Choosing an agency is hard for one simple reason: whoever is choosing doesn't know the subject inside out, which is precisely why they're hiring someone.
The portfolio doesn't help much — everyone shows off their best work. The questions that actually separate agencies aren't about creativity. They're about ownership, accountability and how results are measured. We're writing this knowing we're an interested party; ask us these questions too.
1. Whose name are the accounts in?
This is the most important question, and almost nobody asks it.
The domain, the hosting, the ad account, the analytics account, the company's Google profile — all of that should be registered in your company's name, with the agency given access. Not the other way round.
If it's the other way round, the day the relationship ends — and relationships end — you're left without your campaign history, without years of data, and in the worst cases without your own domain. It's the most effective way to lock in a client, and it's used more often than you'd think.
Also ask what happens at the end: who keeps what, in what format, within how many days.
2. Who's actually going to do the work?
And where those people are based. Working remotely works fine for almost everything, but not for everything: photographing your premises, sitting through a difficult meeting, understanding a business by walking round it. If that matters to you, an agency twenty minutes away is worth more than an excellent one two hundred kilometres off.
The most experienced people show up to the sales meetings. Once the contract is signed, the work can end up with someone else.
There's nothing wrong with that — it's how teams work. What matters is knowing in advance who your day-to-day contact will be, how much experience they have, and who answers when something goes wrong. At a small agency, ask what happens if the person handling your account is off sick.
3. What's included and what isn't?
Most bad client-agency relationships start here, not with incompetence.
A serious proposal states what will be delivered, in how many phases, with what deadlines, and what's left out. And it states what counts as a normal revision and what counts as new work, quoted separately. Without that line drawn in writing, every request turns into a negotiation, and the relationship sours within three months.
Also ask how many rounds of revisions are included. "As many as it takes" isn't generosity: it's a phrase that ends badly for both sides.
4. How will we know if it's working?
If the answer comes back in reach, impressions, followers or views, push further. Those are numbers that almost always go up and don't pay any salaries.
What matters is how many enquiries came in, how many turned into proposals, how much each new client cost. If the agency doesn't know that, or doesn't have access to what happens after the click, it's optimising blind — and it will hand you lovely reports about things that don't decide anything.
5. Have you ever turned a client down?
It's an uncomfortable question, and a very revealing one.
An agency that says yes to everything either has a huge team, or it's taking on work it doesn't actually know how to do. A useful answer is specific: "we don't do X", "for that we usually refer people elsewhere", "in this case we don't think it's worth it".
A variant that works just as well: ask them to tell you what, in your specific case, isn't going to work. Anyone with only good news to give hasn't actually looked at your problem yet.
The answers that should make you walk away
- "We guarantee first place on Google." Nobody can guarantee that. Whoever promises it either doesn't know better, or knows and is counting on you not knowing.
- A long contract with no way out. Twelve months with no termination clause is a risk that's entirely yours. Three months of initial tie-in is reasonable; anything beyond that isn't.
- Refusing to give you access to the accounts. There's no technical justification for this. None.
- A proposal with no price per phase. A single fixed figure, with no breakdown of what's what, stops you comparing quotes and cutting what you don't need.
And one question for yourself
On your side, who's going to answer the agency's questions and actually decide?
A good many projects that go wrong don't fail because of anyone's incompetence: they die waiting for approvals, for copy that never arrives, for a decision that keeps getting pushed to the next meeting. If there isn't one person with the time and the authority to decide, no agency can save you from that.
If you want to see how we work, it's in our portfolio and on the services page.
Ask us these questions
Tell us what you need. We'll answer all six — including the part where we tell you what isn't going to work.