Search for a marketing agency in Egypt and you get two kinds of page: directory lists built from agency-submitted profiles, and agency homepages describing what they sell. Neither tells you how to choose. This guide does, and it is written by an agency with a bar of its own, so it will say plainly where that bar rules some readers out. What it will not do is name competitors or rank anyone. The decision is yours; the questions are the same whoever you ask them of.
Decide what you are buying first
"Agency" covers at least five different purchases, and most bad engagements start with a mismatch between the one the client thought they were making and the one the agency was selling.
- An outsourced head of growth. Someone who owns the number, plans the year, runs the channels and reports to you like a senior hire would. Right for a business with real volume and no one senior in-house. Wrong for a business that wants hands on a keyboard and nothing else.
- A one-time review or rebuild. A defined piece of work: audit the accounts, fix the measurement, rebuild the structure, hand it back. Right when the problem is specific and you have a team to run it afterwards.
- A media-buying desk. Execution at scale, often across many clients per buyer. Right for high volumes of routine work with a clear brief. Wrong if you need someone to tell you the brief is wrong.
- A freelancer. One person, usually cheaper, sometimes excellent. The risk is continuity and range; the upside is attention.
- An in-house hire. Focus and speed on one account, at the cost of a single point of view and nobody to catch the mistakes.
Write down which of these you are buying before you talk to anyone. The rest of the selection is easier once the purchase is named, because half the candidates will fall away on that alone.
Where the lists come from
The "best agencies in Egypt" pages that dominate the results are directories. Their lists are built from profiles that agencies submit about themselves and from reviews those agencies invite. That makes them useful for one thing, a longlist of names that exist, and useless for the thing you actually need, which is a judgement about fit. An agency's own page is more honest than it looks, but in a specific way: it tells you what the agency sells, not what it does day to day, and the two can be far apart.
Neither source will tell you who will work on your account, how many others they carry, or what they measure. Those are the questions below, and no list answers them.
Seven questions to ask before you sign
- Who runs the account day to day, and how many accounts do they carry? Not who pitched it. Ask for the name, ask how many other clients that person serves, and ask what happens when they are on holiday. An account run by someone carrying twenty others gets an hour a week.
- What do you measure, and on what basis? Return on ad spend means different things depending on the attribution window, whether it counts the platform's reported revenue or the store's, and whether every channel's spend is in the denominator. An agency that cannot explain its basis in one sentence does not have one.
- Do your case studies state a window and a basis? Look at any result the agency shows you and ask over what period it was measured and whether it includes every channel's spend. A number with no dates is a marketing asset, not a result. Every case study on this site names its window and its basis, because we have seen what happens when they do not.
- What happens in month one? The right answer involves your measurement setup, your baseline, a plan with a number and a date on it, and a first test. An answer that starts with a creative refresh or a budget increase is starting in the wrong place.
- How do you handle the measurement setup? Whoever runs your ads needs the pixel, the server-side events, the analytics and the store data to agree with each other. If the agency treats that as your problem, you will spend the engagement arguing about whose numbers are right.
- What would you say no to? A serious agency has a list: budgets it will not scale into, discounts it will not run, tests it will not report early. If the answer is that they do whatever the client wants, they will do whatever the last thing you said was, including the wrong thing.
- Who owns the ad accounts and the data? You should. Every account, pixel, catalogue and audience should sit in your business assets with the agency as a partner, so that leaving costs you a login change and not your history.
Red flags
Some signals are reliable enough to end the conversation on their own.
- A guaranteed return. Nobody controls the auction, the market or your margin. A guarantee is either a small number dressed up or a large one that will be quietly renegotiated.
- A price before seeing the account. A quote produced without looking at your data is a quote for the average client. You are not the average client.
- Case studies with no dates or bases. See question three. If the proof cannot be dated, it cannot be checked.
- Dashboards without decisions. A weekly report that shows forty charts and recommends nothing is a report designed to be defensible rather than useful.
- No access to your own accounts. If the agency runs your ads from its own accounts and shows you screenshots, you do not have an agency; you have a landlord.
- A sale-first reflex. In Mojo's comparison of 23 Egyptian fashion storefronts, every one of the six women's fashion brands led its homepage with a discount, and measured depths across the market ran from 10 percent sitewide to 80 percent off. An agency whose first idea for a soft month is a deeper discount is proposing the one move everyone else has already made.
How to run the selection
Pitches reward presenters. Findings reward analysts. You are hiring the second kind, so run the selection to favour them.
- Give read-only access and ask for findings. Any credible agency will look at your accounts before quoting. Give two or three candidates read-only access to the ad accounts and analytics for a week and ask each for a short written diagnosis: what is working, what is leaking, what they would test first. Compare the findings, not the decks. The agency that found the thing you did not know about is the one that was actually looking.
- Ask for references in your vertical. A fashion e-commerce client of a similar size will tell you more in ten minutes than a reel of logos will in an hour. Ask the reference what the agency stopped doing, not what it started; the answer tells you whether anyone is reading the data.
- Read the agency's own work. An agency that publishes its own research about your market has shown you how it thinks before you pay for it. Our review desert report, for instance, found that only 5 of 23 Egyptian fashion stores showed a single customer review and that none of the 23 committed to a delivery time on the page; a candidate that has never noticed anything like that about your market will not notice it about your store.
- Fix the terms before the fee. Account ownership with you, media billed at cost with no markup, a notice period you can live with, and a written scope. These matter more than 10 percent either way on the retainer.
- Agree the number and the date. Before anything is signed, both sides should be able to say what result is expected, by when, and how it will be measured. An agency that resists a number is not confident; an agency that promises a huge one is not serious. The right answer is a specific one with the assumptions written next to it.
What it should cost
Fees in this market come in three shapes. A fixed monthly retainer, which rewards the agency for keeping you rather than for spending more of your money. A percentage of ad spend, which is simple and scales, and which quietly rewards the agency for a bigger budget whether or not it earns one. And a hybrid, a floor plus a performance element, which aligns incentives if the performance measure is honest and the floor covers the real work.
We will not quote ranges here, because a range for the average client tells you nothing about yours, and because the same fee can buy a senior operator's week or a junior's afternoon. Ask instead what the fee buys: which named people, how many hours, what is delivered weekly, and what is excluded. Then compare that answer across candidates. The cheapest fee attached to the thinnest answer is the most expensive option on the table.
Mojo's own answers
It would be strange to write a buyer's guide without answering its questions, so here are ours, including the ones that rule some readers out.
We work with businesses doing 300,000 EGP a month or more in revenue. Below that line the numbers cannot yet tell us reliably what is working, and we would be guessing with your money; the guides and reports on this site are free and written for exactly that stage. We are judged on profit, not on impressions or reported return, and we say so in writing before the first campaign runs. Every case study on this site names its window and its basis, and the ones that cannot be shown with a client's name are shown without one rather than dressed up. We do not publish prices, for the reasons in the section above; the fee follows the diagnosis. And month one always starts the same way: measurement fixed, baseline agreed, a plan with a number on it, and one test, of the kind set out in the payday cycle guide and the rest of the guides here.
If that fits what you are buying, the first step is the same one we recommend for any agency you consider: ask for a free account diagnosis, give us read-only access for a week, and judge us on what we find.
