Questions to Ask a Marketing Agency Before You Hire

Ask who will personally run your account, whether you keep ownership of your accounts and data, how results are reported, what the exit terms are, and what they would do in your first ninety days. Vague answers to those five questions predict a bad engagement more reliably than anything in a pitch deck.

Every agency describes itself as data-driven, results-focused and a true partner. None of that survives contact with a specific question, which is why the comparison should be a short interview rather than a review of proposals.

Full disclosure, since it matters when you are reading advice about hiring: Engage Ads is a marketing agency. This is written to be genuinely useful whether or not you ever talk to us, and the criteria below are the ones we would want a prospective client to hold us to.

Who is actually doing the work?

Ask for the name and how many other accounts that person handles. The answer tells you both the seniority you are buying and how much attention you can realistically expect.

Worry if the people in the pitch are not the people in the delivery, and nobody will say who is.

Do I own my ad accounts, data and creative?

The answer should be an immediate yes, covering ad accounts, pixel and conversion history, creative files, and the CRM. Anything else means your campaign history stays behind when you leave.

Worry if ownership is described as complicated, or if it depends on the contract term.

How will you report, and how often?

You want reporting that leads with cost per qualified lead, booking rate and revenue, delivered on a fixed cadence you do not have to chase. Ask to see a real report from an existing client with the name removed.

Worry if the sample report leads with impressions, reach, or a large number of charts that never reach a booked client.

What happens if I want to leave?

Ask about the notice period, what you take with you, and whether anything is held back. A confident agency answers this easily, because their retention comes from results rather than from switching costs.

• Notice period, in writing
• Whether accounts transfer immediately and at whose cost
• Whether creative and landing pages come with you
• Whether any tracking or automation stops working when you go

What would you do in the first ninety days?

The answer should be specific to your business and should include finding out what is already broken before spending anything. An agency that answers this with a generic onboarding timeline has not thought about you yet.

Good answers usually start with tracking and intake rather than with creative, because those are where most existing spend is being wasted.

What are you not good at?

Ask it directly. An agency that cannot name a weakness or a type of client it turns away is either inexperienced or is telling you what you want to hear, and both cost you the same amount later.

For the wider comparison framework, see choosing an agency in Georgia and what agencies charge and why.

If you want a second opinion on your current setup, Engage Ads runs a no-cost growth audit. We review your ads, your search and AI visibility, and your intake flow, and show you where revenue is leaking out. If we are not the right fit you still leave with the list.

Related: how to keep ownership of your ad account and data and Facebook and Meta ads agencies in Suwanee and Gwinnett County compared.

Related: how to check a founder-led claim.

A question most agencies cannot answer yet: "How would you get us recommended by ChatGPT and Gemini?" The honest answer is in how to get your business recommended by AI assistants.