Hiring a digital marketing agency is one of those decisions where the pitch and the product can look nothing alike. Here is the short answer. Pick a Toronto digital marketing agency that ties every channel back to tracked leads, hands you ownership of the ad accounts and analytics it touches, and explains the work in language you could repeat to your accountant. One team covering your website, your search visibility and your ads usually beats juggling three vendors, because your site is where every campaign either converts or leaks.
The rest of this guide is the list of questions we would ask if we were sitting on your side of the table in Toronto, plus the answers that should make you close the folder.
What does a digital marketing agency actually do every month?
A digital marketing agency earns its retainer in four places: the website that converts, the channels that send people to it, the local signals that put you on the map, and the reporting that proves any of it produced work. Everything else is decoration.
On a typical Toronto account that looks like conversion fixes to two or three key pages, search work aimed at buyer intent terms, Google Ads and Meta Ads managed against cost per lead instead of clicks, Google Business Profile upkeep, an email sequence for people who enquired and went quiet, and one monthly report a human actually wrote. GA4 sits underneath all of it, counting form fills and calls so every channel can be compared honestly.
Two things stay off that list: brand awareness with no number attached, and monthly decks of impressions. If a proposal cannot name the pages and campaigns it will touch in month one, you are buying a subscription.
How many Canadian businesses actually outsource their marketing?
Fewer than most owners assume, which is why good referrals are hard to come by. Statistics Canada asked businesses across the country what they had contracted out in the previous twelve months. In its analysis of businesses outsourcing work in Canada, first quarter of 2025, sales and marketing support came in at 10.1 per cent of all businesses, well behind accounting and legal work at 36.5 per cent, general labour at 20.0 per cent, website or software development at 17.0 per cent, and IT support at 14.4 per cent.
What Canadian businesses contract out, share of all businesses
Accounting, law or other professional services 36.5%
General labour, repairs, cleaning 20.0%
Website or software development 17.0%
Information technology support 14.4%
Sales and marketing support 10.1%
The gap widens as businesses get smaller. Among businesses with 1 to 4 employees, only 7.0 per cent outsourced sales and marketing support, against 14.7 per cent of those with 20 to 99 employees. Over half of Canadian businesses, 52.2 per cent, contracted out something in the year, so the habit exists. Marketing is simply the piece owners hold onto longest.
That has a practical consequence for you. When you go looking for a digital marketing agency, you have fewer peers who have done it recently and fewer honest war stories to borrow. The questions below are the substitute.
11 questions to ask a digital marketing agency before you sign
Ask all eleven in one call, of every digital marketing agency on your shortlist. It takes about half an hour and it tells you more than any portfolio page will. Bring a few things with you so the answers can be specific.
What to bring to the first meeting
â–ª Your last three months of enquiries, counted the way you count them, including phone calls.
â–ª Your top five services ranked by margin, which is usually a different order than by volume.
â–ª Login access, or at least the account owner names, for your website, GA4, Google Ads and Meta Ads.
â–ª Your busy and slow months, so nobody promises growth in a season you cannot service.
â–ª One sentence defining a good lead for your business, written down before the call.
Five things that turn a vague sales call into a real scoping conversation.1. Which channel would you start with, and why that one?
A good answer names one channel and gives a reason tied to your situation, like a site that already gets impressions and needs conversion work, or a service with urgent demand that suits paid search. An answer that starts everything at once is a budget spread thin enough to prove nothing.
2. What exactly happens in the first 60 days?
You want page names and campaign names. A real answer sounds like: rebuild these three service pages, get lead events firing in GA4, launch one search campaign on your two highest margin services, clean up the Business Profile categories. If the reply arrives as phases labelled discovery and alignment, ask which pages each phase touches and by when.
3. How do you define a lead, and where does it get counted?
Agree on this before money moves. Form fills, tracked phone calls, booked estimates: pick the events that count and confirm who is responsible for making them fire. Any digital marketing agency that reports traffic without a lead number attached has chosen the metric it cannot be judged on.
4. Do I own the ad accounts, the analytics and the creative?
Google Ads, Meta Ads, GA4, Search Console, your Google Business Profile and the website itself should all sit in accounts registered to you, with the agency added as a user. Ask the same about the ads, the copy and the photography. If anything lives in an agency owned container, that is a no.
5. What is the total monthly number, including ad spend and tools?
Management fee, media spend, software, call tracking, stock or photography. Owners get surprised by the second and third lines far more often than the first. Ask for one page with every recurring cost on it.
6. Who writes the copy, and who touches my website?
The person who wins your trust on the call is often not the person doing the work. Ask who writes, who edits your site, who runs the ad accounts, and who you email when a page breaks on a Friday. Our own work is founder led, so the person on the call is the person in the account, and that is fair to demand from anyone.
7. How will you use my Google Business Profile?
For a local business this is frequently the highest return asset in the whole plan and the one most proposals skip. You want categories, services, photos, questions and reviews handled on a schedule. Our guide on how to optimize your Google Business Profile covers what good looks like.
8. What happens to my email list, and who carries the risk?
Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation reaches the business a message is sent on behalf of, so an agency mistake lands on your desk. The CRTC lists four main requirements under CASL, and the first one governs every commercial email and text you send: prior consent from the recipient, identification and contact information in the message, and a working unsubscribe mechanism. The CRTC also states that violations may draw monetary penalties, and that directors of corporations who authorised or participated in them may be held liable. Ask how consent is recorded, where the list lives, and who exports it when the engagement ends.
9. How do you report, and how often will I hear from you?
Monthly is normal. What matters is whether the report opens with leads and closes with next month’s plan, and whether a person is on a call to walk you through it. Automated dashboards with no commentary are a warning sign about how much attention the account gets.
10. What happens in month seven if it has not worked?
Every account has a bad quarter. You are listening for a diagnosis process: what gets reviewed, what gets changed, what evidence would make them recommend stopping a channel. An agency that has never paused its own tactic has either been lucky or has never checked.
11. What will you refuse to do?
Our favourite question, because it is the hardest to fake. Bought links, spun content, fake reviews, keyword stuffed location pages, engagement pods: a competent digital marketing agency keeps a list of things it will not touch and can explain each risk in a sentence. No list means no judgement.
Flagging the questions on the proposal before the meeting is the cheapest hour you will spend on this decision.
Agency, freelancer, or your first marketing hire?
Pick by the shape of the work. A freelancer suits one clear job with a known end. A digital marketing agency suits several channels that have to be coordinated. An employee suits a business with enough volume to keep one person busy and a manager who can direct them.
| Freelancer | Agency | In house hire |
|---|
| Best fit | One defined job with an end date | Several channels that feed each other | Steady volume and someone to manage it |
| You get | Deep skill in one craft | A stack of skills and shared tooling | Full attention and product knowledge |
| Where it strains | Holidays, illness and scope creep | Junior staff on the account you never met | One person cannot cover every channel |
| Ask for | A written scope and a backup contact | The names of everyone touching the account | A budget for tools and outside specialists |
Plenty of Toronto businesses end up with a blend, usually an employee who owns the customer relationship and an outside team handling the technical channels. That works well when the reporting line is clear and one party owns the lead number.
Red flags that should end the conversation
Guaranteed first place rankings are the loudest one, and a digital marketing agency offering them in Canada is carrying legal risk on your behalf. Under paragraph 74.01(1)(b) of the Competition Act, a performance claim has to be supported by an adequate and proper test carried out before the claim is made, and the Competition Bureau counts words and images on a website, and even the keywords used in online advertising campaigns, as claims. For a corporation, a first violation can draw a penalty of up to the greater of $10 million and three times the benefit derived. Nobody can test their way to a promise about Google’s ranking system.
A pause with the pen still up is usually the right instinct. Read the exit clause twice before it comes down.The rest of the list is quieter.
- Ad spend bundled invisibly into the fee. You should always be able to see what Google and Meta received and what the agency received.
- Reporting that leads with reach or impressions. Those numbers rise on their own. Leads do not.
- A twelve month lock in with a thirty day scope. Long commitments are fine when the deliverables are equally specific.
- No named owner for your accounts. If nobody can tell you whose email the Google Ads account is registered to, find out before you sign.
- Copy written for a keyword instead of a customer. Read one sample out loud. You will know inside a paragraph.
None of these are exotic. They are the shapes a quiet, unproductive quarter takes when nobody is watching closely.
One team or several specialists?
Splitting the work across a web shop, a search firm and a separate digital marketing agency sounds sensible and usually costs you in the seams. The SEO team wants content the ads team never sees, the ads team sends traffic to a page the web team is redesigning, and when leads dip everyone points sideways. Your website sits under all of it, so whoever owns the site tends to own the outcome by default.
We run web design, search and ads as one engagement for that reason. It means a landing page for a Google Ads campaign gets built by the same people who know what the organic version of that page already ranks for, and the reporting arrives as one number instead of three. Our digital marketing service and our Toronto web design work sit in the same room, and our guide to choosing an SEO company in Toronto goes deeper on the search half.
Several specialists can absolutely work. It needs one person inside your business with enough time to coordinate them, and that person is usually you.
What should a Toronto digital marketing agency cost?
Enough of the market hides this that we publish ours. Our retainers are listed on our pricing page at $1,650, $3,650 and $6,650 per month with a three month minimum, and the difference between the tiers is volume: content produced, keywords tracked, links and citations built. Media spend for ads sits on top and goes straight to the platform.
Use that as a yardstick. The more useful question is what a number buys you each month, written out. A small retainer producing two thin blog posts costs more in the end than a larger one that fixes the four pages your buyers actually land on. Ask every digital marketing agency on your shortlist to convert its price into a monthly list of deliverables, then compare the lists.
If your budget only stretches to one thing this quarter, spend it where the money is closest. Our breakdown of Google Ads versus SEO for small businesses walks through that choice, and getting more leads from your website is often the cheapest first move of all.
Frequently asked questions
How do I choose a digital marketing agency in Toronto?
Shortlist three, ask each of them the eleven questions above, and compare the written deliverables instead of the headline prices. The one that names specific pages and campaigns, agrees on how leads will be counted, and tells you plainly what it will refuse to do is almost always the right pick. Trust the specificity.
What should a digital marketing agency include every month?
At minimum: conversion work on the pages that already get traffic, content or campaign work aimed at buyer intent, Google Business Profile upkeep if you serve a local market, and a report that opens with leads. Ad management should be quoted separately from the media spend so you can see both.
Should I hire a marketing agency or a freelancer?
Hire a freelancer for one defined job with an end date, such as a website build or a set of ad creatives. Hire an agency when several channels have to be coordinated and someone needs to own the whole number. If the work is steady and predictable enough to fill a full week, an employee is usually the cheaper answer.
How much does a digital marketing agency in Toronto charge?
Retainers vary widely across the city, which is why we publish ours at $1,650, $3,650 and $6,650 per month with a three month minimum. Whatever number you are quoted, ask for the monthly deliverables that come with it in writing, and confirm whether ad spend is included or billed on top.
How long before a digital marketing agency shows results?
Paid search can produce enquiries in the first fortnight if the offer and the landing page are sound. Search and content work usually shows ranking movement at two to three months and meaningful lead volume between four and eight. Anyone promising both inside thirty days is selling you a rankings screenshot.
If you want a straight read on where your marketing stands before you talk to anyone, we will look at your site, your analytics and your Business Profile and tell you what we would do first, whether or not you hire us. Call 647 292 5326 or book a strategy call, and we will walk you through what we find on an obligation free fifteen minute call.