What should I ask a marketing agency before I hire them?

Question 1Who owns the Google Ads account, me or you?

Good answer: you do, and the agency is linked to it as a manager. You can remove them and keep everything.

Bad answer: anything that ends with the agency creating the account. If the account lives under their manager, your spend history, your conversion data and your learning period leave when they do. You start from zero with the next agency, and that is worth months.

Ask it first, before anything else, because the answer tells you how the rest of the relationship is set up. The long version, with how to check in your own account today, is in who owns my website, ad account and data if I leave the agency.

Ours: you own the ad accounts, the creative, the CRM and the website; it is in our standing terms.

Question 2Who owns the website and the domain?

Same test. Your domain should be registered to you, in a registrar account you control, with your own payment method on it. Some agencies hold the domain "for convenience" and you discover the problem on the day you leave.

Ours: the website is yours, in the same standing terms.

Question 3What is the minimum term, and what is the notice period?

A minimum term is not automatically a red flag. Real work takes months, and an agency that can be fired in week three will optimise for looking busy in week two.

What matters is whether the term is honest about why. Three months is a reasonable runway. Twelve months with an early termination fee is a trap.

Ours: a three month minimum, then month to month with 30 days notice, a checkpoint at 60 days, and no early termination fee.

Question 4Who actually does the work?

Not who runs the account. Who writes the ads, who builds the pages, who answers the email.

In some agencies the person who sells you is senior and the person who runs you is three months out of a certification course. That is not always bad, but you should know before you sign.

Question 5What happens in month one?

A good answer is specific and mostly unglamorous: access and tracking, an audit of what exists, the first builds, and a baseline you can judge everything else against.

If month one sounds exciting, be careful. Exciting usually means spending your ad budget before anyone has worked out what converts.

Ours: setup covers the account builds, tracking, review schema and the first creative library.

Question 6How do you report, and will I understand it?

Ask to see a real report from another client with the names removed. Look for whether it tells you what happened and what changed, or whether it is a wall of numbers with no sentences.

A report should answer three things: what did we spend, what did it produce, and what are we doing differently next month.

Ours: a full written report every month, and a written update every two weeks from the Growth tier up; the two largest tiers' terms are not published yet.

Question 7What do you count as a lead?

This is where many disputes start. A form fill is not a booked appointment. A phone call that rang for nine seconds is not a lead. A "conversion" in a Google Ads dashboard can be a tap on a phone number that never connected.

Make them define it in writing, and make the definition something that is worth money to you.

Question 8How much should I be spending on ads compared to your fee?

If the answer is vague, that is a problem. There is a straightforward version, and it is the rule we use ourselves: your ad budget should be at least as much as the agency fee on any paid channel, and the fee plus ads together have to fit inside what you can actually afford.

If someone wants a big fee and a small ad budget, you are funding the agency rather than the marketing.

Question 9Do you publish your prices?

Most do not: on our own ranked list of twelve agencies serving addiction treatment, two publish pricing. Ask anyway, and watch what happens.

An agency that will not give you a number until it has qualified your budget is pricing you, not the work. We publish ours on the pricing page: retainers start at $3,500 a month, and we are happy to say which tier we think you need before you are on a call.

Question 10What happens if it does not work?

Listen for whether they have thought about it. The honest answer involves a checkpoint, an agreed measure, and a conversation at a set date.

Be wary of guarantees. In a regulated category, anyone guaranteeing a specific number of patients is either not reading the rules or not planning to keep the promise.

Ours: a checkpoint at 60 days, in the standing terms.

Question 11Have you worked inside my category's advertising rules?

This matters more in healthcare than almost anywhere. Google and Meta both restrict health advertising, the restrictions change without notice, and an agency learning on your account can get it suspended. We keep a dated record of what the platforms allow and change on our health ad policy tracker.

Ask for a specific example of a rule they have run into and what they did about it. Someone who has actually done the work will have a story. Someone who has not will talk in general terms.

Question 12Can I talk to a client you lost?

Few people ask this, and few agencies expect it.

You will learn more from one honest conversation with a client who left than from three glowing references. If the agency will not do it, that is also information.

If you only ask threeAsk 1, 7 and 12

Who owns the ad account, what counts as a lead, and who left. Those three are the ones that cost the most to learn late, and none of them can be answered well by an agency that is planning to behave badly.

We are a marketing agency, so read all of this knowing that. Where we have given our own answer above, you can hold us to it; the rest we answer on a call, where you can hear whether it is specific. The next page in this series is who owns my website, ad account and data if I leave the agency; the one after it, ad spend against the agency fee, is on its way.