A benchmark is a fixed point you measure against. Most marketing has none — which is why so many business owners can't tell whether the last twelve months of invoices did anything at all.
Ask most business owners what their marketing returned last year and you'll get a shrug, a number their agency gave them, or a story about "brand awareness". That's not their fault. The industry has spent two decades building reporting that describes activity — impressions, posts published, hours logged — rather than outcomes.
Digital Benchmark Solutions was set up to work the other way around. Every engagement opens with a measured baseline against three competitors you name. Every month you get a live dashboard and a plain-English note covering what we did, what changed, and what it cost per lead. If a channel isn't working, that shows up in your report before it shows up in your bank balance.
Three things, mostly.
Everything is in-house. Fifteen services, one team. That's unusual — most agencies specialise in one channel and quietly white-label the rest, which is why your SEO consultant and your ads consultant keep contradicting each other. When one team runs all of it, your website, your content and your campaigns finally pull in the same direction.
You own everything. Your Google Ads account, your analytics, your domain, your creative source files, your website. We work inside your assets, not ours. If you leave, nothing goes with us — which means we have to keep earning the relationship.
We'll tell you no. If your margins can't support paid acquisition, or your market is too small for the budget you have in mind, we say so before you spend. We'd rather lose a sale than take money for work we don't believe in.
Canada is not a smaller version of the US market. Search volumes are lower and more geographically concentrated. A meaningful share of the country buys in French, and translated content loses to native content every time. CASL governs what you can send by email, and Quebec's Law 25 imposes consent requirements stricter than anywhere else in North America. Seasonality swings harder here than almost anywhere — an Edmonton home services business has a completely different December than a Vancouver one.
We build for all of that from the start, across 33 markets from Victoria to St. John's.
Work gets shipped continuously, not in a rush before the report. You get a live dashboard you can open any morning showing spend, leads and cost per lead by channel. Once a month we send a written summary — what was delivered, what moved, what we're doing next — and get on a call if you want to talk it through. There's no charge for that call, and you'll never be asked to sit through a slide deck about impressions.
Most agency relationships fail for the same reason: the client cannot tell whether it's working. We built the whole company around removing that doubt.
Every engagement opens with a measured baseline against named competitors. You always know whether you're winning.
Month to month after the first 90 days. We'd rather earn the renewal than enforce it.
Your accounts, your domains, your data, your creative files. If we part ways, nothing walks out the door with us.
No account manager relaying messages to a team you never meet. You talk to the people doing the work.
A live dashboard plus a monthly note in plain English: what we did, what changed, what's next.
If a channel won't work for your margins, we'll tell you before you spend, not after.
Deliberately small and senior. You work with the people doing the work — no account manager relaying messages to a team you never meet.
We're built for the Canadian market: English and French delivery, Canadian search data, CASL and Law 25 compliance, and pricing in Canadian dollars.
That's common. We'll run the free benchmark either way — if your current agency is doing good work, we'll tell you that, and you'll have an independent read on your numbers.
We don't do fake reviews, bought links, guaranteed rankings, or contracts designed to be hard to leave. We'll also turn down work where we don't think we can beat what you're already getting.
Send us your website and the three businesses that beat you. Within two business days you'll get a written benchmark — where you stand, what's costing you leads and what we'd fix first. No charge, no obligation.