12 questions to ask before you hire a digital marketing agency in India

Somewhere between three and five times a month, a founder tells me they hired the wrong agency last year, wasted six to nine months, spent somewhere between eight and twenty-five lakh, and are only now unpicking the damage.

Almost none of them tell me they had no warning signs. Most of them tell me they saw the signs in the pitch itself and hired the agency anyway, because the deck was good, the case studies looked impressive, and the salesperson was very confident.

This post is the list of questions I wish someone had put in front of them before they signed. Twelve of them. Not a checklist you tick through mechanically. A set of questions where the manner of the answer matters as much as the content of it. Watch how the agency handles each one. Watch what they dodge. That is your real diagnostic.

1. Who exactly will do the work on my account, and how many other accounts do they run?

You are hiring people, not a logo. The person in the pitch is almost never the person doing the work after month one. Ask for the name, seniority, and current workload of whoever will actually be on your account.

The right answer sounds like: "Priya is your SEO lead, she is on three other accounts, here is her LinkedIn, she will be on your monthly call." The wrong answer sounds like: "We have a strong team, don't worry, you will be well taken care of." If the answer is a hedged plural noun instead of a named person, that is your first flag.

2. What is your capacity, honestly?

If an agency of eight people tells you they can take on your account this month, ask what else they took on this quarter. If the answer is more than two new accounts, your work is going to be delivered by whoever is available on Thursday, not by whoever is best suited to it.

Most Indian agencies over-sell in the pitch and under-deliver in month two because the capacity math never added up in the first place. Do the arithmetic in the room. Number of active accounts, average team allocation, hours available. Ask for the actual numbers. Watch the pause.

3. Can I speak to two clients you lost, and one you fired?

This is the single question that separates agencies who know themselves from agencies who are managing an image.

Nobody keeps every client. If they claim they do, they are either new, lying, or holding on to bad engagements out of pride. The agency that will say "yes, here is a client we parted with in March, the mismatch was on volume, they will tell you what happened" is the agency with a healthy relationship to their own work.

I have written more about this in the pricing lessons post, where we talked about why the agencies who fire clients well are almost always the ones who serve their remaining clients better.

4. What does the first ninety days look like, in specific deliverables I can point to?

Not "we will audit and strategise and align." Real deliverables. A named audit document. A named strategy document. A named implementation calendar. A named reporting schedule.

If the agency cannot walk you through the ninety-day plan in the pitch, the plan does not exist yet. It will get invented after you sign, in a hurry, by whoever has an empty slot in their calendar.

For what a serious ninety-day plan actually contains, the SEO cost post has an example broken down by hours and outputs.

5. How do you charge, and what is inside the retainer?

Fixed retainer. Fixed retainer plus performance bonus. Hourly. Deliverable-based. Percentage of ad spend. Each of these has its own incentive shape, and the wrong one for your situation will quietly warp the work.

Percentage of ad spend, in particular, is dangerous for a growing brand. It rewards the agency for growing your spend, not your revenue. If the pitch is "we take 12 per cent of media spend," ask what happens when your paid budget triples and their fee triples with it. If the answer is "we just deliver more," ask what "more" is measured in.

The Google Ads vs Meta Ads post gets into the way the wrong fee structure ends up recommending the wrong channel mix. Same shape of problem in a different room.

6. What does the fee actually cover, in hours?

This is the follow-up to question five and it is the one nobody wants to answer. Ask for the estimated hours per month the account will receive. If the answer is a range like "twenty to sixty depending on the sprint," that is fine. If the answer is "we don't work in hours, we work in outcomes," that is a red flag pretending to be a philosophy.

Outcomes-based pricing is a real model. It also, in agencies with fewer than forty people, usually means "we haven't costed the work honestly and we hope your account doesn't turn out to be a loss-maker."

Ballpark, for the ranges I laid out in the pricing post: a ₹1L retainer should buy you roughly forty to sixty hours of work a month across the account. A ₹40K retainer buys you fifteen to twenty. If the numbers don't add up when you do the arithmetic on their side of the table, they don't add up.

7. What tools do you actually use, and do we get access?

Real answer: a named ads platform seat, a named SEO tool subscription (Ahrefs, Semrush, Sitebulb, or similar), a named analytics setup (GA4 plus BigQuery for anyone serious), a shared reporting dashboard you can open on a Tuesday afternoon without asking permission.

If the "reporting" is a monthly PowerPoint the agency emails you at month-end, you are being reported to, not shown what happened. Insist on the live view.

8. What is your AI and AEO position?

Not because everyone should be doing generative-engine optimisation this quarter. Because how the agency answers the question tells you whether they are keeping up with the actual work or reciting last year's slides.

An honest answer is: "We think it matters, here is what we are testing, we are not yet sure what the payback looks like." A dishonest answer is: "We have a full GEO practice with proprietary methodology." Nobody has a proprietary methodology yet. Anyone claiming they do is packaging fog.

If you want the sober version of what to actually do about AI search this year, the AEO vs SEO vs GEO post is the piece I wrote for founders who wanted the straight answer without a course to sell.

9. Show me a report from a client, with permission, from the last quarter

Not a case study slide. An actual monthly report. Redacted if needed. Real numbers, real commentary, real "what went wrong this month."

Case studies are marketing. Monthly reports are the product. If the monthly report is a screenshot of GA4 with a paragraph of adjectives on top, you are going to get a screenshot of GA4 with a paragraph of adjectives on top. Every month. For a year.

10. What is your termination clause, and how does the offboarding work?

Ask two things. First, the notice period. Anything longer than sixty days is a lock-in dressed as a contract. Second, what happens to your assets when you leave. Who owns the ad accounts. Who owns the analytics setup. Who owns the campaign creative. Who owns the SEO content and the internal docs.

The right answer is: "You own everything, we hand it over on request, the notice is thirty days, and there is no exit fee." The wrong answer involves the word "proprietary."

11. What do you refuse to do?

An agency that will do everything is an agency that is optimising for winning your account, not for doing good work. The best agencies I know have a short, clear list of things they will not do. No affiliate arbitrage. No paid-for reviews. No black-hat link buying. No performance work below a minimum spend where the math cannot work. No industries they do not understand.

Ask the question directly. If the agency cannot name three things they refuse to do, they will do anything, and they will be mediocre at all of it.

12. Why do you want my account?

This is the closing question. It is also the one that sorts the agency chasing revenue from the agency choosing engagements.

The honest answer sounds like: "You are in a category we have three case studies in, your revenue stage is where we do our best work, your timeline is realistic, and the founder is direct. If you were a stage earlier or in a category we don't know, we would refer you elsewhere." The dishonest answer is a warm rewording of your own pitch back at you.

The agencies you want to work with are picky. If the agency you are talking to is not picky, ask yourself what that says about their bench and their book.

A closing note

You will not get twelve clean answers to twelve clean questions. You will get eight good answers, two evasions, and two "let me get back to you" replies that never come back. That is fine. The pattern of what an agency answers well and what it dodges is more useful than any single answer on its own.

The signal you are actually listening for is whether the agency is trying to earn your engagement, or trying to close it. Every question above is designed to force one behaviour or the other into the open.

If you want to see how we answer these ourselves, our services page has our current service list and how we scope each one, and the Patna page has the specifics on who we are and where we operate from. The Indian Golf Shop and CA Ankur case studies are also worth reading, because they cover two very different shapes of engagement and the answers to most of the twelve questions above look different in each.

And if you have a shortlist of two or three agencies and want a second pair of eyes on the pitch decks before you sign, send the briefs across and I will read them. Even if we are not the right shop for you, I can usually tell you within an email which of the three is going to do the least damage to the year ahead.

Fewer things are more expensive in this work than the wrong twelve months.

Shubhanshu