Your First 90 Days With a Marketing Agency: What to Expect

You signed the contract. The agency is excited. You're excited. Now what?

The first 90 days with a marketing agency are make-or-break. Set expectations wrong and you'll be frustrated by week 3. Set them right and you'll have a marketing engine humming by month 3. Here's exactly what should happen, week by week.

Days 1–14: Onboarding and discovery

The first two weeks are about getting the agency up to speed. This isn't wasted time — it's the foundation everything else builds on. Skip it and you'll pay for it later.

What the agency should do

• Run a kickoff call covering your business goals, target customers, competitive landscape, and past marketing efforts
• Audit your existing accounts — ad platforms, analytics, CRM, website
• Review what's been tried before and what the data says about it
• Set up tracking and attribution (this step gets skipped more than it should)
• Present a 90-day strategy with clear milestones and KPIs

What you should do

• Provide access to everything they need — fast. Every day of waiting is a day of lost momentum
• Share your brand guidelines, messaging docs, and any customer research you have
• Be honest about what's been tried and what failed. Agencies waste time rediscovering things you already know
• Align on the 2-3 metrics that matter most to your business

Days 15–30: Setup and first launches

This is when things start moving. The agency has done their homework and now they're building.

• Campaign structures go live (ad campaigns, content calendars, automation workflows)
• Landing pages get optimized or built for campaign-specific traffic
• Tracking is verified — conversions are firing, attribution is clean
• First ads start running, first content goes out
• You get your first weekly report

Don't panic at the early numbers. Week 2-3 data is noisy. Google's algorithm is learning. Content hasn't been indexed yet. The audience pixel is building. This is normal.

Days 31–60: Optimization mode

Now there's real data. This is where a good agency earns their fee. They should be:

• Cutting underperforming ads and keywords (this is as important as finding winners)
• A/B testing ad copy, landing pages, and audiences
• Adjusting bids and budgets based on actual performance data
• Identifying which channels and campaigns drive the best cost-per-acquisition
• Sharing insights that go beyond numbers — what they're learning about your audience

By day 45, you should see cost-per-click stabilizing and early conversion patterns forming. By day 60, the agency should be able to tell you which campaigns are working, which need more time, and which should be killed.

The best agencies aren't the ones that get everything right on day one. They're the ones that learn fastest from the data and adapt.

Days 61–90: Scaling what works

The final month of the first quarter is about amplification. The experiments are done. The winners are identified. Now it's time to push budget toward what's working and expand. (If you're running PPC, this is the phase where knowing your ideal budget becomes critical.)

• Budget shifts toward top-performing campaigns and channels
• New keyword or audience segments are tested based on learnings from months 1-2
• Content that resonated gets expanded into series or different formats
• Automation workflows get refined and extended
• A clear Q2 plan is presented based on Q1 data

What good reporting looks like

By day 90, your agency's reporting should give you:

1. A live dashboard you can check anytime (not a PDF that arrives once a month)
2. Clear cost-per-acquisition by channel and campaign
3. Trend lines showing improvement over the 90 days
4. Honest assessment of what's working and what isn't
5. A data-backed plan for the next quarter

If your agency can't show you these things after 90 days, something is wrong. Either they're not measuring properly, not optimizing, or not being transparent.

Warning signs in the first 90 days

Not everything goes perfectly. But there's a difference between normal growing pains and actual red flags:

• Normal: Early campaign performance is inconsistent (expected while algorithms learn)
• Red flag: No data or reporting after 3 weeks
• Normal: Strategy pivots based on new data (that's good — it means they're paying attention)
• Red flag: No communication for a week. Radio silence means nobody is working on your account
• Normal: Recommending budget adjustments between channels
• Red flag: Asking for more budget without explaining what the current spend is producing

The bottom line

The first 90 days with a marketing agency are an investment in learning. The agency is learning your business, your audience, and what moves your metrics. You're learning whether this agency is the right partner. (Still deciding between agency and in-house? Read our honest comparison.)

Give it the full 90 days. Judge on data, not feelings. And if the data says it's working — that's when the real growth starts.