At the end of last year, we started to publish the results of our Digital Agency Survey for 2024 which was taken by over 600 digital agencies and consultants from around the world.
If you missed the initial results, you can still catch up on the data that we’ve released so far:
- The State of Digital Agencies in 2024: Big Challenges, Bigger Optimism, and Is Remote Work Here to Stay?
- Bad News for the Four-Day-Week, The End of the Office-Based Agency and is Hybrid Working Really Hybrid?
- The State of Digital Agencies in 2024: Client Referrals Drive Agency New Business, But Is It Enough? And Are Sales Pipelines a Cause For Concern?
Today, we’re releasing some more data from the survey which includes some useful benchmarks for agencies and consultants which we hope will be useful in seeing how you compare to your peers.
Before we dive into the data, here is a quick reminder of who took the survey:

In summary, it was a big mix of folks from various sized agencies, with the majority sitting in the 1-25 headcount range. Most of them serve North America and European regions whilst they also represent a huge mix of digital marketing specialisms from SEO to content marketing and paid search to PR. You can find a little more information on exactly who took the survey here as well.
Nearly 50% of agencies charge between $1K-$5K per month
When we asked agencies and consultants what their average monthly retainer was, 49% said that it sits within the $1K-$5K range. The next most popular range was $5K-$10K per month which 26% chose as their typical budget range.

Despite the inclusion of consultants in this data who may naturally charge less than agencies (on the whole), I can’t help but think that agency fees are still on the cheap side and don’t appear to have increased much as all over the last decade.
The data tells us that around 75% of consultants and agencies charge between $1K-$10K per month for their services.
I’ve worked in the agency world since 2007 and these ranges are pretty much what I saw emerge in the early noughties.
When we look at this objectively, it doesn’t make much sense that budgets appear to still be very similar to what we saw over a decade ago. But at the same time, we know that we work in an industry where budgets can be hard to get and retain, especially on the SEO side of things.
Not to mention that the costs of running a business have clearly increased a lot during that time, which makes it even harder to understand.
How does the picture change if we segment the data by location?

Well, not very much. We can see that the $1K-$10K per month range still dominates, with $1K-$5K still being the most popular range. Very few agencies seem to operate in the $25K+ range.
We do see some trends emerge if we segment by agency size.

Whilst it’s unsurprising that we see average budgets typically increase as the agency size gets bigger, one segment did stick out to me – the 6-10 person agency size.
This size removes individual consultants and we still see that the most popular budget range is $1K-$5K – 68% being the exact number.
For me, this adds to my earlier point that agency fees are almost certainly still on the cheaper side of professional services and from my own experience, hasn’t grown much over the last decade.
The majority of agencies work on a retainer basis instead of one-off projects
Leading on from the topic of retainers, this is a useful benchmark to be aware of if you’re an agency founder or indeed, working in-house and looking to onboard an agency.

Just over 80% of agencies and consultants primarily work on a retainer basis. Whilst no doubt many will work on a one-off project basis as well, it’s good to see that most are looking for a long-term engagement which is reflective of how long it can take to see tangible results from some services.
It’s also worth noting that there are obviously commercial benefits for an agency or consultant to work in this way as well, with more certainty around revenue and assigning staff to projects.
For in-house marketers, they should expect that the majority of suppliers who they speak to, that a retainer is the most likely model that they’ll pitch and want to engage with. One-off projects do still happen, but it certainly seems that they’re not the default position for most agencies and consultants.
Most agencies scale headcount (and revenue) alongside the number of clients they work with
When it comes to the number of clients that agencies and consultants work with in an average month, we can see that typically, the larger the agency, the more clients who they work with.

Whilst this may not be overly surprising at first glance, I believe that it does tell us a couple of things about the agency and consultant world.
Firstly, it tells us that client account teams don’t seem to scale in size too much i.e. the number of staff who work on a client account is likely to be around the same for a small agency as it is for a large agency. Or if we combine with the previous data point on average retainer budgets typically increasing alongside the size of the agency, that larger budgets typically just mean larger client account teams.
Why is this interesting?
Well to me, it shows that most agencies are still working on a model whereby they charge for time as opposed to value. Put another way, they scale revenue by:
- Selling more retainers.
- Hiring more staff to service those retainers.
Therefore, scaling revenue correlates with the number of clients and staff that an agency has.
This isn’t surprising, but I believe it does show that as an industry, we still haven’t done the best job of transitioning our work to focus on delivering value as opposed to delivering time.
I do think that this needs to change in the coming years as we see AI start to take over some of the more “time based” tasks that a marketing agency or consultant may take on.
Securing new business is the top challenge for agencies in 2025
When it comes to the upcoming year, nearly 70% of agencies and consultants said that new business sales was going to be one of their top challenges.

Personally, I think that new business is likely to always be one of the biggest challenges that an agency experiences. No matter how good the agency is, client churn is always going to happen at some point, which leaves you in a place where you need to secure new business just to stand still.
If you want to grow revenue, you need the perfect balance between client retention and new business sales. Not simply operating on a “one in, one out” basis for clients, but winning more new clients than the number that churn.
It’s also interesting to see “adapting services to market trends” being so high up the list and I wonder how much of this challenge could be attributed to the impact of AI on the digital marketing landscape.
As we saw in our previous post, opinion is split almost entirely down the middle on whether AI poses a significant threat to the agency business model:

Of course, there are other, very real threats to the industry as well, one being the death of attribution which Rand has talked at length about. But one can’t help but think that AI truly is the driving force behind adapting to market trends being such a key concern for agency folks.
At the other end of the scale, less than 10% of folks felt that company culture was going to be a key challenge in 2025. Whilst I’d love to believe that this is because most companies have it well covered already, it’s probably more likely that it’s taking a back seat for the time being in the minds of agency founders who have had a tough couple of years commercially.
Very few agencies describe their sales pipeline as healthy right now
Leading on from this key challenge, we also asked agencies and consultants to rate their current sales pipeline.

It’s really not hard to see why so many respondents said that new business sales was a key challenge for them as we enter 2025. Only 13% of agencies and consultants rated their current pipeline as healthy, whilst over a third described it as not good.
This fits with my own experience and from talking to numerous agency owners and consultants over the last 12-18 months. Many have enough sales to keep them going, but times are much harder than previous years in a number of ways.
One such challenge is that new business seems to be taking longer to close than previously.
Whilst we can’t provide year on year analysis here, we can provide this benchmark which shows that for some, it can take over 12 weeks for a deal to close.

Having said that, the most popular time ranges from 3-4 weeks, with just over 30% saying that this was the typical time for a sales lead to close. This was followed by just over 20% saying that it could take 5-6 weeks.
In summary, I’d propose that agencies are not increasing fees as quickly as they need to and a tough climate on the new business front is contributing to the difficulties that many have been feeling over the last couple of years.
Certainly, it seems very rare for an agency to automatically increase their fees even a nominal amount each year to account for inflation. I’ve spoken to a number over the last 6-12 months and the vast majority don’t do this. A few may mention it to some clients, but not across the board and often blame uncertainty around client renewals and not wanting to “rock the boat” and potentially lose a client altogether.