Choose on evidence, not on chemistry. An agency that shows you a named contact, a written scope, a reporting cadence and a clean split between its fee and your ad budget is telling you how it will behave for the next twelve months. Here is what to settle before you make contact, the five things that genuinely differ between agencies, the answers that should end a meeting, the track record you are entitled to see, and how to read a proposal in South Africa.
What should you settle before you contact anyone?
Three things: the outcome you want in plain language, the budget band you can sustain for at least six months, and who inside your business will own the relationship. An agency cannot fix an unclear goal, and the short brief you write first is the cheapest piece of work in the entire engagement.
The order matters more than the document. A business that opens with “we need more leads” gets proposals for whatever each agency happens to sell, because the brief left that choice to them. A business that opens with a number, a service value and a funding runway gets comparable proposals, because it has defined the problem tightly enough that the answers converge. Google’s own guide to hiring an SEO makes a related point: a good supplier should ask what makes your business unique, who your competitors are and how your customers find you, and a brief that already answers those questions gets proposals you can compare. KM Digital Solutions treats that brief as the first deliverable of a scoping call rather than as homework you must hand in, but somebody has to write it, and the person who writes it sets the terms of every proposal that follows.
Nail down these four before the first meeting.
- The outcome, stated as a number and a timeframe. Enquiries a month, qualified leads a quarter, bookings a week. Not “brand awareness”.
- The budget band, including the part that is not the fee. Advertising needs media spend on top of management. Decide both.
- The internal owner. One person who can approve copy, supply content and answer questions inside two working days.
- The runway. How many months you will fund before you judge the result. Anything under three is not a test, it is a coin toss.
Which five things genuinely separate one agency from another?
Who does the work, whether the strategy is written down, how measurement is set up, what the reporting shows, and how the commercial terms are structured. Everything else, including the office, the awards and the client logo wall, tells you very little about what will actually land in your inbox each month.
Each gate has one question that settles it quickly.
| What differs | The question that settles it | A weak answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | Name the person who will write my ads, and tell me who reviews them | “Our team handles that” |
| Written strategy | What will I receive in writing in month one, before any spend | “We will get started straight away” |
| Measurement | How will a conversion be defined, and who sets up the tracking | “You will see it in the dashboard” |
| Reporting | Show me a real report from an account like mine | “We send a monthly PDF” |
| Commercial terms | What is fee, what is pass-through, and what is the notice period | “It depends on the package” |
The first gate carries the most weight and gets the least attention. A proposal is written by the person selling it, and the work is often done by somebody else, sometimes a subcontractor two steps removed from the meeting you sat in. Asking for a name is not rudeness, it is the only way to find out whether the expertise you were shown is the expertise you are buying. The second gate is nearly as revealing, because an agency that will not put a strategy in writing before it starts spending has either not formed one or would rather not be measured against it later. Smaller retainers are especially exposed here, since a lean account can end up handled by whoever has capacity in a given week rather than by the specialist who presented. KM Digital Solutions publishes its service scopes for exactly that reason, so the written answer exists before the first invoice does.
What should end the conversation on the spot?
Guarantees of ranking or revenue, refusal to name the people doing the work, agency ownership of your accounts, and pricing that will not separate the fee from the media spend. Each of these is structural rather than stylistic, and none of them improves after you have signed.
These are the ones worth walking away from.
- A guaranteed position or a guaranteed number of leads. Nobody controls the auction or the index. Google’s documentation on hiring search help says that if a supplier guarantees first place in search results, you should find someone else, which is about as direct as a platform is ever going to be about its own supplier ecosystem.
- The agency owns your ad account, your analytics or your domain. You should be the owner and grant access, never the reverse. This is the most expensive item on the list to unwind later.
- Fee and media spend quoted as a single number. If you cannot see which part is management and which is budget, you cannot tell whether performance improved or the spend simply went up.
- No named person, at any point in the process. See gate one.
- Reporting that only ever goes up. Impressions and reach can rise while enquiries fall. A report that never carries bad news is a sales document wearing the clothes of a measurement one.
- A long initial term with a one-sided exit. A longer initial term is defensible when real build work is front-loaded and itemised. One with a cancellation clause that binds only you is not.
The pattern behind all six is the same: each one moves risk from the agency to you while keeping the upside where it was. A guarantee transfers the consequences of a bad forecast onto your budget. Account ownership transfers your ability to leave. A blended fee transfers the burden of proof, because you can no longer show that performance changed rather than spend. None of these is an accident of drafting, and none is unusual enough to be shocking. The defence is boring and effective: get the commercial terms in writing before the creative conversation starts, because once you like the people it becomes much harder to interrogate the contract. KM Digital Solutions puts scope, fee split and notice period in writing before any work starts, for that reason.
What track record should an agency be able to show you?
A named client, a specific metric, the period it covers and the system it came from, plus one reference you may contact. Remove any of those four and the claim cannot be checked. Google’s hiring guide says the same in plainer terms: check the supplier’s business references, and ask past clients whether the service was useful and produced positive results.
One checkable example, from our own work: organic search clicks for C4 Fire and Security rose from 258 in June 2026 to 435 in July 2026, measured in Google Search Console. The client is named, the metric is specific, the window is stated and the system of record is named, and the full account, including what the site got wrong, is in the C4 Fire and Security SEO case study. A track record that cannot be written in that sentence shape is a story, not evidence. Our guide to vetting an SEO agency in Cape Town goes through the proof points in more detail, including the ones Google’s own documentation tells you to ask for.
What does transparent, honest reporting look like?
It ties spend to outcomes you recognise, it names the source of every number, and it says plainly what did not work. A report showing enquiries, cost per enquiry and the trend across several months is doing its job. One that leads with impressions is describing activity rather than results.
This is easy to test before you sign. Ask to see a real report, with the client details removed, from an account roughly the size of yours. What you are checking is whether the numbers connect: does the reported conversion count match something the business would recognise as a genuine enquiry, is the date window stated, and is the source named rather than implied. A report built on an unverified conversion definition can be arithmetically perfect and still worthless, because it is faithfully counting the wrong event. Some agencies send a live dashboard link instead of a document, which is an improvement only when somebody writes the interpretation to go with it. A dashboard shows you what happened. A report tells you what it meant and what changes next month, and that second half is the part you are actually paying a professional for.
How should the pricing be structured?
Management fees and media spend belong on separate lines, once-off setup should be quoted apart from monthly work, and anything genuinely bespoke should be scoped in writing rather than guessed at. The structure matters more than the total, because the structure is what makes two proposals comparable at all.
Concrete numbers help, so here is how our own rate card is built. Google Ads management is tiered by campaign complexity: R500 a month covers a single campaign with keyword monitoring and a monthly report, R3,000 covers up to three campaigns with conversion tracking and weekly optimisation, and R4,000 covers unlimited campaigns and full-funnel work. Your advertising budget is invoiced separately at actual cost, with no markup applied to the spend itself. Website maintenance is R500 a month for updates, security patches, uptime monitoring, backups and a health report. Hosting is passed through at cost, typically R200 to R500 a month. Work that is genuinely bespoke carries no published figure at all and is scoped on a call, which is the honest treatment rather than a placeholder number invented to fill a table. Ask any agency to show you the same breakdown, and note which of those three categories each line actually falls into.
Get a written scope before you commit
Tell us the outcome you need and the budget you can sustain, and we will come back with a scope, a price split into fee and pass-through, and the name of the person who will do the work. If we are not the right fit for what you are trying to do, we will say so.
Our own work runs across search optimisation, paid advertising, social media and content marketing, out of the studio in Durbanville, Western Cape. If the decision in front of you is a website rather than a marketing retainer, the guide to choosing a web design company covers that separately, and the SEO agency guide goes deeper on search on its own. For the rest of the decision, our guides on when to hire an agency in Cape Town and on what each service costs give you the numbers to hold a proposal against.
Frequently asked questions
How long should I give a new agency before judging it?
Long enough for the results to be readable: months rather than weeks for search, and at least a full month of clean data after the learning period for paid advertising, provided measurement was set up correctly on day one. Anything shorter measures the setup rather than the strategy. Agree the review point in writing at the start, along with which evidence will be examined, so the conversation at the review is about the agreed numbers rather than about whose expectations were reasonable.
Should I hire a specialist or a full-service agency?
Hire a specialist when you have one clear problem and the internal capacity to coordinate. Hire full-service when several channels have to work together and nobody in-house can own that job. The risk with specialists is that nothing joins up. The risk with full-service is that one channel quietly subsidises weak work in another, which is why per-channel reporting matters more than the label on the contract.
How do you compare several agencies side by side?
Run every proposal through the same five gates and the table’s questions, get each answer in writing, and compare the fee, pass-through and notice lines column by column. Then ask each agency for one track record in the sentence shape above: client, metric, window, system of record. A proposal that cannot fill in one of the five gates, or that fails the track-record test, drops out before you ever have to compare prices.
Is a nearby agency better than a national one?
Location matters far less than accountability. What a nearby agency genuinely offers is easier face-to-face contact and familiarity with your market, which helps for local search and community-driven businesses. What it does not automatically offer is better work. Judge both against the same five gates, and treat proximity as a tiebreaker rather than as a criterion in its own right.
What should I own at the end of the relationship?
Everything. Your domain, your hosting, your website, your advertising accounts, your analytics property, your business profile and every piece of content produced for you. The agency should hold access, not ownership. Confirm this in writing before you start, because changing the owner on an advertising account after a relationship has soured is slow, and rebuilding a lost analytics history is simply impossible.
What does a reasonable notice period look like?
Thirty days is normal and fair. An initial term is reasonable where a channel needs time before its results can be read, or where setup work is front-loaded, provided what you receive in that term is itemised. What is not reasonable is an automatically renewing term, a notice period that binds only one side, or a clause withholding account access or completed work until a final invoice clears.
Google’s guidance on hiring search help, including the warning about guaranteed first place, the questions a good supplier should ask about your business and the advice to check business references, is published at Google Search Central. The C4 Fire and Security figures are from Google Search Console, June 2026 compared with July 2026, re-checked on 16 September 2026. Rates are from the KM Digital Solutions rate card dated 22 April 2026. All accessed on 16 September 2026.