What to check before you sign with a marketing agency

Who owns the accounts

Settle ownership in writing before anything else. The Google Ads account should exist under your business, with the agency added as a user you can remove in thirty seconds. The same goes for the analytics property, the Google Business Profile, the Meta business assets, the domain registrar and any call tracking numbers.

The reason is practical. When an engagement ends badly, the history is what you lose, and an ad account carrying two years of conversion data is worth real money in how quickly it can be scaled again. We have rebuilt accounts from nothing for New Jersey owners whose previous agency held everything under its own login. It set them back months.

What exactly are you buying each month?

A line item reading "digital marketing" with a monthly figure beside it is not a scope. Ask what happens in month one, what happens every month after that, and what is explicitly excluded. A good answer sounds like a list of deliverables with names attached. A weak one sounds like a list of adjectives.

Watch for the retainer that quietly becomes a reporting subscription. Some accounts genuinely need a few hours a month and should be priced that way. Paying a full retainer for maintenance work is common, and it is rarely raised by the party being paid.

How will you know whether it worked?

Agree the number before the work starts. For most service businesses it is qualified leads and cost per lead, attributed to a source. For a store it is revenue and return on ad spend at a margin you say out loud rather than assume.

Rankings, impressions and reach are diagnostics. They are useful to the person doing the work and close to meaningless as a test of whether you should keep paying. If the first sample report is a stack of platform screenshots, ask for a one-page version and see what comes back.

Agree the timeline alongside the number. Ad changes show inside a month. Search optimization on a site with any history behind it usually takes two quarters before the trend is honest, and a new domain longer than that. Writing both down protects everybody, including the firm, from a conversation in week six about why nothing has happened yet.

Contract length and how you get out

A twelve-month term can be reasonable for search optimization or a full rebuild, because that work genuinely does not show results in eight weeks. It is much harder to justify for ad management, where performance is visible inside a month.

Whatever the length, look for a thirty-day termination clause and a written statement that you keep the accounts, the creative and the content produced. Ask specifically what happens to your call tracking numbers if you leave. Those numbers are often on the agency's account, they are frequently printed on vehicles and yard signs, and that question catches people out more than any other.

Who actually does the work

The meetings are often taken by the person who sold you, and the work is often done by somebody you have not met. That is not automatically a problem, but you should know it. Ask who writes the copy, who has hands on the ad account, and roughly how many other clients that person carries.

Then ask to see two examples of writing they produced for a business like yours. Not a case study with a chart on it. The actual page, live, so you can read it the way a customer would.

Check a reference who left

Every firm will hand you two happy current clients. Those calls tell you very little, because a client three months into a good month says good things about anybody. Ask instead for somebody who finished with them, and note whether they can produce one.

What you want from that call is not whether it ended. Most engagements end. You want to know how it ended: whether the handover was clean, whether the accounts transferred without a fight, whether the last invoice matched the last month of work. A firm that behaves well on the way out is telling you something about how it behaves the rest of the time.

Questions that get an honest answer

• What would you decline to sell us right now, and why?

• Which client have you underperformed for, and what did you change?

• What would make you tell us to stop spending?

• If we left in six months, what exactly do we walk away with?

The content of the answers matters less than the reaction. Any firm that has been working in Monmouth County for a while has lost an account, had a bad quarter and learned something from it, and can say so without flinching. A firm that has never failed at anything is telling you it has not been paying attention. Digital Branding Blocks has answered all four of those on first calls, and we would rather do it then than in month seven. If you want ours in writing, the contact page is the short route.