Between March 2025 and September 2026, our research team tracked client retention across 418 U.S. marketing agencies, covering roughly 19,700 client relationships. Participating agencies shared anonymized billing records, which we used to log the month each client started and the month each relationship ended.
Customer retention rate (CRR) in this report is the share of an agency’s clients at the start of a month who are still paying at the end of it, excluding clients added during that month. We measured CRR monthly because most agency engagements, including retainers, are billed and cancelled month to month. A monthly figure also converts directly into client lifetime: average lifetime in months equals 1 divided by (1 minus monthly CRR). An agency that keeps 90.9% of its clients each month holds the average client for 11 months.
Agencies were grouped by the service that made up the largest share of their revenue. We normalized the dataset by excluding one-time projects under $5,000 and clients lost through acquisition or bankruptcy, so the figures reflect clients who chose to leave. In the sections below, we break down CRR and client lifetime by agency type, agency size, and client company size, followed by the reasons clients gave for ending the relationship.
Average Customer Retention Rate by Agency Type
Across all 14 agency types in our dataset, the average client stays for 12.3 months. The spread between types is wide: advertising agencies keep the average client for more than two years, while web design firms keep them for under seven months. In the table below, we break down monthly CRR, the share of clients still active after 12 months, and average client lifetime for each agency type.
Average Customer Retention Rate and Client Lifetime by Agency Type (September 2026)
| Agency Type | Average Monthly CRR | Clients Retained After 12 Months | Average Client Lifetime |
| Advertising (Creative and Media) | 96.4% | 64.4% | 27.8 months |
| Full-Service Digital Marketing | 95.2% | 55.4% | 20.8 months |
| Public Relations | 93.6% | 45.2% | 15.6 months |
| Email and Marketing Automation | 92.7% | 40.3% | 13.7 months |
| Content Marketing | 91.8% | 35.8% | 12.2 months |
| GEO and AI Search | 91.4% | 34.0% | 11.6 months |
| SEO | 90.9% | 31.8% | 11.0 months |
| Marketing Strategy and Consulting | 90.3% | 29.4% | 10.3 months |
| Branding and Creative | 89.6% | 26.8% | 9.6 months |
| Lead Generation | 89.1% | 25.0% | 9.2 months |
| PPC and Paid Media | 88.3% | 22.5% | 8.5 months |
| Social Media Marketing | 87.6% | 20.4% | 8.1 months |
| Influencer Marketing | 86.2% | 16.8% | 7.2 months |
| Web Design and Development | 85.1% | 14.4% | 6.7 months |
Our researchers took three main points from this data:
- We found that a gap of a few points in monthly CRR produces a large gap in lifetime. Content marketing and advertising agencies are 4.6 points apart on monthly CRR, yet advertising agencies keep clients more than twice as long.
- Our data showed that agencies with the longest client lifetimes run work that is woven into the client’s operations, such as media buying, PR programs, and marketing automation, which raises the cost of switching.
- We found that search and content services, including content marketing, GEO and AI search, and SEO, fall close to the 12.3-month average, between 11.0 and 12.2 months.
Client Survival by Month and Agency Type
Average lifetime tells only part of the story, because clients do not leave at an even pace. To see when departures happen, we followed every client relationship from its first billed month and recorded the share still active at each milestone. The table below compares four agency types from different points on the retention range.
Share of Clients Still Active by Month of Engagement (September 2026)
| Month of Engagement | SEO | Full-Service Digital Marketing | PPC and Paid Media | Web Design and Development |
| Month 1 | 96.2% | 98.1% | 94.8% | 97.3% |
| Month 3 | 81.7% | 91.4% | 76.3% | 83.9% |
| Month 6 | 52.4% | 77.2% | 46.9% | 49.6% |
| Month 9 | 39.8% | 67.5% | 32.4% | 28.1% |
| Month 12 | 32.6% | 57.1% | 23.7% | 15.2% |
| Month 18 | 20.3% | 41.8% | 12.6% | 7.4% |
| Month 24 | 12.9% | 31.6% | 6.8% | 3.9% |
Our team drew three conclusions from the survival data:
- We found that clients in every agency type were most likely to leave between months 3 and 6. For SEO and PPC agencies, close to 30% of the starting group cancelled in that window.
- Our data showed that SEO, PPC, and web design clients who stay past the first six months become steadily more stable, while full-service clients leave at a slow, even pace throughout the first two years.
- Web design clients hold steady early, then fall off sharply after launch, since many engagements end once the site goes live.
Customer Retention Rate by Agency Size
Agency size had a strong effect on retention in our dataset. We grouped agencies by full-time headcount and calculated monthly CRR and average client lifetime for each group, across all service types.
Average Customer Retention Rate by Agency Size (September 2026)
| Agency Size (Employees) | Average Monthly CRR | Clients Retained After 12 Months | Average Client Lifetime |
| 1 to 10 | 88.4% | 22.8% | 8.6 months |
| 11 to 50 | 90.6% | 30.6% | 10.6 months |
| 51 to 200 | 92.9% | 41.3% | 14.1 months |
| More than 200 | 94.8% | 52.7% | 19.2 months |
Three findings stood out to our team:
- We found that agencies with more than 200 employees keep the average client more than twice as long as agencies with 10 or fewer.
- Our data showed that larger agencies tend to assign a dedicated account lead and a backup, so a single staff departure rarely ends a client relationship.
- Small agencies lost the most clients when a founder or lead strategist became stretched across too many accounts.
Customer Retention Rate by Client Company Size
The size of the client mattered as much as the size of the agency. We grouped each client relationship by the client’s annual revenue and calculated retention across all agency types.
Average Customer Retention Rate by Client Company Size (September 2026)
| Client Company Size (Annual Revenue) | Average Monthly CRR | Clients Retained After 12 Months | Average Client Lifetime |
| Small Business (Under $10M) | 87.9% | 21.3% | 8.3 months |
| Lower Mid-Market ($10M to $100M) | 90.8% | 31.4% | 10.9 months |
| Upper Mid-Market ($100M to $1B) | 93.3% | 43.5% | 14.9 months |
| Enterprise (Over $1B) | 95.6% | 58.3% | 22.7 months |
Our researchers noted three patterns in this breakdown:
- We found that enterprise clients stay with their agencies for nearly two years on average, close to three times as long as small business clients.
- Our data showed that small business clients were the most likely to cite budget cuts as their reason for leaving, often within the first six months.
- Enterprise relationships lasted longer in part because of procurement: once an agency clears vendor onboarding, replacing it requires the client to repeat that process.
Primary Reasons Clients End Agency Relationships
When a relationship ended, participating agencies recorded the main reason the client gave, either in the cancellation notice or in an exit conversation. We grouped those reasons into seven categories and calculated each one’s share of all departures.
Our researchers drew three conclusions from the exit data:
- We found that results falling short of expectations accounted for nearly one in three departures, more than budget cuts and in-house moves combined.
- Our data showed that only 12.6% of departing clients left for a competing agency. Most clients who leave stop outsourcing that service altogether, at least for a time.
- Communication and service problems were cited in 10.9% of departures, but agencies reported that these complaints often came alongside concerns about results.
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- First Page Sage Research Study. First Page Sage. September 2026. San Francisco, California.
- Customer Retention Rates by Industry: 2026 Report. First Page Sage. 2026. San Francisco, California.
- B2B Marketing Agency Benchmarks 2025. The Starr Conspiracy. 2025. Fort Worth, Texas.
- Average Customer Retention Rate by Industry. Nicole Bennett, Vena Solutions. February 2024. Toronto, Ontario.
- The Complete Strategy Guide to Reducing Churn and Increasing Client Retention for SEO Agencies. SEOmonitor. London, United Kingdom.
