Every agency relationship ends. Yours will too.
The benchmark surveys published this year put the median lifespan somewhere between two and five years depending on how you’re paying. Project-based work averages about two years and churns at roughly 42% annually. Retainers last longest, close to four and a half years, with churn around 18%. Performance deals sit in the middle at about two and a half years.
So the interview everyone runs is the wrong interview. People spend the call probing whether the agency is good, which is genuinely hard to assess in an hour and which you’ll find out in ninety days anyway.
Here’s the better frame. The questions worth asking are not about how good they are. They’re about what you still own on the day it’s over. Because the version of this that ruins your quarter isn’t hiring someone mediocre. It’s hiring someone fine, parting ways two years later on perfectly cordial terms, and discovering you’re walking away from your own conversion history.
Three questions do most of the work. Start with the one nobody asks.
Ask who owns the ad account, then go and verify it
A Google Ads account has exactly one owner. Not a list. One.
If the agency created your account inside their manager account and never transferred ownership, they are the owner, full stop. You are a user on an asset they control. When you leave, moving it requires their cooperation, and cooperation is doing a lot of work in that sentence when someone has just lost your business.
What you lose in that scenario isn’t the campaigns, which are easy enough to rebuild. It’s the conversion history, the audience lists, the years of performance data smart bidding trained itself on. You start a new account from zero and your cost per acquisition goes backwards for a quarter while the algorithm relearns what it already knew.
The correct setup is boring and takes ten minutes at kickoff. You create the account under your own company Google account. They link their manager account to it with standard access. They get every capability they need to run campaigns. You keep the deed to the house.
Go and check yours now, before the next call. In Google Ads, open Admin, then Account access, and look at the manager accounts section. If an agency manager account is listed as owner rather than linked, that’s the conversation to have this week rather than the week you resign.
Then run the same check on everything else:
- GA4. If your property sits inside the agency’s Analytics account, you’ll never get account-level permissions, because that would expose every other client they manage. Move the property into your own account. You need Administrator and Editor roles on both sides to do it.
- Google Business Profile. Primary ownership, not manager access.
- Meta Business Manager. Your business, their partner access. This one goes wrong constantly because agencies spin up assets inside their own portfolio.
- The domain and the DNS. More common than you’d think, and far worse than the rest combined.
None of this implies bad faith. Most of the time it happened because setup was quick and nobody thought about it. That’s exactly why you ask at the start, when it costs nothing, rather than at the end, when it costs leverage.
Ask who does the work, in month four
The people on the pitch are the people who are good at pitching. That’s not a scandal, it’s how the industry staffs itself, and juniors do perfectly good execution with real supervision.
What you need to know is the shape of it.
So ask it specifically: who is on the weekly call in month four, what’s their title, and how many other accounts are they carrying? A straight answer sounds like “Priya, senior strategist, she has six other accounts and I’ll be on monthly reviews.” An evasive answer talks about the team, the pod, the collective bench.
Then ask whether any of it gets subcontracted. White-label delivery is everywhere and it isn’t automatically wrong, but you should know whether the people touching your account work for the company you’re paying.
If nobody will name a human being who will be on your account in six months, you’re buying capacity, not expertise.
Ask what the exit actually looks like
You’re negotiating this at the only moment you have leverage, which is now.
Four things belong in the contract rather than in a friendly verbal assurance:
- The notice period, and whether it’s 30, 60 or 90 days. Ninety is common and it’s a real cost, because you’ll pay for a quarter of work by a team that knows they’re finished.
- Who owns the creative, the copy and the landing pages after termination.
- What gets handed over, in what format, and by when. “Full export of ad accounts, analytics access and creative assets within 14 days of termination” is a sentence worth arguing over.
- Whether ownership of the ad accounts transfers to you on exit, if it somehow isn’t yours already.
Any decent operator will agree to all four without much friction, because they intend to keep you by being useful rather than by holding your data hostage. Watch what happens to the room when you raise it. The reaction tells you more than the answer does.
Agency or freelancer, honestly
I’m a solo consultant, so treat my view here with appropriate suspicion. But the honest answer is that it depends on a structural question, not a quality one.
An agency is genuinely the right call when you need several channels running at once, when you need coverage so a holiday doesn’t stop the work, when production volume is the actual bottleneck, or when your procurement process simply won’t onboard an individual. Those are real constraints and no amount of freelancer enthusiasm changes them.
A solo operator makes more sense when you want one channel done properly, when your budget wouldn’t buy senior attention at an agency [below roughly $4,000 a month you’re usually getting a junior on eight accounts], or when the diagnosis matters more than the execution.
The tradeoff you’re accepting with a freelancer is bus factor. One person gets ill, takes a contract, or moves on, and there’s no bench. Ask them directly what happens to your account if they’re unavailable for three weeks. Anyone worth hiring has thought about it and will tell you plainly.
The question that reveals the most
Ask what would make them tell you not to hire them.
Everyone competent has a disqualifying scenario. Wrong budget for the channel, wrong stage of business, a market where the economics don’t work, a problem that’s actually a sales problem wearing a marketing costume. Someone who has genuinely thought about their own limits answers this in one sentence.
Someone who insists every business is a fit for them has just told you they’re describing an invoice.
I’ve written separately about the diagnostic questions to ask before hiring, which cover how they’d approach the work. This post is the other half: the structural questions about what you keep. Both conversations belong in the same meeting.
Before your next call
Check who owns your Google Ads account and your GA4 property. Do that first, because if the answer is wrong on your current setup, that’s a live problem regardless of who you hire next.
Then write down the four exit terms and put them in front of whoever you’re about to sign with.
If you’d like to think through your own GTM or digital marketing problem out loud, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch. My notes on how I work go into more detail if you’d rather just read.