What should I look for in selecting a digital ad agency?

I've had the luxury of working at 3 amazing, prominent digital agencies throughout my career, and the Merkava team members are all ex-agency as well. I cut my teeth serving Mom and Pop HVAC companies, moved on to Franchised SMBs, then Enterprise and international clients. Throughout it all I've been carefully observing what works well, what could use improvement, and how it can be improved (and scaled). Here are the hallmarks of a good digital agency (spoiler: there's lots of overlap with our golden rules).

1. Results-focused. Anyone can talk for hours about ideas, branding, click funnels, being a "guru," or theory of advertising. Getting actual results in the form of leads that turn into revenue needs to be the prime focus of the agency.
2. Transparent: The agency should be direct and honest with their client. Sometimes that means gently shooting down an idea that won't work well, or being honest about a campaign that spent $500 and only returned one lead. See our related question on "what metrics should my agency be reporting to me?"
3. Proactive: The agency should actively be guiding the client, ideally based on data from past similar clients or campaigns. Actively exchanging ideas is great, but it's on the agency to be making suggestions around things like ad copy refreshes, changing up targeting, checking in, and so forth.
4. Tenacious: Sometimes an idea doesn't work, or a campaign performs poorly. A good agency will call out the poor performance, examine the data, and come up with a new strategy to try again (or suggest to shift budget elsewhere).
5. Responsive: Waiting 2+ days for a response to an e-mail is not OK. At a minimum, a good agency will respond to a customer inquiry within the same business day noting when they expect the task to be complete.
6. Curious: Always Be A/B Testing. Landing pages, ad copy, promotions, and image/video creative should all be continually tested to boost conversion rate and lower cost per lead. Good, and even great, should never be enough. You can always get your conversion rate a little higher.

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