Digital Agency Industry Insights

TL;DR Our Agency Operating Model Assessment is live! Use it to identify and fix the key gaps in how your agency operates. Last year, we built Delphi - an insight network for agency leaders. Now hundreds of leaders get quarterly updates that keep them informed about...

TL;DR This quarter's Agency Pulse Survey is live! Join Delphi to learn if it's you or the market.​ We're working on the next salary survey, and we'd love your input! Brands hire agencies to solve problems that they either don’t have the knowledge or capacity to handle...

TL;DR We reviewed all our Growth Review engagements over the last 10+ years to identify the most common issues. Focus and agency complexity were common issues that have gotten worse recently. Cheap AI builds can make focus and complexity worse by creating expensive...

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...