A digital marketing agency should deliver three things every month: a written plan of what is being done and why, the execution of it, and a report showing what happened — in numbers you can check yourself.
If any of those three is missing, you are not buying marketing. You are buying activity. The distinction becomes obvious around month three, when the invoices have added up and nobody can say what changed.
What does a monthly retainer actually pay for?
It pays for the strategy, the work and the measurement — not for the advertising budget, which is separate and stays in your own account.
This is the single most misunderstood part of hiring an agency in Pakistan, and it is where most disputes start. Two different numbers exist:
| What it is | Where it goes | |
|---|---|---|
| Management fee | What you pay the agency for the work | To the agency |
| Ad spend | What you pay Meta or Google to show the ads | To the platform, from your own account |
| Production cost | Photography, video, printing, if needed | Quoted separately, per project |
An agency quoting one blended number without separating them is either inexperienced or deliberately vague. You should be able to raise your ad spend without your management fee changing, and vice versa.
Definition
A retainer is a fixed monthly fee for an agreed scope of work — a set number of channels, a set reporting cadence — rather than payment per task or per campaign.
What should be in the scope, in writing?
The channels, the deliverables per month, who provides creative, the reporting date and the notice period.
- Which channels. “Digital marketing” is not a scope. “Meta ads and Google Search ads, plus the landing page” is.
- How many deliverables. Number of campaigns, creatives, posts or pages per month. A range is fine; silence is not.
- Who makes the creative. If they need product photos from you and nobody said so, month one stalls.
- When the report arrives. A fixed date beats “monthly”, which quietly becomes quarterly.
- Notice period. Thirty days is normal. Twelve-month lock-ins for a service that can be judged in ninety days are not.
- Who owns what. Accounts, pixels, page admin, creative files. See below — this one costs people real money.
Who should own the ad account and the assets?
You should. Every account, page, pixel and domain should be in your business’s name, with the agency added as a user.
The alternative — the agency running your ads inside their own account, or owning your Facebook page — means that when the relationship ends you lose the campaign history, the audience data and sometimes the page itself. The pixel data alone can represent a year of learning that cannot be rebuilt.
- Meta Business Manager in your name, agency added as a partner
- Google Ads account in your name, agency granted access
- Analytics and Search Console owned by you, agency as user
- Domain and hosting in your name, always
- Creative source files handed over, not just the exports
A reasonable agency agrees to all five without argument, because it is standard practice. Resistance to any of them tells you what leverage they intend to keep.
What do digital marketing services cost?
Structured single-channel work starts around $800 a month, with multi-channel work from about $2,000 — separate from ad spend.
Those are our own starting fees, quoted in dollars for every market. Below roughly $300 a month the arithmetic stops working: nobody can plan, produce, run and report on a campaign properly for less, so what gets delivered is posting.
For context on what those numbers are set against: agencies in the UK charge from around £1,250 a month for a single channel, and Gulf retainers commonly run AED 3,000 to 15,000. Delivery from Pakistan is what closes that gap — the full comparison is on our services page.
What should the monthly report contain?
What was done, what it produced, what it cost per result, and what changes next month — on one or two pages.
- Work completed. Named, specific: campaigns launched, creatives tested, pages published.
- Results against the goal. Leads, orders, calls, enquiries — the thing your business actually needs, not impressions.
- Cost per result. The number that tells you whether this is working. Everything else is context.
- What is being changed. A report with no next step is a receipt, not a report.
Reports built only from impressions and reach are a warning sign. Reach is easy to buy and tells you nothing about whether anyone bought anything.
Five questions that expose a bad fit
Ask these before signing. The answers separate operators from salespeople quickly.
- “What will you not do?” A good answer is specific and slightly disappointing. “Everything” means no plan.
- “Whose account will the ads run in?” Anything other than yours needs a very good explanation.
- “What happens in month one, concretely?” Should be audit, tracking setup, plan — not “we start growing your brand”.
- “What is the cost per lead you would consider acceptable for my business?” Requires them to think about your economics, not their portfolio.
- “Can I speak to a client you no longer work with?” Nobody expects yes. The reaction is the answer.
When you should not hire an agency
If your offer, pricing or fulfilment is not settled, advertising will only find out faster that it does not work.
Paid marketing amplifies whatever exists. If the product is unclear, the price is wrong, or orders cannot be fulfilled reliably, spending money on reach makes the problem more expensive rather than solving it. Fix the offer, then buy attention for it.
The other honest case: if the budget only covers the fee with nothing left for spend, wait. A campaign with no media budget is a plan nobody can execute. Small, real spend beats a large retainer with an empty account.
If you would rather learn to run this yourself rather than pay for it monthly, that is what the Digital Marketing course is for — the same work, taught on live accounts.