How do you compare marketing agency quotes apples to apples?
Normalize on deliverable counts, fee model, what is excluded, and who does the work.
Convert every quote to a cost per deliverable, pin down the fee model and its minimum, get the exclusions in writing, and find out who is actually doing the work. Four questions turn three incomparable proposals into a real comparison.
1. Normalize to cost per deliverable
A $2,500 SEO quote with no named output is not cheaper than a $1,850 quote for 6 optimized articles plus 3 hours of technical SEO. It is unmeasurable. Ask every agency how many articles, how many pages, how many posts, how many hours. Then divide. If they will not give you counts, you cannot compare them and you should not try.
2. Pin down the ad fee model and the minimum
Ad management is usually a percentage of spend, a flat fee, or a percentage with a floor. Each behaves differently at your spend level. LevelUp charges 10% of spend with a $1,500 per month minimum, which means the fee is flat until spend passes $15,000 a month and scales after that. Run your own number through whatever model each agency quotes, at your real budget, and compare the actual dollars.
3. Get the exclusions in writing
The invoice surprise almost always comes from an exclusion nobody wrote down. Ask directly: is ad spend included or separate, who pays for software and licenses, how much video is included and what happens past that count, what happens when a request falls outside scope. See what a LevelUp retainer excludes as a model for what you should be able to get in writing.
4. Ask who does the work, and who owns the accounts
- Who is on the account day to day, and did you meet them in the sale?
- Which disciplines are done in house and which are white labeled out?
- Do you own the ad accounts, the analytics property, the CRM and the content, or does the agency?
- What happens to all of it if you leave?
Account ownership is the one that quietly matters most. If the agency owns the Google Ads account, leaving means starting over with no history.
Related: How to choose the right digital marketing agency, LevelUp Digital vs other HubSpot partners, Do you charge a fee on top of ad spend?, LevelUp rate card