How do I compare two agency proposals?

List exactly what each proposal includes: number of campaigns or pages, hours of work, specific tasks performed each month, and anything explicitly excluded. Two proposals with a similar monthly price can represent very different amounts of actual work once you line up what each one promises to deliver.

Pay close attention to how each proposal handles ad spend, if the work involves Google Ads or another paid channel. One proposal might quote a management fee separate from spend, while another bundles spend into a single number, which makes the two impossible to compare directly until you separate them yourself.

Check the starting point too. If one agency proposes building from scratch and the other proposes working inside your existing accounts, that difference affects both the price and the timeline, and it is easy to miss if you are only scanning the total at the bottom of the page.

Read both proposals for language about who owns the Google Ads account, the website, the content, and the Google Business Profile once the work is delivered. A proposal that states clearly you retain ownership throughout and after the engagement is offering something meaningfully different from one that is silent on the question, even if their prices are identical.

If either proposal is vague on ownership, ask directly rather than assuming the answer favors you. A short, clear response, in writing, from each agency gives you a real point of comparison that a glossy proposal document alone will not show.

This matters most for work that produces something long lasting, like a website or an ad account with growing history, since the ownership terms determine how easily you could leave either agency later if the relationship does not work out.

Look at the notice period, the minimum term, and any early termination fee in both proposals. A slightly higher priced proposal with a 30 day notice period and no minimum term may be a better overall deal than a cheaper one that locks you in for 12 months with a steep exit fee.

Check what each proposal says about reporting: what you receive, how often, and whether you get direct access to the underlying account data or only a summary document. A proposal promising more frequent, more transparent reporting is worth something, even if it is not stated as a dollar value anywhere on the page.

If one proposal includes a guarantee, such as a trial period or a money back window, and the other does not, factor that into your comparison directly, since it changes how much risk you are actually taking by choosing one agency over the other.

Once you have compared deliverables, ownership, and terms side by side, weigh price last, not first. The proposal with the lowest number is not automatically the better deal if it includes less work, is silent on ownership, or locks you into a longer term with a bigger exit cost.

If you are still unsure after comparing on paper, get on a short call with each agency and ask the same three or four questions of both. How they answer, and how quickly, often tells you as much about how they will operate as the written proposal does.

Ask each agency for a reference or an example of similar work they have done, if you have not already, since a proposal that reads well on paper should also be backed by real, checkable experience doing that specific kind of work.