Paid advertising services, compared on published evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to shortlist a paid advertising agency

1. Quote the fee and the media budget as two separate numbers. Never accept a blended figure. You need to know how much reaches the auction and how much reaches the agency, because those two numbers are the whole basis of comparison between candidates. Ask for the fee in writing as a flat amount or a stated share, and ask what happens to it if you pause spending for a month.
2. Insist on owning every account, pixel and tag. The ad accounts, the analytics property, the conversion tracking and the audience lists should be created under your own business identity with the agency granted access. Agencies that run clients inside their own accounts keep the performance history when you leave, and that history is worth real money in a platform that learns.
3. Agree what a conversion means before the first invoice. Platforms will count almost anything as a conversion if you let them, including page views and calls of a few seconds. Define the events that matter, agree how duplicates and repeat customers are handled, and agree that the definition does not change mid engagement without both sides saying so in writing.
4. Ask for the account access review, not the case study. Ask a candidate to walk you through a live account they manage, with the client's permission and the name redacted, and to explain the structure, the negatives and the last three changes they made. Ten minutes of that reveals more competence than any deck, and an agency that cannot do it is probably not the team doing the work.

The fee models and what each one incentivises

A flat monthly retainer is the most predictable and the easiest to compare, and it is neutral about how much you spend, which is usually what you want. A share of media spend is the most common model at larger budgets and it is defensible when the work genuinely scales with the budget, but it rewards recommending a bigger budget rather than a better one, so it needs a cap or a review point. A performance fee tied to leads or revenue sounds perfectly aligned and often is, provided the definition of the counted event is airtight, because otherwise you have simply moved the argument to what counts. Hourly billing is rare and tends to suit audit and remediation work rather than ongoing management.

Whichever model you pick, ask what happens in a bad month. An agency that keeps invoicing the same amount while the account is losing money is not doing anything wrong contractually, but the conversation you have at that point is much easier if a review trigger was written in at the start.

What separates good management from expensive maintenance

Most of the value in a paid account comes from a small number of decisions: which campaigns exist at all, what the offer is, what the creative says, and what the account is told to optimise toward. Everything else is upkeep. That is why creative capacity is worth more than dashboard sophistication in most engagements, particularly on paid social where the auction rewards ads people stop for and fatigue is measured in weeks. Ask candidates how many new creative concepts they produce per month, who produces them, and whether that is inside the fee.

The second separator is honesty about attribution. Platform reporting is generous to platforms and the numbers from two networks will happily add up to more conversions than your business recorded. An agency with a view on how to reconcile that, whether by holdout tests, by measured incrementality or simply by comparing platform totals against your own order records, is doing the work. One that reports only the platform figure has not looked.

The compliance items buyers forget

The advertiser carries responsibility for what runs. The FTC's online advertising guidance sets the baseline: claims need to be truthful and substantiated, disclosures need to be clear and conspicuous rather than buried, and the same standard applies whether the ad is a search headline, an influencer post or a video. Ask to see the copy approval process and put a named person on your side in it.

Ask also about data. Conversion tracking, customer list uploads and remarketing all involve moving customer data into platforms, and your privacy notice needs to reflect what is actually happening. If a candidate proposes uploading a customer list on day one and has no view on consent or on your privacy notice, that is a signal about how the rest of the engagement will be run.

Questions people actually ask

How much media budget do we need before an agency is worth it?

Below a modest monthly spend the management fee usually swallows the advantage, and a competent in house person or a few hours of consulting each month is better value. The threshold is not a fixed number, it is wherever the fee stops being a small fraction of the budget it improves. Ask candidates directly whether your budget justifies their fee, and treat a confident yes with no reasoning as an answer about their pipeline.

Should the agency also make the landing pages?

Someone has to, and the landing page moves results more than most in account tweaking. What matters is that the pages live on your own site under your control rather than on the agency's page builder, so that leaving does not take your best pages with it. Price the page work as a separate line so you can see what it costs.

What reporting cadence is right?

Monthly written reporting with a short live review, plus access to a dashboard you can read whenever you like. Weekly reporting sounds attentive but usually produces reaction to noise, and the account changes it triggers can undo learning. What matters more than cadence is that the metric set is fixed in advance and does not quietly rotate toward whatever looks best.

How long before we can judge performance?

Assume a setup period of a few weeks, then a meaningful read once enough conversions have accumulated to be more than noise, which depends on your volume rather than the calendar. Agree the volume threshold rather than a date. If the account will never produce enough events for a clean read, agree in advance that decisions will be made on cost per enquiry and on your own sales records.

Browse agencies by specialty

• SEO agencies with verified facts
• PPC agencies with verified facts
• Social media agencies with verified facts
• Content marketing agencies with verified facts
• Email marketing agencies with verified facts
• Performance marketing agencies with verified facts