How to choose a marketing agency

The 10 questions

1. Who actually works on my account? Ask for a name, and ask how many other accounts that person is responsible for. It’s not unusual to meet a senior person in the sales meeting and get a junior on the account.
2. Do I own the accounts and the data? The Google Ads account, the Meta Business account and all the history should sit with you, with the agency as a user. If you switch agencies, the history should go with you.
3. How do you charge, and what happens in a bad month? If the agency gets paid the same regardless of results, that’s good to know. How the models differ is covered in performance-based or fixed fee.
4. Is there a lock-in period? Ask how long the notice period is, and what happens to the accounts, ads and landing pages if you leave.
5. What do you measure, sales or clicks? Ask to see a real client report. It should show what you spent and what it brought in sales or inquiries, not just impressions and click-through rate.
6. How often do you make new ads? Ads wear out, especially on Meta. Ask how many new ads a client your size gets per month, and who makes them.
7. Can I get references with numbers? Cost per lead, ROAS or sales growth over time, and ideally the name of a client you can call.
8. What do you do in the first month? The answer should start with tracking and an account review. If it starts with “we launch campaigns,” they’re optimizing without knowing what works.
9. When do you say no to a client? An agency that never turns anyone down also takes on clients where advertising can’t pay off.
10. How and how often do you report? You should know what happened last week and what’s being done this week, without having to ask.

Five red flags

• The agency owns your ad accounts.
• A long lock-in period, for example “12 months is standard with us.”
• Reports on impressions and clicks, not sales and inquiries.
• The same ads running for months.
• Guaranteed results before they’ve seen your numbers.

Big or small agency?

Size matters less than who does the work. A big agency has more people and more capacity, but you share them with many clients. A small agency often gives you direct contact with the person working on your account, but has less backup during sickness and holidays. Ask both who writes your ads and who adjusts the bids.

Our own answers

Since we’re telling you to ask everyone these questions, here are our answers:

• Who: There are two of us. Victor Skretteberg runs Google Ads, Jona Helgen runs creative and Meta. We’re the ones doing the work.
• The accounts: Owned by you. We’re users.
• Payment: A share of the value we create for you, not a fixed monthly fee. If you don’t earn more, you pay us nothing. It works for us when the share comes to around NOK 20–30,000 a month, so we work with established businesses with a monthly ad budget of at least NOK 30,000. The details.
• Lock-in: None.
• Measurement: Sales and inquiries, measured in your own account.
• New ads: 10+ a week. We’ve made more than 5,000 ads in total.
• References: Case studies with numbers from our clients’ own ad accounts.
• First month: Tracking and an account review before we change anything.
• When we say no: When the ads can’t realistically generate enough for the model to work for both sides.
• Reporting: You get a report every Monday.