Digital Agency Industry Insights

TL;DR Beyond referrals, three strategies are driving agency growth today: thought leadership, programmatic M&A, and RFPs. Real thought leadership is the best way to build trust without a referral. The point of view has to come from leaders, and writing is how you...

TL;DR It's been a strangely flat year for agency leader outlooks. We're sitting about where we were in 4Q25: smaller projects are easy to land, larger ones are stuck behind tight client budgets, and sales cycles keep stretching. AI is great and garbage at the same...

TL;DR Referrals are the best growth channel for most agencies. Referred prospects close at higher rates and sign larger deals, and referred clients stay longer. Most agencies take referrals as they arrive. Agencies that run a program ask on purpose. This guide covers...

TL;DR 37% (203) of the 556 verified partner programs in our 2026 dataset publish a commission, discount, or margin as a percentage. Flat payments are listed separately. Referral is the most common model, with 268 programs. Of the 147 that publish a commission...

TL;DR We had the pleasure of interviewing some amazing agency owners about their growth stories. Check out the full recording here​ Our agency market sizing brief is now available to help leaders and product companies better understand the size and makeup of this...

TL;DR Agencies in our Fast Growth tier averaged 34% growth in 2025. Agencies in the Slow Growth tier declined 15% on average. Positioning begins to provide its promised benefits when it changes which work the agency accepts, the proof it builds, the channels it uses,...

TL;DR Our research sponsorship page is live! If you have any SaaS/PaaS friends who want to fund some fantastic agency research, I'd really appreciate it if you could share this with them. We launched a free Digital Agency Growth Diagnostic to help agency leaders...

Client retention rate is the percentage of clients an agency keeps over a set period, after you remove the clients you won during that period. An agency that starts a year with 24 clients and still has 18 of those same 24 at the end retained 75%. While the calculation...

In our recent survey of 165 digital agency leaders, 42% reported average retainer tenures above two years. 24% said their typical client leaves within one year. What separates them in the survey is the various activities they employ to build a quality customer...

TL;DR The "all-in on AI" wave in agencies is receding. Our Delphi pipeline surveys, conversations with SaaS/PaaS teams, and agency clients are all getting more critical of how AI is being used. AI's "jagged frontier" never fully flattened. The valleys where AI fails...

TL;DR We launched a new Digital Agency Growth Guide​ The widening gap between thriving and struggling digital agencies traces back to a misunderstanding of revenue generation. A large portion of the industry borrowed SaaS and product go-to-market tactics that don't...