How to choose a digital marketing agency

Questions worth asking

"Who will be working on my account day to day, and can I speak to them now?" The gap between the pitch team and the delivery team is the single most common source of disappointment.

"What happens to my accounts if we stop working together?" The right answer is that you keep everything, immediately, including historical data. Any hesitation here is disqualifying.

"What will you report on?" Leads, cost per lead, conversion quality and revenue. If the sample report leads with impressions, reach and engagement, they are planning to be judged on numbers that do not pay wages.

"What would you do in the first 30 days?" A specific answer means they have looked at your account. A generic answer means you are getting a template.

"What is your management fee, and is ad spend separate?" It should always be separate and always paid directly to the platform from your own account.

Warning signs

Guaranteed results. Nobody can guarantee a position, a lead volume or a return. Google and Meta run auctions. An agency promising a specific outcome is either inexperienced or being dishonest.

Agency-owned ad accounts. Sometimes framed as a convenience. It means your campaign history, your conversion data and your account structure stay behind when you leave.

Long lock-in contracts. Some minimum term is reasonable — campaigns need a few months of data to optimise properly — but that is an argument for a three-month recommendation, not a twelve-month contract with exit fees.

Percentage-of-spend pricing with no cap. It pays the agency more for spending more, whether or not spending more was right.

No named contact. If you cannot find out who will do the work, assume it is being outsourced.

Big agency or small agency

Large agencies bring process, specialists and capacity, and they can absorb staff turnover. The trade-off is that a small account is a small priority, and you will usually deal with an account manager rather than a practitioner.

Small agencies give you direct access to the people doing the work and tend to move faster. The trade-off is less redundancy and narrower specialisation.

Neither is correct in the abstract. What matters is honest alignment: a $2,000 a month budget is not a priority at an agency whose average client spends $50,000, no matter how good they are.

What a reasonable arrangement looks like

You own the ad accounts, the website, the domain and the data. Management fees are a clear, separate line item. Ad spend goes directly to the platform. Reporting shows leads and cost per lead. There is no lock-in, and the agency recommends a sensible minimum period rather than enforcing one. You know the name of the person doing the work.

That is how we operate, and it is a reasonable baseline to hold any agency to — including us. Our services are on the Google Ads page and our team is on the about page.