How to choose a digital agency — and the flags that say walk.

First check whether you should be hiring at all — the DIY-or-agency split is its own decision, and "delegated" is only one of its three honest outcomes. If you land there, what follows is the interview.

The guarantee flag

Anyone who guarantees rankings is lying about how the machine works. Google's results are an auction of relevance run by someone else — no vendor controls them, including vendors with "partner" badges, including us. The honest version of ambition sounds different: here's the work, here's the mechanism it feeds, here's how we'll measure whether it's paying (the crossover arithmetic is what that measurement looks like). "Page one in ninety days or your money back" isn't confidence — it's a funnel for people who want certainty more than results, and refund terms designed never to trigger. Guarantee talk on the first call saves you the second one.

The hostage test

The single most expensive discovery owners make about a bad agency arrives at the end: the ad account was "theirs", the website lives on "their platform", the analytics belong to "their agency account" — and leaving means starting from zero. Years of campaign learning, conversion history and content, held as leverage against your departure. So ask it straight, before anything is signed: who owns every account, and what exactly do I keep if we part on bad terms? The only acceptable answer is that everything — ads, analytics, the website, the domain, the business profile — sits in accounts your business owns, with the agency working as an invited user. This one question outranks every other on the list. If the answer is wrong, nothing else on the card matters.

"What did you ship last month?"

Retainers rot when activity replaces output. The question that exposes it is concrete: for a current client of similar size, what actually shipped last month — which pages went live, which tests ran, which campaign changes were made and why? A working agency answers instantly, because the list exists; it's how they run the work. A rotting one answers with process — "we run continuous optimisation" — or offers to show you a dashboard. Reports describe weather. Shipping is what you're paying for, so buy from people who can name what they shipped.

Reporting in money, not rankings

Ask to see a real (anonymised) monthly report before signing, and read it for one thing: what's the headline unit? Impressions, sessions and "visibility scores" are activity dressed as achievement. The report you want leads with enquiries and their cost — which channels produced them, what each cost, what changed since last month and what will change next — in language a business owner can act on. An agency that reports in rankings is negotiating with your attention; an agency that reports in money is accountable to it. The difference tells you what they'll optimise for all year.

Contracts, and the reference call

Contract terms tell the truth about confidence: month-to-month or short notice periods mean the work is expected to justify itself; long lock-ins mean the paperwork is doing that job instead. Read the exit clause first — ownership on departure, handover obligations, and any fee for leaving. Then make one reference call, to a client who's been aboard long enough for the honeymoon to be over, and ask two questions: what do they actually do each month, and what happened when something went wrong? The second answer is the audit. Every agency performs well in the sales cycle; references describe the marriage.