How to Choose a Marketing Agency: What to Ask Before You Sign

The questions worth asking fall into four groups: who actually does the work, what happens in the first 90 days, what happens to your accounts when the relationship ends, and what the agency asks you. Most selection processes never make it to the fourth one, which is the one that predicts the outcome best.

The reality is that you are not buying a strategy. Strategies are cheap and most agencies pitch a version of the same one. You are buying whose calendar your account lands on, and that person is usually not in the room during the pitch.

Here are the thirteen questions, the answers that should end the meeting, and the honest version of when a different kind of agency is the better call.

What you are actually evaluating

Three things determine whether this works, and none of them appear in a pitch deck:

• Who touches your account weekly, and how many other accounts they carry
• Whether the first 90 days produce a system or just activity
• What you walk away owning if it does not work out

Everything below is a way of getting at one of those three.

Questions about who does the work

1. Who works on my account day to day, and how many other accounts do they carry?The answer you want is a name and a number. Agencies that dodge the number are dodging it for a reason. A strategist carrying 25 accounts is doing template work on all of them.

2. Will the people in this meeting be on my account in month four?This is the single most common gap between what was sold and what gets delivered. Senior people close, junior people execute. That is not automatically bad, but you should know it going in rather than discovering it in month three.

3. What gets outsourced, and to whom?Outsourced creative or development is normal. Outsourced strategy is not. Ask specifically which functions leave the building.

Worth saying plainly: a large agency with in-house specialists in paid, creative, and analytics can beat one generalist, especially if you are buying media across multiple markets, need coverage when someone is on vacation, or have procurement requirements. Founder-led shops win on senior attention and speed. Ask which tradeoff you are making, and make sure the answer matches what your business actually needs.

Questions about the first 90 days

4. What happens in the first 30 days before anything launches?A good answer includes an audit, tracking and conversion setup, and a documented baseline. If the plan is to launch ads in week one, you will have no way to prove anything that happens afterward was them.

5. What are we optimizing toward, and what number tells us it worked?Get one primary metric, not five. If the answer is impressions, engagement, or reach, you are buying activity.

6. Can I see a real monthly report with the client name removed?This is the most underused question in the entire process. A report shows you what the agency actually pays attention to. If it opens with follower growth and buries lead volume on page six, you have learned everything you needed.

7. What would you tell me to stop doing?An agency with a point of view will have an answer. An agency that only adds line items is selling scope, not judgment.

Questions about money

8. What is the management fee, and what is billed on top of it?Ad spend, creative production, landing pages, software licenses, and hours beyond scope are the usual extras. Get the full monthly number, not the retainer number.

9. What results do you expect, and in what timeframe, by channel?Google's own guidance on hiring a search professional puts this question on its recommended list. Channels move at different speeds. Paid media can show real signal in the first 30 days. Search work generally takes 90 to 180 days to move meaningfully. Anyone collapsing all of it into one optimistic timeline is managing your expectations rather than your marketing.

10. What does this need to produce to pay for itself?Do this math before you sign, not in month five. Take the total monthly cost, divide it by the gross profit on an average customer, and you have the number of new customers a month that gets you to break even. A $3,000 retainer against a customer worth $2,000 in gross profit needs two new customers a month to be neutral. If two a month sounds impossible in your market, the problem is the plan, not the agency.

Questions about the exit

11. Who owns the ad accounts, the pixel, the analytics property, the domain, and the creative files?The correct answer is you, on your own business accounts, with the agency added as a user. Agencies that run your ads inside their own account are holding your historical data hostage. When you leave, the learnings leave with them and your next agency starts from zero.

12. What is the notice period, and what does offboarding include?Ask what gets handed over and in what format. A good agency will describe a process. A vague answer here usually means there isn't one.

13. What happens after the initial commitment ends?Some commitment period is reasonable, because strategy needs time to compound and nobody can produce search results in six weeks. Ninety days is a fair minimum. A twelve month lock with no exit is usually about the agency's cash flow, not your results.

Answers that should end the meeting

• A guaranteed ranking. Google's documentation states it directly: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." Google also advises that if someone guarantees first place in search results, find someone else.
• A request for write access to your Search Console during an audit. Google recommends granting read access only at that stage.
• A claimed special relationship with Google, or a tool described as Google approved. Google does not evaluate or endorse third-party SEO tools, and warns against tools claiming otherwise.
• Secrecy about method. Google's guidance is blunt about being careful with any company that will not clearly explain what it intends to do, and you remain responsible for what a vendor does on your behalf.
• A cold email telling you your site is missing from major search engines. Google specifically calls out this exact spam pattern in its own documentation.
• AEO or GEO recommendations that contradict published guidance. Google now advises checking whether an agency's advice on optimizing for AI experiences aligns with its official generative AI guidance, and whether they cite official documentation as evidence. This is new for 2026, and it is a fast way to separate practitioners from people repeating what they read on LinkedIn.

Most teams miss this last one entirely. AI search is where the confident nonsense currently lives, because almost nobody in the buying seat knows enough to challenge it yet.

The questions a good agency asks you

Google's hiring guidance includes a line that gets skipped constantly: an agency should be curious about what makes your business different, who your competitors are, and how customers currently find you. If they are not interested, find someone who is.

Here is what that sounds like in practice. A serious agency will ask:

• What is a customer worth to you, and what is your close rate on inbound leads?
• How many new customers can you actually handle in a month?
• Which customers do you wish you had more of, and which do you regret taking?
• What is your seasonality, and what does a slow month look like?
• What happens after the lead comes in, and who follows up?

If nobody asks what a lead is worth or whether you have capacity to serve more of them, they are selling deliverables. The pitch will be about what they will produce, not about what it needs to produce for you.

How to run the comparison

Do not compare pitch decks. They are designed to be incomparable.

Pick five of the questions above, ask every finalist the same five, and write the answers in a single document side by side. Weight question 1, question 6, and question 11 most heavily, because staffing, reporting, and ownership are the three that are painful to fix after you have signed.

The bottom line

The agency that answers these questions directly is not always the cheapest one, and it is not always the biggest one. It is the one that treats your money like it has to come back.

If you are evaluating options right now, it is also worth knowing whether an agency is even the right shape for what you need. We broke that down in fractional CMO vs full-service agency vs in-house hire and what a fractional CMO actually costs.

JG Collective is founder-led. Every client works directly with the person doing the work, engagements start with a 90 day commitment and move to month to month after that, and you own every account we touch. You can see what we do and bring this list of questions to a call.

Book a free 20 minute discovery call. Ask us all thirteen.

Source: Google Search Central, "Do you need an SEO? Tips for hiring an SEO," last updated June 5, 2026.

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