Most "how to choose a marketing agency" articles treat this like a shopping decision. Look for experience. Ask about their process. Check their reviews.
That advice is useless because every agency in Edmonton already knows how to pass those tests. They'll show you case studies, quote you a clean process, and point to five-star reviews from clients who can't actually tell if the work is any good.
The real question isn't who looks good in a sales meeting. It's this: when something breaks in your marketing — your tracking fails on a Tuesday, your ad budget overspends by 40% on a Saturday, a competitor launches a price drop on a Wednesday — will your agency know before you do?
Most won't. Not because they don't care, but because they aren't watching. They'll look at your account when it's time to write the monthly report. By then the month is over.
After 15+ years running Choice OMG and auditing the ad accounts, analytics setups, and technical SEO work of agencies across Western Canada, we've seen the same patterns repeat. Below are the seven red flags that reliably predict a bad engagement — and what competent, systems-driven work looks like instead.
The Short Version
If you don't have time to read the whole article, here's the compressed version of what separates good Edmonton agencies from bad ones:
- The best agencies monitor. The worst agencies report. Problems get caught in hours, not at the end of the month.
- Your tracking either works or it doesn't. If the agency can't show you your conversion setup live, on a screen share, in five minutes — it probably doesn't work.
- Flat fees beat percentage-of-spend. Agencies paid a cut of your ad budget are structurally incentivized to grow your spend, not your results.
- The person in your meeting should be the person in your account. If every technical question gets "I'll check with the team," you're paying for a middleman.
- Vanity metrics mean the business numbers aren't there. Reports that lead with impressions and rankings are hiding the leads and revenue that didn't show up.
The rest of this article explains why, with specific red flags and what to look for instead.
Red Flag #1: They Can't Explain What They're Tracking (Or There's Nothing To Track)
The single most common failure we see when a business comes to us from a previous agency: there is no functioning measurement setup.
Not "the analytics could be better." Not "the attribution is imperfect." We mean:
- GA4 installed but with no conversion events configured
- Google Ads running with no conversion import from GA4, or conversions double-counted across platforms
- Form submissions that don't fire any event at all
- Phone calls that are the primary lead source, with zero call tracking in place
- Enhanced conversions disabled, meaning the ad platform is flying blind on match rates
If your agency can't tell you — in one sentence — exactly how a lead is attributed from first click to qualified inquiry, they are guessing. Every report they send you is fiction dressed up as data.
What to look for instead: Ask them to walk you through your conversion setup on a screen share. A competent agency can show you the events firing in GA4 DebugView, the conversion actions in Google Ads, and the call tracking integration within five minutes. If they need to "get back to you," the answer is that nobody on the team actually knows.
At Choice OMG, tracking health is one of the things our automated systems verify daily across every client site — because a tracking setup that worked when it was built is not the same as a tracking setup that still works today. We've written about how conversion tracking breaks silently if nothing is watching for the drift.
Red Flag #2: Nobody Is Watching Your Ad Spend Between Reports
Here is a scenario we have cleaned up more than once: a Google Ads account is set to a $5,000 monthly budget. On day 22 of the month, spend is already at $6,800. The agency notices during the monthly review on day 5 of the following month — eleven days after the overspend started.
The agency apologizes, credits some of the management fee, and promises it won't happen again. But the overspend itself is gone. That money was spent on clicks that weren't planned for and weren't optimized toward.
This isn't rare. It's the default when nobody has an automated check running against the account.
Most agencies review your ad spend once a month. We verify it every 30 minutes. If spend crosses 110% of monthly budget across any of the Google Ads accounts we manage, an alert fires and someone is looking at the account within the hour — not within the next reporting cycle.
What to look for instead: Ask the agency what their automated alerting looks like on your ad spend. The answer should involve a specific frequency ("we check every X") and a specific threshold ("the alert fires when spend exceeds Y"). If the answer is that they "keep an eye on it" or "review it weekly," you are buying weekly attention for a system that can go wrong by the hour.
Red Flag #3: The Google Ads Account Looks Like It Was Set Up Once and Forgotten
We audit Edmonton Google Ads accounts regularly, and the pattern is so consistent it's almost a signature:
- Broad match keywords running without a meaningful negative keyword list
- Search terms report showing the account paying for clicks on wildly irrelevant queries (we've seen law firms paying for "free legal advice" clicks for months)
- No negative keyword list shared at the account level
- Ad schedules that don't match when the business actually converts
- Location targeting set to "presence or interest" instead of "presence," which in Edmonton means you're paying for clicks from people searching about Edmonton from anywhere in the world
- Single ad groups containing 40+ keywords with one generic ad
This isn't a "Google Ads is hard" problem. It's a "nobody is logging into this account" problem.
What to look for instead: Ask to see the search terms report from the last 30 days and the negative keyword list. An account under active management has a negative keyword list that grows weekly. An abandoned account has the defaults from the day it was built.
Notice the pattern so far? Broken tracking. Unwatched spend. Dormant ad accounts. These aren't three different problems — they're three symptoms of the same one. We'll name it explicitly later in the article. First, four more red flags that all trace back to the same root cause.
Red Flag #4: Locked-In Contracts and Percentage-Of-Spend Billing
Two of the oldest agency-protection mechanisms in the industry are still going strong: the 12-month lock-in contract, and the percentage-of-spend fee structure.
The lock-in contract exists for exactly one reason: to make it expensive to leave when the work isn't working. If we lock the client in for a year, we don't have to be good — we just have to be good enough that leaving feels like more work than staying.
The percentage-of-spend model is worse. It pays the agency more when you spend more. The incentive is misaligned from the first month. An agency earning 15% of ad spend has a structural reason to push you toward a $10,000 budget when a $4,000 budget would have delivered the same result. They aren't necessarily being dishonest. They are responding rationally to how they get paid.
What to look for instead: Flat monthly fees. Month-to-month or clearly-defined performance exit clauses. An agency whose revenue goes up when your results go up, not when your spend goes up. Choice OMG has operated on flat-fee, no-ad-spend-percentage engagements since 2010, because the alternative structures reward the wrong behaviour. We wrote up the incentive math in more detail in Why We Don't Charge a Percentage of Ad Spend.
Red Flag #5: Your Account Manager Can't Answer Technical Questions
This is the tell that separates agencies that do technical work from agencies that resell technical work.
Ask your account manager:
- "Can you walk me through what schema markup is on our homepage right now?"
- "What's our Core Web Vitals score and what's causing the LCP issue?"
- "Why did organic traffic drop 14% in October — was that a core update or a site change?"
- "What negative keywords did you add last month?"
If the answer is always "let me check with the team and get back to you," you are paying account-management markup on work being done by someone who is not in the meeting. That's fine if the work is good. It's a disaster if the account manager can't evaluate whether the work is good, because they become a telephone game between you and whoever is actually touching the account.
What to look for instead: An agency small enough that the person on your call is also the person in your account. Choice OMG is built this way deliberately — a 10-person specialist team instead of a 200-person generalist shop. You don't need your account manager to be a developer, but they need to be technically literate enough to open DevTools, pull up GA4, or log into Google Ads and answer the question in real time.
Red Flag #6: They Report on Vanity Metrics Instead of Business Outcomes
Impressions are up 40%. Click-through rate improved. You're ranking #3 for a keyword.
None of these things are business outcomes. They are intermediate metrics that might correlate with business outcomes, if the rest of the funnel is working. Agencies lean on them when the business outcomes aren't there to report.
The honest report answers one question: did the marketing spend produce more qualified leads or revenue than it cost?
Everything else is context that helps explain the answer. If your monthly report leads with impressions and rankings, and you have to dig to find lead volume or revenue, the agency is managing your perception, not your pipeline.
What to look for instead: Reports that lead with leads, qualified leads, pipeline value, or revenue — whichever is measurable in your business — and use the intermediate metrics (traffic, rankings, CTR) to explain why the business number moved. For high-value procedure practices like dental implants or elective medical, where a single converted lead can be worth $20,000 or more, reporting that doesn't close the loop to booked consultations is essentially decorative. See our write-up on high-value procedure campaigns for the full argument on lead-quality reporting.
Red Flag #7: No Real Technical SEO Work — Just "Content and Links"
There's a whole tier of agencies whose entire SEO offering is:
- Write a blog post per month
- Buy some backlinks from a vendor
- Install Yoast
That's not SEO. That's content marketing with a plugin.
Real technical SEO in 2026 includes:
- Schema markup beyond what Yoast generates out of the box — LocalBusiness with proper geo data, Service schema for each core offering, FAQ schema on relevant pages, AggregateRating where legitimately applicable
- Core Web Vitals work that actually moves the numbers, not just a plugin that claims to
- Daily rank tracking at scale — not monthly spot-checks on five keywords, but position tracking across the full keyword set that actually reflects the business (we track 1,000+ keyword positions daily across our client base)
- Daily automated site health checks — fatal errors, broken CSS, broken images, JavaScript crashes, failed network requests, cache misconfiguration, navigation accessibility, visual regressions. A WordPress update on Tuesday can silently break your homepage, and you won't know until someone complains
- Proper canonical and hreflang setup if applicable
- Internal linking structure built around topic clusters, not just "related posts" widgets
- AI search visibility tracking across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot — where an increasing share of buyer research is happening
If your agency's SEO work is invisible to you — you never see code changes, schema updates, or technical audits — it's because there isn't any happening. Content alone has not been a complete SEO strategy since approximately 2018.
What to look for instead: Ask to see the last three technical changes they made to your site. Real answers sound like "we added Service schema to the five core service pages last week, here's the validator output, and here's the custom mu-plugin that generates it." Vague answers sound like "we've been optimizing the site." Related: We Track Your Business Across 10 AI Platforms.
The Common Thread: Monitoring vs. Reporting
Go back and re-read the seven red flags. They're all the same problem wearing different clothes.
Broken tracking, overspent budgets, abandoned ad accounts, vanity metric reports, invisible SEO work — each of these is a symptom of an agency that looks at your account when it's time to write the report. By the time a monthly report shows a problem, the month is already over. You've already lost the money, missed the leads, or handed the market to a competitor who was paying closer attention.
Our approach is structurally different. Here's the contrast, stated plainly:
- Most agencies check your Google Ads account once a month. We check every 30 minutes.
- Most agencies look at your website when something's obviously broken. We run automated health checks every morning across eight failure categories.
- Most agencies track a handful of rankings quarterly. We track 1,000+ keyword positions daily.
- Most agencies wait for you to notice a problem. We monitor 60,000+ data points a day so we see it first.
Other agencies will show you a dashboard. We built the system that feeds the dashboard, catches problems before they show up on a dashboard, and alerts the team the moment something breaks. That's the difference between monitoring and reporting, and it's the thing no other agency at this size and price point can match.
Real Examples
A US-based dental practice focused on implant surgery. When they came to us, their Google Ads were running but the conversion tracking treated any contact-page view as a conversion — not actual consultation requests. The ad platform was optimizing for people who looked at the contact page, not people who booked consultations. Nobody was tracking phone calls, and phone was how most new patients actually inquired.
We rebuilt the measurement layer from the ground up: proper GA4 events, real conversion imports into Google Ads, dynamic call tracking, enhanced conversions. We reworked the negative keyword strategy against 12 months of search term data, added Service and FAQ schema across the procedure pages, and set up daily automated checks so tracking drift would surface immediately.
Over the following year, monthly implant surgery revenue moved from roughly $300,000 to $800,000. We did not invent a new channel or multiply the ad budget. We fixed the instrumentation, plugged the leaks, and made sure nothing silently broke without someone on our team knowing about it within the hour.
A multi-location optometry group in Alberta. The business operated three clinics and wanted to grow, but their previous agency's reporting made it nearly impossible to tell which locations, services, and campaigns were actually driving new patient bookings. They were spending on Google Ads across all three locations without any attribution granularity.
We restructured the accounts for per-location attribution, built daily monitoring into every campaign, implemented call tracking with location-level number routing, and set up reporting that tied ad spend to booked eye exams at each specific clinic. Over the next two years, they expanded from three clinics to six while reducing their overall patient acquisition cost by roughly 30%.
Again — no magic. The growth came from being able to see what was working at which location, and reallocating in weeks instead of quarters. We've written up the playbook for this kind of expansion in Scaling Multi-Location Healthcare.
What Actually Matters
If you read this article looking for a list of what to look for in an Edmonton agency, here's the short version:
Infrastructure you can verify. Is someone — or some system — actually watching your campaigns between reports? How often? What triggers an alert?
Measurement you can trust. Is the conversion setup correct? Do the reports lead with business outcomes, not vanity metrics?
Incentive alignment. Flat fees instead of percentage-of-spend. Month-to-month or clear performance terms instead of lock-in.
Specialists, not middlemen. The person in your meeting should be able to answer technical questions about your account without "checking with the team."
None of this is about whether an agency is cheap or expensive. It's about whether the spend is being managed by people and systems that are actually watching.
A note on why I think this framing matters. I spent 22 years in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve, 18 of those as an instructor teaching disciplines that ranged from psychological operations to cyber. Those two fields map almost perfectly onto the two halves of modern digital marketing. Psyops is the study of how audiences form beliefs and take action — the persuasion layer. Cyber is the infrastructure layer, the systems and signals and verification. Most agencies are built around one half or the other: marketers who don't really understand the systems, or developers who don't really understand persuasion. The work only holds up when both halves are taken seriously, and when someone on the team is watching both of them every day.
Before You Sign Anything
A short checklist you can use in your next agency conversation:
- Ask them to screen-share your GA4 and walk you through the conversion events that are firing.
- Ask how frequently your ad spend is monitored automatically, and at what threshold an alert fires.
- Ask to see the last 30 days of search terms from your Google Ads account, and the account-level negative keyword list.
- Ask what schema markup exists on your site right now, and request the validator output.
- Ask whether the contract is flat-fee or percentage-of-spend, and whether it's month-to-month.
- Ask the account manager to answer one technical question about your account without "checking with the team."
- Ask what their last three technical changes to your site were, specifically.
If an agency passes all seven, they're worth a serious conversation. If they fail three or more, you already have your answer.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a digital marketing agency in Edmonton cost?
Honest answer: it varies more by what you're buying than by who you're buying it from. A freelancer running your Google Ads part-time costs less than a specialist team with automated monitoring, daily site health checks, and a data warehouse tracking your keyword positions — but you're also buying a fundamentally different product. The more useful question is what a missed month costs you. If your tracking breaks in week one and nobody notices until the monthly report in week five, that's a full month of ad spend optimized against bad data. That's almost always more expensive than the management fee difference between a cheap option and a competent one.
Is it better to hire a local Edmonton agency or go remote?
It depends on the channel. For Google Ads, technical SEO, and web optimization, geography is largely irrelevant — the work is remote-native and the results don't care where the account manager's desk is. Local matters more when the channel involves on-the-ground knowledge: local media buying, in-person photo or video production, networking with Edmonton-specific business communities. For most SMBs, the real question isn't local vs. remote. It's whether the people running your account actually understand the technical work, regardless of where they're based.
How long before I see results from SEO or Google Ads?
Google Ads: you'll see traffic and leads within the first week. You'll see whether the campaigns are profitable after roughly 60–90 days, because that's how long it takes to collect enough conversion data to optimize intelligently. Any agency that promises profitability in week one is guessing.
SEO: typically 4–6 months for meaningful organic traffic movement on a site that already has some authority, and 9–12 months on a newer site. Anyone promising first-page rankings in 30 days is either targeting keywords nobody searches, or lying.
How do I know if my current agency is actually doing the work?
Three questions will answer it. First, ask them to screen-share your Google Ads search terms report and show you the negative keywords they've added in the last 30 days. Second, ask them what schema markup is currently on your homepage. Third, ask what changed in your GA4 configuration since they took over the account. An agency doing the work can answer all three in the call. An agency collecting a retainer without doing the work can't.
What should I do if I think my current agency is underperforming?
Don't cancel first — audit first. Get an independent review of your tracking setup, your Google Ads account health, and your technical SEO. You need to know whether the problem is the agency's execution, the original setup they inherited, or a strategy mismatch. Cancelling a mediocre agency and hiring another one without understanding the underlying issues usually produces the same result twelve months later.
Before You Keep Paying Your Current Agency Another Month
If you read this article and recognized your current setup in more than a couple of the red flags, you have three options: hope it sorts itself out, start a painful vendor-switch process, or get a straight second opinion first.
We offer a no-obligation audit covering the things this article actually measures — your GA4 and conversion tracking, Google Ads account health, technical SEO and schema markup, and whether anything is being monitored between reports. You get a written findings document. We tell you what's working, what isn't, and what would actually move the number. If the answer is "your current agency is doing fine, stay where you are" — we'll tell you that too.
For related reading, see our pieces on Why We Don't Charge a Percentage of Ad Spend, How We Monitor 60,000 Data Points a Day, and Conversion Tracking Breaks Silently. To go deeper on what we actually do, see our Edmonton Google Ads practice and SEO services.