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How to choose a digital marketing agency

Most advice on this is a list of adjectives. Look for transparency. Look for a cultural fit. Find a partner, not a vendor. None of it is checkable before you sign, which makes it useless at the only moment it would have helped. What follows is the version you can verify in an afternoon.

Ask only questions with checkable answers

Nine questions. Each one has a factual answer that can be written down, and every answer that arrives as a feeling instead of a fact is itself the finding.

• What is the term, in days, and what happens the day after it ends?
• Who does the work, by name and role, and how many other accounts is that person carrying?
• If we stop, who owns the website, the code, the ad account, the analytics property and the content?
• What lands in month one, month two and month three, as deliverables rather than activities?
• What does the monthly report look like? Ask to see a redacted one before the call ends.
• Will you work with a competitor in my industry and my city, and will you say so in writing?
• What is the total monthly cost, including software, licences and anything billed separately?
• Where does my ad budget go: straight to the platform, or through an account you control?
• What will you refuse to do, and what have you turned down recently?

Write the answers in a column next to each agency. The exercise is unkind to vague agencies and that is the point. Two shops with similar portfolios produce visibly different columns, and the difference is rarely about skill. It is about what each one is willing to put in writing.

Notice what is not on the list. Nothing about process, philosophy or approach, because every agency has a good answer to those and the good answers do not discriminate between them. Nine factual questions discriminate immediately.

Four answers that should end the meeting

Not red flags in the vague sense. Four specific answers, any one of which is enough to end the conversation politely and quickly.

• A ranking promise with a date attached. Nobody controls a results page, and an agency willing to promise one has told you how it handles inconvenient facts.
• A refusal to name the person doing the work, or a name you never hear again after the pitch.
• A monthly number that grows once you add the software, the licences and the items billed separately.
• Urgency attached to a deadline that belongs to the agency rather than to your business.

Check the two things a reference call cannot tell you

A reference tells you whether somebody was pleasant to work with. It does not tell you whether the work survived. Two better checks. Ask for a client who left, and why. Then look at a site the agency built two years ago and see whether anybody has touched it since. Both are harder to stage than a testimonial.

What a proposal should contain before you sign it

A price. A term in days, and what happens at the end of it. A deliverable list with months against it. The owner of every asset, named per asset. The people doing the work. The scope boundary, written as what is not included. And the notice period, in days, with the method of giving it.

If any of those are missing, ask for them by email rather than on a call. The written answer is the product. A proposal that cannot survive being written down will not survive month four either.

Two structural choices that matter more than vetting

Two decisions do more work than any amount of reference checking. The first is how you pay: a flat fee, or a performance based arrangement where part of the fee moves with a result. The second is how long you buy for: a retainer with a cadence, or a project with a finish line. Get both right and a mediocre agency still produces something useful. Get them wrong and a good agency struggles to.

Our answers, in the format we just asked for

90 day initial term, then month to month at the same price. The industry asks for 6 to 12 months.

Nothing happens at day 91. It continues at the same price, month to month, and you can end it at any month end.

One SEO client per industry, per city. Ads and websites are not exclusive, and we say so.

You keep the domain. We rebuild the site, it is inside the $2,500 rather than on top of it, and you own the code. Every account is opened in your name, and you keep the code, the content and the data during and after.

None of that changes on a call, and none of it is a different number for a buyer who pushes harder.

That is the whole of how to choose a digital marketing agency. Ask for facts that can be checked, write the answers down, and treat an unwillingness to write something down as the answer to the question you were actually asking.