For a Belgian agency the usable measure is EBITDA margin on gross margin: what remains before depreciation, financial charges and tax, divided by the fee portion of revenue.
The distribution in financial year 2024
Measured in IKAg's Agency Barometer, across all Belgian agencies with filed annual accounts:
- Median: about 22 percent. The middle agency of the market.
- First quartile: about 7 percent. A quarter of agencies sit below that.
- Everything in between is the middle half of the market, and that is by far the most common outcome.
So an agency at 15 percent sits exactly there: below the median, well above the first quartile, and completely normal. That is the most important sentence in this answer, because a number without a distribution around it is almost always read too harshly.
Why you should not look at margin on revenue
At agencies, net margin on revenue says nothing, because revenue includes pass-through costs such as media, print and production. A media agency placing ten million in media and earning half a million in fees shows a laughable revenue margin while being perfectly healthy. So always calculate on gross margin.
The movement matters more than the level
Between 2021 and 2024 the third quartile lost 6.7 percent of its margin, and the first quartile 45.5 percent. The bottom of the market lost almost half its profitability while the top barely moved.
That makes "where does this agency sit in the distribution" a more useful question than "does this agency have a good margin". Two consecutive years of decline at an agency already at the bottom is a different story than at one in the top quartile.
What a low margin does and does not mean
It measures continuity risk, not quality. An agency at 6 percent margin may think more sharply than its competitors; it simply has less buffer when something goes wrong. So do not use the figure to reject, use it to know which question to ask.
See also: what an agency earns on you and how to know whether an agency is financially healthy.