Management
How to choose a digital marketing agency
Eight questions to ask in the proposal meeting, five warning signs, and what must be in the contract before you sign.
7 min readFluxo Ads
We wrote this knowing it might cost us contracts: several of the questions below are uncomfortable for any agency, ourselves included. But a client who hires without knowing what to ask leaves unhappy, and that costs more.
The eight questions
- Will the ad accounts be in my name? The right answer is yes, with admin access for you. Accounts under the agency entity mean you lose all history if you leave.
- What is the fee and what is the media budget, separately? A single number hides markup on your spend.
- Which event will you use as a conversion? If the answer is "WhatsApp click", ask how they will measure actual sales.
- How do you measure return? Cost per lead is not enough. It has to reach cost per sale at some point.
- Who will work on my account and how many accounts do they carry? A very low price usually means too large a portfolio.
- How often is the account adjusted? Weekly is the minimum. Monthly means up to thirty days of misallocated budget.
- What happens if I want to leave? Thirty days notice and handover of access is reasonable. Lock-in penalties signal that retention does not come from results.
- Have you worked in my sector? Not mandatory, but it changes the speed of the first ninety days.
Five warning signs
| Sign | Why it is concerning |
|---|---|
| Guaranteed first place on Google | Google does not sell organic position. Guaranteeing it is selling what they do not control |
| Guaranteed revenue return | Nobody controls ad auctions or your site conversion rate |
| Reports with only reach, impressions and likes | Metrics that rise on their own and say nothing about sales |
| Refusal to grant account access | Without access you cannot audit or take your history with you |
| Identical proposals for different businesses | A sign of a packaged offer, not a diagnosis |
What belongs in the contract
- Scope with named deliverables, not "digital marketing management".
- Explicit ownership of accounts, website and data.
- Notice period and how access handover happens.
- Reporting and meeting cadence.
- What is fee and what is pass-through to third parties.
On timeline expectations
A serious agency will tell you paid traffic responds in weeks and SEO responds in months, even knowing the fast promise sells better. If a proposal promises organic results in thirty days, either the understanding is shallow or the promise is deliberate.
| Front | First signals | Consolidated result |
|---|---|---|
| Paid traffic | 7 to 15 days | 60 to 90 days |
| SEO | 60 to 90 days | 6 to 12 months |
| Google Business Profile | 15 to 30 days | 3 to 6 months |
| Automation and CRM | Immediately after launch | 30 to 60 days |
When not to hire an agency
There are cases where the honest answer is not to hire yet. If available media budget is very low, fees outweigh media and the math does not work. If the product has no defined offer, or support cannot handle current volume, generating more leads only increases the loss.
In those cases the best first step is usually fixing the internal bottleneck: organizing customer support, building out the Google profile and repairing measurement. After that, an agency delivers far more.