How to Choose a Marketing Agency: 10 Questions to Ask First

The short answer: the right marketing agency will let you own your own ad accounts, tell you exactly who works on your business, show you all the data (not a curated monthly PDF), explain how you can leave, and be willing to say "ads aren't your next step" when that's true. The questions below exist to surface those five things before you sign anything.

We're an agency, so take this with whatever salt you like — but we've also inherited enough accounts from bad experiences to know exactly where founders get burned. Ask these ten questions and you'll learn more from how an agency answers than from any case study.

The 10 questions

1. "Who owns the ad accounts — us or you?"

The only acceptable answer: you do. The accounts, the pixel, the data, the payment methods — yours, with the agency as an invited partner. Agencies that run your ads inside their accounts can hold your entire advertising history hostage when you leave. This one question eliminates more bad agencies than the other nine combined.

2. "Who will actually work on my account day to day?"

The person in the sales call is often not the person in your account next month. Ask who does the daily work, how many other clients that person carries, and who you'll actually talk to. Vague answers here become unanswered emails later.

3. "Will ads go live without my approval?"

You should know what's being published under your brand's name before it runs. Any agency that treats client approval as friction is telling you how the relationship will feel. (For what it's worth: every ad we run goes to the client first. It's your brand.)

4. "Can I see the actual data, whenever I want?"

Not a monthly PDF of hand-picked wins — live access to your own numbers. If reporting only flows through the agency's filter, you can't tell a good month from good storytelling. Ask to see a sample report and ask whether you'll have direct access to the platforms (you own the accounts, remember?).

5. "What does the contract look like — and how do I leave?"

Month-to-month or 3-month terms are reasonable; 12-month locks for a new relationship deserve skepticism. Ask what offboarding looks like: what do you keep, what gets handed over, how fast. Agencies confident in their work make leaving easy, because clients rarely want to.

6. "What happens when something doesn't work?"

Every honest agency has months where a campaign flops — ads fail for predictable reasons, and the first months are a learning curve by design. What you're listening for is a process: how they diagnose, what they change, how they communicate it. Run from anyone who implies they don't have losing months.

7. "What results would be realistic for a business like mine?"

You're not looking for a number — you're looking for whether they ask you questions before giving one. Your margins, your price point, whether you've run ads before. Anyone who promises a specific ROAS before understanding your business is guessing, and guessing with your money. Guaranteed results are the loudest red flag in the industry.

8. "What will you need from me?"

Good ads need product photos, brand voice, approval turnarounds, honest feedback. An agency that says "nothing, we handle everything" is describing generic work. The right answer names specifics and a rhythm — and tells you they've thought about brands like yours.

9. "Have you worked with businesses at my size and stage?"

Not necessarily your exact industry — a strong process transfers between industries. But an agency built for enterprise budgets will be structurally wrong for a $3k/month account (you'll get the intern), and vice versa. Stage-fit matters more than industry-fit.

10. "Why shouldn't I just do this myself?"

A fair question that deserves a real answer. Sometimes the honest answer is "you should, for now" — if the budget is tiny or the foundations aren't ready, a good agency will say so and tell you what to build first. An agency that pitches every business on ads, ready or not, is selling retainers, not results.

The short version

However you weigh the ten, ask them all — the pattern across the answers is the real answer. And if you'd like to hear how we'd answer them, that's exactly what a strategy call is for.