Before founding Northbound, Daniel Climans spent years on your side of the table: hiring agencies, managing them, and firing a few. This guide is everything that experience taught about telling the difference between agencies that drive growth and agencies that complete tasks — written for the person signing the contract.

Start With the Uncomfortable Question

Before evaluating anyone, answer this honestly: do you need execution, or do you need leadership? If nobody senior in your business owns marketing strategy, hiring an execution agency hands the steering wheel to a vendor whose incentive is to sell you more of what they do. Fix ownership first — internally or through fractional leadership — and every vendor decision afterward gets easier.

Five Signals of a Strong Agency

• They ask about your business before their services. Revenue model, margins, sales cycle, capacity. An agency that starts with a services menu is selling inventory, not outcomes.
• They define success numerically, up front. Good partners propose KPIs and timelines before you ask, and put them in the agreement.
• They tell you something you don’t want to hear. A candid “your budget is too small for that channel” or “your website will waste this spend” in the sales process predicts honesty after the invoice starts.
• Their reporting samples talk about money. Ask for a (redacted) sample report. If it leads with impressions and activity, that’s what you’ll be buying.
• Senior people stay involved. Ask directly: who works on our account in month four? The seniority gap between the pitch team and the delivery team is the oldest trick in the industry.

Five Red Flags

• Guaranteed rankings or “#1 on Google” promises. Nobody controls Google. This pitch reliably marks either naivety or dishonesty.
• Proprietary secret methods. Good marketing survives explanation. Secrecy usually hides either nothing special or something risky.
• Long contracts with no performance definitions. Commitment without defined success metrics transfers all the risk to you.
• They own your accounts. Your ad accounts, analytics, and website must live in your name. Agencies that hold them hostage are planning for the breakup.
• Every question gets a yes. Real experts have opinions and decline work outside their strengths. Universal agreement means the sales team is still talking.

Questions That Cut Through the Pitch

• “Walk me through a client you lost and why.” (Honesty test.)
• “What would you need from us to succeed?” (Good agencies have requirements, not just deliverables.)
• “How will we know in 90 days whether this is working?” (Forces a measurable definition of early success.)
• “What won’t you do, even if we ask?” (Reveals standards.)

The Model That’s Often Better Than “Pick an Agency”

The businesses that get the most from agencies share one trait: someone experienced on the client side directs the work. That’s the model Northbound operates — strategy and leadership on your side of the table, with execution carried by accountable specialists under one plan and one standard of quality.

Choosing between agencies right now? Book a growth consultation — we’ll give you an honest read on the proposals in front of you, even if the answer is that one of them is exactly right.

Most Google Ads accounts leak money in the same dozen places. Some leaks are small and chronic; some quietly consume a third of the budget. Here’s the checklist we use when auditing an account for the first time — work through it and you’ll know more about your account than most agencies report.

Measurement First (Because Everything Else Depends on It)

1. Conversion tracking accuracy

Are conversions double-counted (a form thank-you page firing alongside a button click event)? Are calls tracked at all? Is anything counting page views as conversions? Broken measurement makes every downstream optimization wrong, which is why we always fix tracking before touching bids.

2. Conversion actions worth money

Check what the account optimizes toward. Newsletter signups and “engaged visits” train Google to find you more of exactly that — instead of leads.

Structure and Targeting

3. Broad match sprawl

Review the actual search terms report. Broad match plus smart bidding can work, but unsupervised it buys queries that are embarrassingly unrelated to your business.

4. Negative keyword discipline

When was a negative keyword last added? Accounts without a living negative list pay a permanent irrelevance tax: jobs, free, DIY, competitors’ brand names you can’t convert.

5. Location settings

The default “presence or interest” setting happily spends your local budget on people in other countries reading about your city. Verify it.

6. Brand vs. non-brand separation

If brand terms are mixed into performance campaigns, your reported results are flattered by clicks you would have won for a fraction of the price — or organically.

Spending and Bidding

7. Budget allocation vs. results

Rank campaigns by cost per qualified conversion, then compare with budget split. It’s routine to find the worst performer spending the most, purely by inertia.

8. Bidding strategy fit

Target CPA with ten conversions a month starves itself; maximize clicks on a lead-gen account buys traffic, not customers. The strategy has to match the account’s data volume and goal.

9. Search partners and Display expansion

Check where ads actually served. These checkbox defaults frequently consume budget at dramatically worse conversion rates.

The Part After the Click

10. Landing page message match

Does the page continue the exact promise of the ad, or dump visitors on a generic homepage? Message mismatch is the most common conversion killer in paid search — and a core reason we pair ads with CRO.

11. Mobile experience

Most local and many B2B clicks are mobile. Slow load, tiny tap targets, and forms that fight autofill silently burn spend.

12. Ad copy and offer testing

Look at when ad copy last changed. Accounts that haven’t tested an offer in a year aren’t being managed; they’re being billed.

What to Do With the Findings

Score each item: fine, needs work, or on fire. Fix measurement first, stop the worst leaks second, and only then think about scaling spend — scaling a leaky account just buys bigger leaks.

Want the audit done for you, with the findings priced in dollars of wasted spend? That’s the standard first step of our Google Ads Strategy & Management service. Book a growth consultation and we’ll take a look.

Somewhere between “the founder runs marketing off the side of their desk” and “we hired a $250,000 CMO” sits the option most growing businesses don’t know they have: fractional marketing leadership. Here’s what a fractional CMO actually does, what they don’t, and how to know when it’s the right move.

What a Fractional CMO Actually Does

A fractional CMO is an experienced marketing executive who leads your marketing function part-time, typically a set number of days per month. The word that matters in that sentence is leads. This isn’t a consultant who hands you a deck, and it isn’t a freelancer who executes tasks. It’s someone who takes ownership of marketing outcomes.

In practice, that means:

• Setting strategy: deciding where to play, what to spend, and what to expect back, documented and defended to leadership.
• Leading the team: giving internal marketers direction, standards, and priorities, and identifying gaps worth hiring for.
• Managing vendors: holding agencies and freelancers accountable to outcomes, not activity reports.
• Owning the numbers: reporting marketing performance to leadership in revenue terms, and adjusting course when the data says so.

What a Fractional CMO Is Not

It’s worth being direct about the boundaries. A fractional CMO is not a cheaper way to get a full-time executive’s hours, and not a hands-on specialist who will personally rebuild your ad campaigns at midnight. Execution capacity comes from your team or from the specialists the CMO directs; the fractional CMO ensures that capacity works on the right things, to the right standard.

The Economics: Why This Model Exists

A full-time CMO in Canada typically costs $200,000 to $350,000 per year with benefits and equity. Most businesses under $20M in revenue can’t justify that, but they suffer daily from its absence: budgets allocated by instinct, agencies unmanaged, channels working in silos.

Fractional leadership prices that judgment at a fraction of the cost, because you’re buying decision quality, not hours. The decisions a seasoned executive makes in two days a month routinely outweigh what an unguided team produces in thirty.

Five Signs It’s Time

• Marketing spend has grown past the point where “we’ll see how it goes” is an acceptable strategy.
• Work is getting produced, but nobody senior is deciding what work matters.
• Every vendor reports success while pipeline stays flat.
• You’re about to make a big marketing bet (a rebrand, a new market, a serious budget increase) and want experienced judgment before the money moves.
• You know you’ll need a full-time CMO eventually, but not yet, and not at that price.

What to Look For

Ask any prospective fractional CMO three things. First, have they owned budgets and answered for results, or only advised from the sidelines? Second, how will they measure their own success in your business? If the answer isn’t specific and numeric, keep looking. Third, how do they handle execution: do they bring accountable partners, work with your vendors, or both?

The Bottom Line

Marketing rarely fails from lack of effort. It fails from lack of leadership. If your business has real revenue and real ambitions but marketing decisions are being made by whoever happens to be in the room, fractional leadership is usually the highest-leverage investment available.

That’s exactly the model Northbound was built around. Read more about our Fractional Marketing Leadership service, or book a growth consultation to talk through whether it fits your stage.