How do I choose a digital marketing agency?
What actually predicts a good agency
The team you get. Not the founder who charmed you in the meeting, the executive who will open your ad account on Monday morning and never speak to you again. Ask for names. Ask how many accounts each of them carries, because a strategist stretched across eleven clients cannot think about yours.
How they talk about failure matters more than how they talk about wins. Every agency has lost clients. One that can describe a campaign that did not work, what they misjudged at the start and what they actually changed once they saw the numbers, is quietly showing you how they will behave on the day your own campaign starts to struggle, and it will struggle at some point. The ones who claim an unbroken record are either new or editing.
Watch what they refuse to promise. Good agencies decline to guarantee rankings, because nobody controls Google. That refusal is a positive signal.
Questions worth asking in the room
Who owns the accounts and the data? The answer must be you. Ad accounts, analytics, Search Console, the website, the domain. Agencies that keep these hostage are common, and it makes leaving very expensive.
What does the first ninety days look like, specifically? A real answer includes audit, tracking setup, and a defined first test. A vague answer about strategy and synergy means they have not thought about your business yet.
Have you worked in my category? Useful, though not decisive. Real estate lead flow, restaurant local search and D2C unit economics all behave very differently from one another, and an agency that is quietly learning your category for the first time on your own budget will take a full quarter before it becomes genuinely useful to you.
What is in the contract about notice and deliverables? Read it. Most people do not.
Signs to walk away from
Guaranteed page-one rankings. Guaranteed lead numbers before they have seen your funnel. Pricing so low that the maths cannot support a competent person spending real hours on it. Case studies with percentages and no context. Reluctance to give you administrative access to your own accounts.
One more, and it is the clearest tell of all. If nobody on their side asks you about margin, sales capacity or what a good lead actually looks like for your business, they are planning to optimise for something that will not make you money. That question is the tell.
Related questions: How long before SEO shows results? · How do I know if my agency is doing real work? · Should I hire in-house or an agency?.
Want this handled: Digital marketing · All answers.
Judge the people who will do your work, not the people in the pitch. Ask who runs the account daily, how many others they handle, and what happened on the client they lost last year. Agencies that name a number for rankings or leads in month one are guessing, and the pitch deck is the least useful thing in the room.
Retainers vary enormously by scope, city and seniority. The useful test is whether the fee supports enough skilled hours to do the work described. Very low retainers usually mean a junior executive splitting attention across many accounts.
Three to six months is reasonable, because most channels need that long to show anything. Twelve-month lock-ins with no exit clause favour the agency. Ask for a notice period you could actually use if things go wrong.
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