How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency: The Questions That Rule One Out

You have taken three or four calls. Every agency had a polished deck, a Google Partner badge, a case study with a big percentage in it, and a strategist who asked good questions about your brand. You came away unable to tell them apart, and slightly suspicious that the cheapest and the most expensive would do roughly the same thing. That suspicion is usually right, and it is not your fault.

The pitch is built to be judged on things that do not predict the work: presentation, credentials, confidence. What does predict it — who touches your account, what you own, how you leave, and whether you will ever hear bad news — rarely comes up unless you ask. The pages ranking for this question tell you to define your goals and check reviews. This one gives you the questions, and the answers that should end the call.

Why do all the agencies I talk to sound the same?

Because the person pitching you is usually not the person who will run your account, so what you are comparing is sales teams. At most agencies, a senior person or a salesperson wins the business and hands it to an account manager, who hands the actual work to a specialist you may never meet. The pitch is the most standardized thing an agency produces. The work is the least.

That is the cause. The fix is to move the conversation from what the agency is to what will happen to your account on a normal Tuesday in month four. Every question below does that.

What does the Google Partner badge actually tell me?

It tells you the company clears a spend and certification bar across all its clients; it tells you nothing about who will work on yours. Google’s page on how to become a Google Partner lists the requirements: the agency’s manager account needs $10,000 in ad spend across managed accounts over 90 days, an optimization score of at least 70%, and at least half of its account strategists certified.

Two things follow. The spend bar is low enough that a modest agency clears it. And optimization score is Google’s own rating of how closely accounts line up with Google’s recommendations, some of which amount to spending more. The badge is not worthless. It is just a statement about the company’s relationship with Google, not about the person reading your search terms report.

The seven questions, and the answers that rule an agency out

Ask all seven on the first call. You will learn more from how they are answered than from the deck.

The account question matters most, because it is the one that hurts later. Google Ads lets an agency manage your account from its own manager account, and Google’s page on access levels for manager accounts shows why ownership matters: whoever holds administrative ownership controls who else can get in. Make sure that is you, on your billing, before the first campaign runs.

For SEO specifically, Google publishes its own list of interview questions in Do you need an SEO?, along with the warning that no one can guarantee a first position. Anybody who does has told you what you need to know.

How can I tell if an agency is selling activity instead of results?

Look at the reports: an agency selling activity sends reports with no bad news in them. Every month has a win, every chart is labelled with an upward arrow, and the metrics are the ones that are easy to move — impressions, clicks, “optimizations made”, hours logged.

An agency selling results reports on the numbers you would check yourself, and says when they are bad. Three tells to look for in a sample report:

• Revenue comes from the ad platform, not your store. Platforms count sales generously and overlap each other. If the report never reconciles against what Shopify says you actually sold, nobody is checking. I wrote about how that reconciliation works in auditing a Google Ads account for ecommerce.
• Activity is listed as achievement. “Added 140 negative keywords” is a task. The result is what happened to cost per sale afterwards.
• Nothing is ever stopped. A real account has experiments that fail and get turned off. A report where everything is working is a report where nothing is being tested, or nothing is being said.

Ask how they would tell you if the account got worse. The answer to that question is the report you will actually receive.

What contract terms should I accept?

Accept a short initial commitment and then month to month, with your ownership of every account written in. Long minimum terms exist because the first months are expensive for an agency to staff; that is a fair reason for a short minimum, not for a year.

My own terms are published: three months on the Growth Partner retainer, then month to month with 30 days notice, and six months on the other two, because there is more to unpick at the start. Every account, pixel and analytics property sits under the client’s billing. The longest relationship I have is a seven‑year one with Shurhold, and no contract clause is the reason. Length of relationship should be earned every month, not locked in on the first one.

Agency, consultant or a hire?

It depends on how much of a competent specialist’s week your marketing needs, and for most stores spending between $5,000 and $50,000 a month on ads, the answer is less than an agency sells and less than a hire costs. I laid out the arithmetic in in‑house vs agency vs consultant. Agencies win when you need capacity across many disciplines at once — creative production, email, paid and a site rebuild in the same quarter. A consultant wins when the work is judgement more than volume.

When I am the wrong choice

I would fail question seven on my own list if I did not answer it. I am the wrong choice if:

• You spend under $5,000 a month on ads, where my fee stops making sense.
• You want someone to execute a plan you have already written.
• You need a full creative and production team in house.
• You are looking for the cheapest option rather than the most profitable one.

If none of those is you, the published pricing will tell you whether the numbers work before you book a call.

Questions people ask