Should we run a formal RFP?

For large engagements, sometimes. But RFPs reward agencies who are good at writing RFP responses, which is a different skill from doing the work. A paid pilot project usually tells you far more than a hundred-page document.

How much should we expect to pay?

Retainers commonly run $3,000–$30,000 a month depending on scope, and projects $8,000–$150,000. Be suspicious of quotes far below that range — the work is either being offshored without disclosure or scoped too thin to succeed.

What if the engagement isn't working?

Raise it explicitly and early, with the specific indicators you agreed. Good agencies would rather fix a problem than lose an account. If the response is defensiveness or new metrics that happen to look better, use your notice period.

Comparison

The questions that actually reveal quality

Most agency selection processes evaluate the pitch rather than the agency. These are the questions that produce genuinely informative answers.

Our bias, declared

We wrote this partly because we lose deals to agencies who pitch better than they deliver, and a better-informed buyer is good for us. Everything below applies to us too — ask us all of it, and if we dodge any of it, that's your answer.

Side by side

How to choose a digital marketing agency comparison
Factor	Good sign	Warning sign
Who runs the account	The strategist who pitched you, named in the contract	"You'll be assigned a team" after signing
Pricing	Published or given plainly on the first call	Requires three calls to learn the number
Contract length	90 days, then 30 days' notice	12-month minimum with auto-renewal
Account ownership	You own every account, pixel, and asset	Agency-owned accounts you'd lose on exit
Reporting metrics	Blended CAC, pipeline, revenue	Impressions, reach, engagement
Response to "what wouldn't you do?"	Specific things they decline and why	"We can do anything you need"
References offered	Including a client who left	Only current, hand-picked, recent clients
Guarantees	Leading indicators, in writing	Guaranteed rankings or guaranteed revenue
Case studies	Include what went wrong and what they'd change	Uninterrupted successes with vague metrics

Choose good sign when

Ask them to critique your current setup live

A good agency will open your site and analytics on the call and have specific observations within minutes. Vagueness here is the single clearest signal — they either can't see the problems or won't say them out loud.

Ask who specifically will work on your account

Get names and titles, and ask to meet them before signing. Bait-and-switch — senior on the pitch, junior on the account — is the most common agency failure mode and it's easy to screen for.

Ask what they'd tell you not to do

An agency that agrees with everything is selling, not advising. The willingness to say 'don't do that, and here's why' is the best available proxy for whether they'll be useful in month eight.

Ask for a reference from a client who left

Almost nobody asks this and the reaction is informative on its own. Agencies with nothing to hide can usually produce one; the answer tells you how they behave when a relationship ends.

Choose warning sign when

Guaranteed rankings or guaranteed revenue

Google doesn't sell ranking guarantees, so anyone offering one is either misrepresenting or planning to game something that will be corrected in a core update.

Ownership of your ad accounts

If campaigns run in agency-owned accounts, you lose all history, audiences, and learnings when you leave. That's a retention strategy rather than an operational necessity.

Reporting that never contains bad news

Every account has bad weeks. An agency whose reports are uniformly positive is curating, and you'll find out what was hidden at the worst possible moment.

Pricing that requires a discovery process to learn

There's no legitimate operational reason a retainer range can't be shared on a first call. Withholding it is a negotiation tactic that costs you time whether or not you're a fit.

Related questions

Ninety days is the minimum honest window — enough time for tracking fixes, restructuring, and one full learning cycle. But agree the leading indicators in week one, in writing, so you're evaluating against something specific rather than a general feeling in month four.

Other comparisons

Marketing agency vs in-house teamNot budget, and not company size. It depends on whether you already know which channel works — because that single fact changes the right answer completely.Marketing agency vs freelancerWe say this on sales calls regularly. Under roughly $10,000 a month in media, agency fees eat too much of the budget to be honest value.SEO vs PPCSEO compounds and pays back slowly. PPC starts immediately and stops the moment you do. Which one you can afford to wait for is the whole question.Shopify theme vs headless commerceIt buys genuine speed and flexibility, and it buys them with permanent operational complexity most stores don't need.Retainer vs project pricingEach model creates a different incentive, and matching the model to the work matters more than negotiating the rate.Google Ads vs Meta AdsIf people already search for what you sell, start with Google. If they don't know it exists, Google has nothing to capture.Brand vs performance marketingPerformance work is measurable and brand work mostly isn't, so budget flows to what can be defended in a meeting rather than to what works.Performance Max vs Standard ShoppingThe performance difference between them is smaller than the reporting difference. What you are really choosing is how much you are willing to not be able to see.Last-click vs data-driven attributionAttribution does not measure causation and was never able to. The question is not which model is accurate — it is which set of errors you can work with.Email vs SMS marketingThat single difference drives every other decision — what you send, how often, and how quickly you can burn a list you spent a year building.Full rebrand vs brand refreshThe symptom is usually that the brand looks dated. The diagnosis is almost never that the brand is wrong — and those two problems have very different price tags.Webflow vs a custom buildMost companies pick the platform once, at the point of least information, and live with it for four years. The better question is which one fits the next eighteen months.Organic social vs paid socialThe comparison is usually framed as free versus paid, which is why it produces bad decisions. Both cost money. They just buy completely different things.Google Ads vs Amazon AdsThe difference is not intent or cost per click. It is whether you end up with a customer you can contact again, or a transaction Amazon owns the relationship for.Creator content vs studio productionThe comparison is usually framed as cheap versus expensive, which is why it goes wrong. Compare cost per asset that actually gets used and the gap narrows sharply.In-house studio vs production partnerWhether to build a studio is decided by how many assets you need every month and how predictable that number is — not by how much you care about the work.Native vs cross-platform appsThe technology argument is largely settled and mostly irrelevant. What decides this is how many engineers you have and how close your product sits to the hardware.Attribution vs incrementality testingThese are not competing methods for the same job. They answer different questions, and most measurement arguments are really two people answering different ones at each other.

Services referenced

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