The buyer's guide
How to choose a marketing agency
A bad agency does not just waste the retainer. It burns a year of your growth window, your budget, and the performance data you needed to do better next time. This guide exists to prevent that, whether you ever talk to us or not. Take these fourteen questions into every sales call, including ours.
The 14 questions to ask any agency
Ask them in order. A serious agency answers all fourteen without discomfort. Most will not make it past the first three.
01
Who owns the ad accounts, the analytics, and the profiles?
The accounts hold your conversion history, your audiences, your rankings data, your reviews, and everything the algorithms have learned about your customers. Whoever owns them owns your ability to market tomorrow. This is not just the ad account: it is analytics, the tag container, Google Business Profile, the landing pages, and the email and SMS list.
A good answer
You do, unconditionally, across the whole stack. The agency works through delegated or partner access on accounts registered to your business, so if the relationship ends nothing has to be transferred back.
A red flag
We run everything through our accounts, it is more efficient that way. Translation: your performance history is collateral, and leaving means starting from zero.
02
What happens when I leave?
Every engagement ends eventually. How an agency behaves on the way out tells you more than anything it says on the way in.
A good answer
A written offboarding process: you keep the accounts, audiences, pixels, creative files, content, rank data, lists, and reporting, access is removed on a stated date, and there is no exit fee. It should be in the contract, not a verbal assurance.
A red flag
We would work something out, or a 60 to 90 day notice period, or a claim that the creative and the content are agency intellectual property. If leaving is painful by design, staying is not a choice.
03
Show me the actual contract terms and renewal windows.
Not the pitch deck summary. The document you would sign, including term length, auto-renewal language, and cancellation mechanics.
A good answer
The contract arrives before you have said yes to anything, the term is month to month or clearly short, and the cancellation window is stated in plain language on one page.
A red flag
The contract only appears after a verbal commitment, or it contains a 12 month term that auto-renews unless you cancel inside a narrow window nobody mentioned on the sales call.
04
Is your pricing published, or do I have to book calls to hear a number?
Published pricing is the cheapest possible proof that an agency charges every client the same way. Hidden pricing is a signal that the number depends on what you look like you can afford, and it previews how the rest of the relationship will run.
A good answer
A public pricing page with the packages, what is included in each, any setup or onboarding fee, and the conditions under which fees are waived. Ours is on the pricing page so you can hold us to this standard too.
A red flag
Every engagement is custom, so we scope pricing on a call. Sometimes true for enterprise work, but for a $3,500 to $19,500 per month package it usually means the price is set by the sales conversation, not by the work.
05
Do you cover AI search and the map pack, or only paid ads?
A customer now checks several places before they contact you: the search results, the map pack, an AI assistant, the social feed, and your reviews. An agency that only buys ads is competing for one of those while your competitors take the other four for free.
A good answer
A specific answer per surface: how they earn map pack position and manage Google Business Profile, how they handle Local Services Ads, how they get you named in AI answers through entity and schema work and citation building, how they run SEO, reviews, email, and landing pages, and which of those they do in-house versus subcontract.
A red flag
SEO is a nice to have, or AI search is not a real channel yet, or a vague yes with no description of the actual work. If they cannot describe what they would do to your Google Business Profile this month, they do not run it.
06
Who exactly works on my account day to day?
Agencies are sold by their best people and often delivered by their newest. The gap between the pitch team and the delivery team is where accounts go to die.
A good answer
Roles and seniority for the specific people who will log into your accounts, how many accounts each carries, and a chance to meet them before you sign.
A red flag
You will have a dedicated team, with nothing attached to it. If they cannot tell you who touches your account on a Tuesday, the answer is whoever is available.
07
How do you verify conversion tracking?
Every optimization decision downstream depends on the tracking being right. An agency optimizing against broken data is just spending your money confidently.
A good answer
A concrete audit process: firing test conversions, reconciling platform numbers against your CRM and call log, deduplicating events, and fixing or rebuilding the setup before anything scales.
A red flag
We install the pixel, offered as the whole answer, or reporting platform numbers without ever checking them against what your CRM says actually happened.
08
Will you scale my budget before tracking is verified?
This is the follow-up that separates a real process from a rehearsed answer. Plenty of agencies describe a tracking audit and then raise spend in week one anyway, because the retainer starts either way.
A good answer
No, and a stated sequence to prove it: measurement rebuilt and verified first, campaigns launched next, budget scaled only once conversions reconcile. Ours is written into the first 30 days of the engagement.
A red flag
We can run both in parallel to save time. Scaling on unverified data means every optimization for the next quarter is made against numbers nobody checked.
09
Who owns the plan across channels when they disagree?
Full-service only helps if one person is accountable for the whole picture. With separate vendors for ads, SEO, and the website, every problem becomes someone else's, and you become the project manager you were trying to avoid hiring.
A good answer
One named owner of the strategy across every channel, one plan, and one set of numbers that all channels are measured against, including the channels that are not paid.
A red flag
Separate teams with separate reports, separate calls, and no single number they are all accountable to. That is four vendors in one invoice.
10
What do you report and how often?
Reporting is where an agency either respects your intelligence or manages your perception. Ask to see a real report from an existing client, redacted is fine.
A good answer
Cost per lead or acquisition measured against your actual economics, organic and map pack position, calls, review velocity, a weekly written summary of what changed and why, and live access to the raw numbers whenever you want them. Every figure should trace to a source you can open yourself.
A red flag
A monthly PDF headlined by impressions, reach, and engagement. Those are the metrics agencies show when the metrics that matter are not moving.
11
How is your fee structured and what incentives does it create?
Every fee model creates an incentive. A percentage of spend rewards spending. A flat fee rewards keeping you around. Neither is evil, but the agency should discuss the tradeoff without flinching.
A good answer
Published pricing and a straight explanation of the incentive it creates, including any setup or onboarding fee stated up front rather than added to the first invoice.
A red flag
The fee is only revealed deep into a sales process, or it is an uncapped percentage of spend paired with constant pressure to raise budgets.
12
What is your creative testing process?
On paid social especially, creative is the biggest performance lever there is. An agency without a testing system is renting yesterday's winners until they fatigue.
A good answer
A named cadence: fresh ad batches on a schedule, kill criteria defined in numbers before launch, and documented learnings that shape the next batch.
A red flag
We optimize continuously, with no cadence, no kill criteria, and the same three ads running since the quarter you signed.
13
What results can you promise?
This is the honesty test. Markets, seasonality, algorithm updates, and competitors are outside any agency's control, and everyone competent knows it.
A good answer
None, honestly. The only things an agency can guarantee are its own delivery and process: what gets built, launched, and measured by when. Ours is written down as a 30 day delivery guarantee for exactly that reason.
A red flag
A guaranteed return, revenue number, or first page ranking. Check the fine print and you will find the carve-outs that make the guarantee unclaimable, which tells you how they treat the rest of the contract.
14
Can I talk to a current client?
Written testimonials are curated by the agency. A live conversation with someone currently paying them is not.
A good answer
Yes, arranged with a current client's consent, even if scheduling takes a week. Or an honest reason it is not possible, such as being early or working under confidentiality, backed by something verifiable instead: a real sample report, the actual contract, and accounts you can audit yourself.
A red flag
Only polished case studies and quotes the agency controls, and a subject change whenever a live reference comes up. Invented or unlabeled illustrative results are worse than having none.
If you only remember one thing
The fastest tell
An agency that hides its pricing until a sales call is telling you the price depends on what it thinks you can pay. It also previews the whole relationship: information will be released strategically, and you will always be negotiating from behind.
Published pricing is not a marketing gimmick. It is the single cheapest way for an agency to prove it treats every client the same. Ours is public at currentads.net/pricing, the full scope we run is public at currentads.net/services, and any agency worth hiring can meet that bar.
The one question on this list nobody can answer with a deck is the reporting one, so ours is written down instead: which figures land in your portal, and how to check each of them against the platform it came from, is set out on how we report and how you verify it. Ask whoever else you are speaking to for the equivalent page. If the answer is a sample PDF, you have learned something. The models the industry charges on, and what each one quietly rewards, are pulled apart in what an agency actually costs.
Ask us all fourteen
Thirty minutes, no pitch deck. You leave with a tracking audit, a competitor teardown across search, maps, and AI answers, and a written 90 day plan. Bring this list to the call and grade us against it.