How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency or Freelancer: Checklist

The short answer: what to look at first

A good digital marketing contractor stands out through transparency, not flashy case studies. They ask about your unit economics, propose hypotheses instead of guarantees, work inside your ad accounts and agree up front on how success will be measured.

Agency or freelancer is mostly a question of scale. A freelancer is usually cheaper and more flexible but depends on one person. An agency gives you a team (media buyer, designer, analyst) and cover during holidays, but you pay for management and may end up with a junior specialist.

Questions to ask

• What will you ask us? If a contractor never asks about margin, average order value, sales cycle and what happens to a lead after the form, they will optimize clicks, not sales.
• Who exactly will run the project? Ask to meet the person doing the work, not only the sales manager.
• How will you measure results? The answer you want: conversions tied to the CRM, not reach and CTR.
• What will you do in the first 30 days? A solid plan starts with an analytics audit, event and UTM setup, and only then launches campaigns.
• What similar problems have you solved? Ask them to walk through the approach and the mistakes, not to show a "10x growth" slide.
• What happens if we part ways? Access, creatives, audiences and settings must stay with you.

Red flags

• Guaranteed results. Nobody controls the auction, competitors or your sales team. A promise of a fixed number of leads or ROAS signals either inexperience or metric manipulation.
• Accounts registered to the contractor. If the ad account, Business Manager or GA4 property is in someone else's name, you lose the history, pixel data and trained campaigns when you leave.
• No access to data. Refusing to give you even read-only access is a reason to end the conversation.
• Hidden markup on ad spend. The contractor tops up the account and invoices you without a breakdown of actual spend.
• Reports about reach and clicks only, with no link to leads and sales.
• A long contract with no exit from month one.

Pricing models

Cost depends on the number of channels, creative volume, analytics complexity and reporting frequency. Ask for a breakdown: how much is the specialist's work and how much goes to the ad platforms.

Owning your ad accounts and analytics

The rule is simple: every account is created for your company, and the contractor gets access.

• Google Ads, Meta Business Manager, Yandex Direct: you are the owner, the contractor gets admin or advertiser rights.
• GA4, Yandex Metrica, Google Tag Manager: also yours, with the contractor as an editor.
• Ad payments come from your card or your own agreement with the platform. If the budget goes through the contractor, require documents showing actual spend.
• Creatives, copy and audience lists are handed over on request.

What to expect from reporting

A regular report should answer three questions: what we spent, what we got, what we do next. The minimum:

• spend by channel and campaign;
• leads and sales from the CRM, cost per lead and cost per sale;
• which hypotheses were tested and what came of them;
• the plan for the next period.

Agree on cadence: a short weekly update and a detailed monthly review is usually enough. Numbers in the report should match what you see in the ad accounts and the CRM.

How to structure a trial period

1. Limit the term, typically one to three months, because ad platforms need time to learn.
2. Set goals in advance: which metrics, which data sources, what counts as success and what is a reason to stop.
3. Record a baseline of current performance so there is something to compare against.
4. Allocate a test budget you are prepared to spend on learning.
5. Hold a midpoint check-in and a final review at the end.