How to Judge a Marketing Agency Before You Sign

Choosing an agency is difficult because the thing being sold is largely invisible until months after you have paid for it. Sales calls are therefore a poor filter — everyone is confident, everyone has a case study, everyone will “take a look at your competitors”.

What does work is asking questions with verifiable answers, and watching how comfortable the person opposite is while answering. Here are the ones worth asking, including several we would rather not be asked ourselves.

Who is actually going to do the work?

The person selling to you is frequently not the person doing the work, and that is not automatically a problem. It becomes a problem when nobody will tell you who the second person is.

Ask directly: who will write the content, who will be in the ad account, and are they employed here? Ask whether any part is subcontracted, and to whom. Ask how many other accounts that person handles.

You are not looking for a particular answer. Small agencies subcontract, and a good subcontractor beats a bad employee. You are looking for whether they will tell you plainly. An agency that goes vague at this question is hiding something structural.

Follow up with: what happens if that person leaves? Continuity is a real risk in a small firm, and an honest answer beats a reassuring one.

Who owns the accounts?

This is the single most important question in this article, and it is asked least often.

You should own your own Google Ads account, your own Analytics property, your own Google Business Profile, your own domain and your own hosting. The agency should have access to them. It should not own them.

The distinction sounds pedantic and is not. If the agency created your Ads account under their manager account and holds it, then when you leave you may lose every campaign, every conversion record and the entire performance history that automated bidding depends on. Rebuilding costs money and months. The same applies to an Analytics property held in the agency’s name: you lose your historical data permanently, and there is no way to recover it.

So ask: are these accounts registered to my business email, with me as owner or administrator? Can I see them right now, without asking you? If any of them do not exist yet, will they be created in my name?

Any agency that resists this is telling you their retention strategy is lock-in rather than performance. That is worth knowing on day one rather than year two.

The same logic applies to your website. If they build it on a proprietary platform you cannot export from, you are renting your own site. Ask what happens to it if you leave — whether you get the files, the database and the content in a usable form.

What are the contract length and the exit terms?

Long minimum terms exist for two legitimate reasons and one bad one.

The legitimate reasons: some work genuinely takes months to show anything, and an agency that invests heavily upfront needs some protection against a client leaving in week six. The bad reason: it is easier to keep clients contractually than to keep them by being useful.

Reasonable questions: what is the minimum term, what is the notice period, and what happens at the end — does it roll monthly or auto-renew for another full term? Auto-renewal into a fresh twelve months is a trap that catches people who missed a notice window by a week.

Ask what happens if you are unhappy at month three. If the answer is “you continue paying”, at least you know.

Our own view, for what it is worth: a three-month initial period is defensible because the first month is mostly setup and audit, and judging the work before anything has been implemented is not fair to either side. Twelve months with no exit is harder to justify honestly.

What reporting do you get, and can you verify it?

There are two kinds of reporting. One is a document the agency produces. The other is direct access to the underlying data.

You want both, and the second matters more.

Ask whether you will have your own login to Google Ads, Analytics and Search Console — not a screenshot, a login. Ask whether the report figures can be reconciled against those platforms. Ask what happens in a month where results are poor: will you be told before you ask?

Be alert to reports built on metrics that always look good. Impressions, reach, “brand visibility”, keyword ranking counts for terms nobody searches — all of these rise reliably regardless of whether the business gained anything. The metrics worth reporting are enquiries, qualified enquiries, cost per enquiry and, where you can track it, revenue. If a report never mentions those, ask why.

Ask, too, how conversions are being counted. A “conversion” that counts every form view, every page scroll or every click on a phone number regardless of whether the call connected will produce flattering numbers that mean nothing. Getting this right is the actual point of web analytics.

How do you charge, and where are the incentives?

Percentage-of-ad-spend pricing has an obvious conflict built in: the agency earns more when you spend more, whether or not the extra spend was worth it. That does not make it dishonest, and it is common for a reason — larger budgets do take more work — but you should know it is there and ask how they handle it.

Other questions worth asking: is the ad budget separate from the fee, and paid by you directly to the platform? Are there setup fees? What is included in the monthly fee versus billed extra? What happens when you want something outside scope?

Get the answer to “what would you charge to add another service page” before you need it, not after.

What would you refuse to do?

This question is unfair and revealing, which is why it is useful.

An agency that has never turned work down, never told a client a channel was wrong for them, and never said “you don’t need us yet” is either very lucky or not being straight with you. Ask for a specific example of advising against spending money with them. Vagueness here is a genuine signal.

Related: ask what they think will not work for your business, before they have your money. If everything they do happens to be exactly what you need, that is a sales answer.

The questions that test us too

It would be dishonest to write this article as though we would sail through it.

Ask us for named references in your sector, and we may not have one — we are a small studio, and our experience is deeper in some sectors than others. The right answer to that is to tell you, not to stretch a loosely related example into a claim.

Ask us for hard numbers on client results, and you will find we are careful. Much of our reporting sits inside client accounts we do not have permission to publish, and results depend heavily on the starting point, budget and market. We would rather show you the method and the reporting format than quote a figure you cannot verify.

Ask us to guarantee a ranking or a lead volume, and we will say no. Nobody controls search engine results, and any agency promising a position is either misinformed or counting on you not checking.

Ask us how long it takes, and the honest answer is a range rather than a date — which is exactly what our article on SEO timelines sets out.

Practical red flags

• Pressure to sign before a “price expires”.
• Reluctance to name the person doing the work.
• Accounts created in their name, with vague answers about ownership.
• Reports with no enquiry or cost-per-enquiry figures anywhere.
• Any guarantee of a ranking position.
• A proposal that could have been written for any business in your industry, because it was.
• No questions about your margins, your capacity or which services you actually want more of. An agency that has not asked what a customer is worth to you cannot plan a budget for you.

One last test

Ask them to explain something technical in plain language — why a page is not ranking, or how their bidding strategy works. Not because you need to become an expert, but because an inability to explain simply is usually an inability to explain at all.

You are going to be reading their explanations every month for a year. Find out now whether they make sense.

If you want to put these questions to us, start here — we would rather answer them before you sign than after.