What questions should a UK firm ask a digital agency?

Search for questions to ask a digital agency and you will be handed a list. Eight of them, or twenty-one. Almost every one of those lists is published by an agency, which is the first thing worth noticing about it.

The assumption underneath them is that the questions are the hard part. They are not. Any agency that has pitched a dozen times has heard all twenty-one and has a warm answer to each. A question you cannot check is not a test. It is a prompt for a rehearsed reply, delivered by someone who does this for a living to a managing partner who does it once every four years.

The five below are different, because each has something behind it that the agency does not control: its filed accounts, the advertising code it is bound by, the copyright position and a public UK register. You can check every answer after the meeting, on your own, for nothing.

The questions are not the hard part

Push any pitch question one rung further and the ground underneath it changes.

Who is actually going to do the work?

Ask for the names of the people who will do the daily work, then check the headcount against the filed accounts. The person who pitches is frequently not the person who delivers, and a studio of thirty on the website can be three people with subcontractors behind them. Neither is disqualifying. Being misled about it is.

This one is free to verify. Under section 411 of the Companies Act 2006 the notes to a company's annual accounts must disclose the average number of people it employed that year, and that applies to the smallest companies as well as the largest. Those accounts sit on the Companies House register and take two minutes to pull. A pitch describing a large team alongside accounts showing four employees is not necessarily lying, but it owes you an explanation of who the others are and who employs them.

The reference question sits in the same place. If an agency is using a testimonial in its marketing, the CAP Code already requires it to hold documentary evidence that the testimonial is genuine and to hold contact details for whoever gave it. Asking to speak to that client is not an unusual imposition. It is asking for something the agency is supposed to have on file.

What can this agency honestly promise?

A guarantee of position or lead volume is the single fastest disqualifier available to you. Google's own documentation for people hiring search help states that no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and tells you to be wary of suppliers who claim to, or who allege a special relationship with Google. You do not need to argue the technical point. You can hand the supplier the page.

What a competent agency commits to is the process rather than the outcome: a baseline recorded before work starts, defined deliverables in the first ninety days, a reporting rhythm, and a named person accountable for explaining a bad month. Harder to promise, far more useful to hold someone to.

Who owns what you pay them to make?

Paying for something does not make you its copyright owner. This is the question professional services firms are most often surprised by, and the one with the clearest answer in UK law. Section 11 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 provides that the author of a work is its first owner, and that an employer owns it only where the author made it in the course of employment. An agency you commission is not your employee. Absent a written assignment, it owns the design, the code, the copy and the images you paid for.

So do not ask “do we own the website”, because the answer will be yes and it will be given sincerely. Ask which clause assigns copyright to your firm, and when it takes effect. Ask the same about the accounts: the domain, the analytics property, the ad account and the content management login should be registered to your practice with the agency granted access, not the reverse. Recovering an asset from a supplier you are leaving is far harder than agreeing who holds it on the day you appoint them. Our guide to choosing a digital agency covers the wider comparison, but this clause is the one to read twice.

Who at the agency touches your client data?

If the agency will process personal data for you, it should already be on the public register of data protection fee payers. For an accountancy practice or a financial advice firm this is not a formality. Your client list is the asset, and a supplier building your CRM integration or running your email campaigns will handle it. The Information Commissioner's Office publishes a searchable register of organisations paying the data protection fee. An agency that cannot be found on it, or does not know whether it should be, has told you something useful about how it thinks.

The second half is the contract. Where a supplier processes personal data on your behalf, the controller and processor guidance sets out what that written contract must contain. Ask for the agency's standard version before you sign, not afterwards.

Regulated firms carry a further point no agency raises unprompted. Under COBS 4.2.1R, a firm must ensure a communication or financial promotion is fair, clear and not misleading. That obligation sits on the authorised firm. If the agency writes the landing page, the firm is still answerable for it, which makes sign-off routing part of the scope conversation rather than an afterthought.

When not to hire an agency yet

The five questions assume you are ready to appoint someone. Often the honest answer is that you are not, and no supplier will tell you so.

Hold off if nobody in the practice can approve work inside a week, because an agency stalled on approvals bills you for the wait. Hold off if you cannot say what a good outcome looks like in numbers you already track, or if you have not recorded a baseline, since without one you will be arguing about attribution in month four. One more case is worth naming: where the work is small and unlikely to recur, a freelancer is usually the better buy and we will say so.

Each of those is fixable in a fortnight. Fix it before briefing anyone. Our page for professional services firms sets out what we assess before recommending anyone, and how the assessment works explains what happens when we conclude no introduction should be made at all.