The Questions to Ask a Digital Marketing Agency Before You Sign

Most founders walk into an agency pitch and let the agency run the meeting. That's the mistake. The pitch is where you find out whether this partnership will burn six months and a chunk of runway, or actually work. The agency has done this a hundred times. You've done it maybe three. The only way to close that gap is to bring the right questions.

This is that list. Not the polite version you'll find on ten other blogs. The version we'd want a client to ask us.

Before you start asking

A few notes on how to use this.

You don't need to ask every question below. Pick the ten that matter most for your situation and ask them all. What you're listening for is the shape of the answer, not the specifics. A good agency will have thought about these things and will answer plainly. A bad one will slide into slogans, or subtly change the subject, or answer a related-but-easier question. That deflection is the signal.

Ask follow-ups. Every question below has a good-answer version and a lazy version. If the first answer sounds rehearsed, ask for a specific example. "Can you walk me through one time this actually happened on an account?" reveals more than the original question ever will.

Take notes. Compare answers across the two or three agencies you're seriously considering. Patterns emerge across the notes that don't show up in the moment.

Questions about their process (do they have one?)

"Walk me through what the first 90 days would look like." A real agency has a documented onboarding process: audit, strategy, approvals, then production. If the answer is "well, it depends" or "we'll figure it out with you", that's a red flag. It usually means they'll show up in month two with no plan and start posting on Instagram.

"What do you do in the first 30 days that generates zero content and zero campaigns?" This one filters ruthlessly. The right answer is some version of audit, discovery, positioning, and strategy. If they can't name specific artefacts they produce before anything ships, they don't have a strategy layer. They only have a production line, and you'll get generic work as a result.

"Who writes the strategy, and who executes it?" Ask about the actual humans. Are they the same person? Different people? Where do handoffs happen? Agencies where strategy and execution live in totally separate silos tend to produce work that looks strategic on paper and generic in the wild.

"How do you decide when to kill something that isn't working?" Every ad, every content series, every landing page eventually stops working. A real agency has an explicit kill criteria and doesn't need to be talked into it. "We optimize until it works" is not an answer. It's a way of saying "we never admit failure and keep charging you."

Questions about results (do they measure what matters?)

"What's the last account you fired, and why?" Almost nobody asks this. It's disarming. A good agency will have a real answer: a client whose business model made results impossible, an owner who wouldn't approve creative, a budget too small for the goal. An agency that has never fired a client is an agency that will keep charging you even when they know they can't help.

"Show me a report you'd send us in month three." Ask to see one from an existing client, redacted. What you're looking for: does it explain what worked and why? Does it name what didn't work? Is there thinking on the page, or just screenshots of graphs? Reports are the product the client actually receives every month. If theirs are data dumps, that's what you'll get.

"What's the KPI you'd push back on if we asked for it?" Real agencies push back on vanity metrics. If a client asks for "1 million impressions" and the agency shrugs and says "sure", they're not thinking about the business. They're order-taking. You want an agency willing to say "impressions won't do what you want; here's what will."

"When did paid media stop working for one of your clients? What did you do?" Meta CPMs go up. Google auctions get harder. Creative fatigues. Every account eventually hits a wall. What you're testing is whether they've navigated one before. If they've never had a client's performance dip meaningfully, either they're new or they're not being honest.

Questions about the team (who actually does the work?)

"Who from the pitch team will still be on my account in month six?" Agencies famously send the A team to the pitch and the B team to the account. Ask directly. Then ask what happens to your account if the person they name leaves the agency. If the answer is "we'll assign someone new" without any handover protocol, you'll feel it three months in.

"How many other accounts does the person leading mine handle at once?" The number tells you how much of their attention you'll actually get. Six or seven is common. Twelve is a red flag. Twenty means you're a spreadsheet row.

"What does your creative team look like? Are they in-house or contracted?" Neither is better in the abstract. What matters is whether they can name the specific people, and whether those people have worked together long enough to have a shared standard. Contracted-out creative that changes hands every month reads as inconsistent to the audience, even if they can't articulate why.

Questions about ownership and exit (the ones agencies dread)

"If we part ways in six months, what do I walk away with?" The right answer is: everything. Your ad accounts under your billing, your creative files, your data, your website code, your keyword research, your audience lists. Ownership belongs to you from day one. Any agency that gets vague here is planning to make leaving painful, a form of lock-in that has nothing to do with quality of work.

"Do we own our ad accounts and analytics logins, or do you?" Some agencies still insist on running ads through their own Business Manager or Google Ads MCC. That's fine for convenience, but the accounts must be under your ownership with them as a user, not the other way around. If your Meta pixel sits on their Business Manager, they can hold months of audience data hostage the day you decide to leave.

"What's your handover process if we transition to another agency or bring the work in-house?" A confident agency has a written handover checklist. A defensive one treats the question as an accusation. How they react to this question tells you what leaving will feel like before you've signed anything.

Questions about honesty (what do they hide?)

"What's a mistake you made on a client account in the last year, and how did you catch it?" Every agency makes mistakes. Wrong audience, wrong copy, a campaign live too long, a tracking bug that ate two weeks of data. What separates the good agencies is a working error-catching system and the honesty to name failures. An agency that can't name a single recent mistake either doesn't have quality control or is lying about it.

"What's an industry you'd refuse to work in?" Everyone should have one. Real agencies have a point of view about who they can and can't help. Agencies that say "we work with everyone" usually mean "we take any money that comes through the door", and their work reflects that lack of focus.

"What's your take on AI-generated content?" The right answer here doesn't exist. What you're testing is whether they've thought about the question at all. In 2026, an agency without a considered position on AI in content, ads, and design is an agency that hasn't been paying attention.

"How much of our monthly retainer goes to actual work versus your overhead?" Nobody asks this because it feels rude. Ask it anyway. You're not looking for a P&L; you're looking for whether they're comfortable talking about the shape of their business. Agencies that get evasive here often have thin margins covered by lots of clients, and low attention per account is the natural result.

Red flags to listen for in the answers

Some of these are subtle. Watch for them.

Slogans without specifics. "We're data-driven." "We focus on ROI." "We build growth engines." These phrases mean nothing on their own. Every agency uses them. What matters is whether they can back the slogan with a specific example the moment you ask.

Deflecting to what they'll do "for you specifically." If you ask a process question and they answer with a personalized-sounding future promise ("what we'd do for your business is..."), they haven't answered the question. Bring them back to it.

Guarantees on rankings, leads, or sales. No reputable agency guarantees SEO rankings; Google's algorithms move and nobody controls them. Guaranteed leads are usually low-intent form fills that don't convert. Any specific outcome guarantee should make you more suspicious, not less.

A refusal to name any client publicly. Some clients ask for confidentiality, which is legitimate. But an agency that can't name a single client, ever, is an agency you can't verify.

Discomfort with the ownership question. Watch faces when you ask about account ownership. If the answer takes noticeably longer to arrive than any of the others, that pause is telling you something.

What you should be ready to answer

The best agencies will interview you back. If you find yourself in a pitch where the agency is only pitching, that's actually a warning sign. It means they've decided they can sell you regardless of fit, and that decision will cost you six months of the wrong work. Come prepared to answer:

• What does a customer's journey to purchase actually look like today?

• What's your average deal size or order value, and what would tripling your leads mean for your operations?

• What did the last agency get right and get wrong?

• Who signs off on creative, and how fast?

If the agency doesn't ask any version of these, they're not diagnosing whether they can help you. They're just closing a deal.

A note on how we run this

Marcadors has been the agency being interviewed, and we've helped founders prepare to interview others. The questions above are the ones we hope every prospect asks us, because the conversation they force is the conversation that decides whether the partnership will actually work. Ask them. Ask them of us, ask them of everyone else you're considering, and pick the agency whose answers held up.