"Can I cancel my marketing agency contract early?" is a question people usually ask in month four, when the reports have stopped making sense. The better time to ask it is before you sign, while you can still change the answer.
This is general guidance, not legal advice. Your contract's own wording decides what you can do, so if real money is at stake, have a lawyer read it.
Why agencies ask for a term at all
It is worth understanding the other side before you negotiate. Most of an agency's effort on a new client comes at the start: getting access, auditing what exists, fixing tracking, building the first pages or campaigns. If a client leaves after one month, that setup work is never paid back. A minimum term is how some agencies protect themselves from that.
That is a fair concern. The question is whether the term you are being asked for matches the work.
What is reasonable depends on the work
Different services take different amounts of time to show whether they are working:
SEO builds slowly, so it is reasonable for an SEO provider to want enough time to show progress. But "enough time" should come with a clear answer about what you will see and when. Google's own advice is to ask any SEO what results to expect and in what timeframe (sourced from Google Search Central).
Paid ads start producing spend, clicks and calls from the first week. You learn quickly whether a campaign is working, so a long lock-in is harder to justify.
A website build is a project, not an ongoing service. It should be priced in milestones with a clear handover, not wrapped in a monthly term.
If an agency offers both month-to-month and a fixed term, ask what each costs per month and compare them in writing. Then you can decide whether the discount is worth the commitment.
My own position, stated plainly: the studio doesn't use annual contracts. Every tier is month to month with two months' notice to stop, and mine are published so you can see the terms before we talk.
What happens to your accounts, data and content when it ends
This is the part that hurts most when it's left vague. Before you sign, get these in writing:
Your Google Ads account. If an agency creates a new account from its own manager account, Google makes that manager the owner. The good news is that "The client account still owns its data and has the ability to remove ownership access by unlinking" (sourced from Google Ads Help). Simpler still: ask for the account to be created in your business's name from day one.
Your Google Business Profile. You, not the agency, should be the primary owner. Agencies can do their work as managers.
Your website and domain. Who holds the domain registration, and who owns the site files and the content written for you?
Your analytics. The Google Analytics property should sit in your account, with the agency added as a user.
Your email list. Your list and the record of how each person agreed to hear from you should leave with you. Under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), the onus of proving consent is on whoever claims to have it (sourced from the CRTC), so losing those records is a real problem, not a paperwork one.
It also helps to know what happens to your search visibility once the work stops. I've written about what happens to your rankings if you stop paying for SEO.
What the first 90 days should look like
Whatever the term, the first three months tell you a lot. A healthy start usually looks like this:
Week one: access requests and questions. A good agency asks for access to your accounts and asks about your customers before it changes anything.
The first month: a written plan. What they found, what they will do first, and why that order.
By day 90: work you can point to. Pages published, campaigns rebuilt, tracking fixed, and reporting that connects to calls, bookings or sales rather than just traffic. Progress, not a promised result: nobody can guarantee outcomes, and Google says outright that "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."
Early warning signs
No one has asked for access, yet reports are arriving.
Reports list numbers that never connect to enquiries or sales.
You can't get a list of what was changed and why.
You are told results are guaranteed.
If you are reviewing an agreement right now, it is worth reading the proposal line by line before you sign it. What does yours say about leaving?