12 questions to ask before hiring a marketing agency, and the answers that should worry you

Yes, we're a marketing company telling you how to interview marketing companies, including us. Fair. But we've onboarded enough owners escaping bad agency relationships to know exactly where the bodies are buried, and every question below comes from a real horror story. Ask them all, us included.

Contract and exit terms

1. "How long is the contract, and what does it cost to leave early?" Twelve-month terms with early-termination fees are standard at big-agency platforms. Worry if the answer involves a lock and a fee: a contract that long protects the agency from its own underperformance. Month-to-month exists in this market; confident agencies use it.

2. "If I leave, what walks out with me?" The most expensive question on this list. You should keep: your domain, your website content, your phone and tracking numbers, your ad accounts with their history, your reviews, and a full data export. Worry if any item gets a hedge: "the website is built on our proprietary platform" often means your site vanishes on exit, and porting tracking numbers "isn't supported" means every ranking citation and ad carrying that number now feeds someone else. (Our answer, for the record, is the No-Hostage Guarantee: it's all yours, exported in full, month-to-month.)

3. "Who owns the ad accounts?" If campaigns run inside the agency's account rather than yours, your years of conversion history, the thing Google's algorithm optimizes from, resets to zero when you leave. Insist on your own accounts with the agency as a manager.

Money

4. "Exactly how much of my budget goes to media vs. your fees?" You'd be amazed how often this is unanswerable. Worry about bundled "programs" where ad spend and management are one opaque number: commonly, meaningful percentages disappear into the bundle. You want the split in writing, invoice by invoice.

5. "Is your pricing published anywhere?" Agencies that publish pricing can defend it. Agencies that "build a custom quote after a discovery call" are frequently pricing on what you look like you'll pay. Published pricing isn't just transparency: it's evidence the agency prices on value, not on victim.

Fit

6. "What percentage of your clients are in my industry?" A generalist learns the lawn care calendar on your dime. Worry about a portfolio that's "everything from dentists to divorce lawyers": home services seasonality, price points, and buying behavior are their own discipline. Ask to see campaigns for companies like yours, in months like your March.

7. "Do you integrate with MY software?" Your operational truth lives in Jobber, Service Autopilot, RealGreen, or Sweep&Go. If the agency's system can't read it, they can't see which leads became revenue, can't trigger follow-up from real events, and will judge success by form fills. Worry if the answer is "we can look into that." The right answer names your CRM and describes what syncs: it's why we build integrations before campaigns.

8. "Who actually works my account?" The person selling you is almost never the person running your ads. Ask how many accounts your manager carries (worry at 40+), and what happens when they quit: account-manager churn is one of the most commonly reported agency complaints. You want named humans and a documented handoff plan.

What you'll actually see

9. "Show me a real monthly report from a current client." Redacted is fine. If it leads with impressions and clicks, that's what they optimize. A report worth paying for leads with booked jobs, cost per booked customer, call outcomes, and budget pacing (the stuff our live reporting shows daily, because monthly PDFs are where bad news hides for four extra weeks).

10. "Can I hear my calls?" Call recordings with outcomes are the fastest lie detector in marketing: they reveal lead quality AND how your office handles leads. Worry if call tracking is an upsell, or if "lead volume" is reported without any way to hear what a lead was. (See our call tracking for what this should look like.)

11. "Does your system DO anything, or just display things?" Dashboards are table stakes. Ask what happens automatically: does a completed job trigger neighbor marketing? Does a missed call trigger a text-back? Does an unsold quote get a follow-up cadence? Worry if the automation story is "we'll send you a report and recommendations": a platform should act, not narrate.

A quick story about why question 2 matters most

A composite from companies we've onboarded, but every detail is one we've seen: an owner spends three years and $90,000 with an agency. The website ranks, the tracking number is on 40 directory listings, the ad account has three years of conversion data. Then the relationship sours. On exit he learns the site was on the agency's proprietary platform (gone in 30 days), the tracking number belonged to the agency (now routing his callers to a recording), and the ad account was theirs too (history unrecoverable). He didn't lose an agency. He lost three years of compounding assets and started over at zero, minus the $90,000. None of it was illegal. All of it was in the contract he didn't press on. Ten minutes of question two would have surfaced every bit of it.

The kill question

12. "Tell me about a client you lost, and what they'd say about you." Everyone has lost clients. An honest agency tells you a real story with a real lesson. Worry about deflection, blame ("they didn't give it time"), or a suspiciously perfect record. How a company talks about endings is exactly how yours will end.

The takeaway: the worrying answers rhyme: locks instead of results, bundles instead of breakdowns, dashboards instead of actions, and vagueness anywhere ownership is concerned. An agency that wins on merit will answer all twelve without flinching.

Take this to the sales call

1. Contract length and exit cost, in writing.
2. Full list of what you own on exit: domain, numbers, content, data, reviews, ad accounts.
3. Media-vs-fees split on every invoice.
4. Industry mix and your-CRM integration, specifically.
5. A real client report and real call recordings.
6. The lost-client story.

Want to see how we answer all twelve? It's on our comparison page, and our pricing is published, which handles question five.