Questions to ask a Meta ads agency before you sign

Which questions actually matter before you sign?

Most evaluation lists hand you thirty questions and no way to weigh them, which is how a two-hour meeting produces no decision. In practice six of them decide the outcome, and the rest are only worth asking once those six have good answers.

They cluster around a single theme: what happens when the relationship ends. An agency that owns your ad account, produces creative you cannot reuse, and keeps its qualification rules in its own head has made leaving expensive. That is a commercial position rather than a service, and you should know which of the two you are buying before you sign anything.

There is a second reason to lead with them. Each one is answerable in a sentence by somebody who has thought about it, and unanswerable by somebody who has not, so they sort the room quickly.

Ask the six first. If any answer is evasive, the remaining twenty-five will not rescue it, and you have saved yourself a second meeting.

1. Who owns the ad account, the pixel and the creative?
2. Who physically writes and produces the ads?
3. How do you define a qualified lead, and who agrees it?
4. Do closed deals get fed back into the ad account?
5. What is not included in the fee?
6. What do I keep on the day I leave?

Who is actually doing the work?

The person in the meeting is often not the person in the account. That is not automatically a problem, and at any agency above a certain size it is unavoidable. An unanswered version of it is the problem.

A good answer names a person, says how many other accounts they hold, and offers to put them on the next call. A bad one talks about a team, a pod, or a process, which is what gets said when the honest answer is a rotating junior.

Follow it with a question about volume. Somebody running fifteen accounts is administering yours rather than thinking about it. There is no universally correct number, but there is a number above which weekly creative testing stops being possible, and you want to know it now rather than in month three.

Then ask who writes the ads. Strategy and copy often sit with different people, and the gap between them is where a sharp brief turns into a generic ad.

Ask to meet the person who will be in the account, not the person selling it. A refusal is itself an answer.

Who owns the account, the pixel and the creative?

The only correct answer is that you do. Your ad account, on your business manager, with the agency added as a partner. Your pixel, firing on your domain, with its history intact and going back further than this engagement.

Agencies that run clients inside their own account will tell you it is simpler, and it genuinely is, for them. The consequence lands on you: when you leave, you leave without the conversion history, and that is the asset which took months to accumulate and cannot be rebuilt after the fact.

Creative is the same question wearing different clothes. Ask whether you can use the ads elsewhere once the engagement ends, and whether you receive source files or only flattened exports. A licence that expires with the contract means you rented your own campaign.

None of this is hostile to ask. An agency that has thought about it will have a clean answer ready, because clients ask.

How do they define a qualified lead?

This is the question that separates an agency optimising for your pipeline from one optimising for its own reporting, and it is the one most often answered with a process rather than a definition.

A good answer says the definition comes from you and is written down before launch, with criteria specific enough to argue about: company type, seniority, budget range, timing. A bad answer describes a lead scoring model, or says quality improves over time, or explains that qualification is really a sales function.

Then ask what happens when a lead they counted turns out to be worthless. If the answer involves no change to the campaign, the definition was decoration.

The point of agreeing a definition is that it changes what the account optimises toward. An agency that cannot describe that mechanism in plain language is not using one.

What does the fee actually exclude?

Every fee excludes something. The only question is whether you find out during the sales conversation or in the first invoice.

Media spend is the obvious exclusion and is rarely hidden. The ones that surprise people are creative production above a stated volume, landing pages, tracking implementation, and the tooling the reporting depends on. Any of those is a real cost and none is unreasonable to charge for. Being vague about them is the problem, not the charging.

Ask for the exclusions in writing. Then do the arithmetic that makes two incomparable quotes comparable: convert each into the total cost of one qualified sales call, including media, fee and anything you will have to buy separately.

That single number is the only fair way to compare a flat retainer against a percentage of spend.

• Creative production above an agreed monthly volume.
• Landing pages, and who builds them.
• Tracking and analytics implementation.
• Tools and reporting subscriptions.
• Anything billed hourly rather than inside the retainer.

What happens on the day you leave?

Ask this in the first meeting, while nobody is defensive yet. The answer tells you more about how the engagement will actually run than any case study will.

You are looking for a notice period you can live with, and a handover that includes account access, creative source files, audience definitions and the tracking setup. You are also looking for the absence of any dependency on a tool only they can log into, because that is a hostage rather than a deliverable.

The tell is hesitation rather than the answer itself. An agency confident in its work has no reason to make leaving difficult, because the thing keeping you is that it is working.

One that has designed friction into the exit has told you, early and for free, what it expects the work to be worth.

An agency that makes leaving easy is telling you it expects to earn the renewal. That is the most useful signal in the whole conversation.

Which answers should end the conversation?

Some answers are not negotiating positions. They are the end of the meeting, and recognising them saves a quarter.

A guaranteed revenue or return figure is the clearest. Nobody controls your sales team, your close rate or your market, so promising a number that depends on all three means either the promise is unenforceable or the person making it has not thought it through. Neither is a good start.

The others are refusing to name who works on the account, requiring the campaign to live in the agency's own ad account, declining to put the qualified-lead definition in writing, and being unable to say what the fee excludes.

Each of those is recoverable if the answer is honest and the reason is specific. None is recoverable if the answer is a deflection, and you will be able to tell the difference in the room.

• A guaranteed revenue or return on ad spend figure.
• The campaign has to live in the agency's ad account.
• No named person on the account.
• The qualified-lead definition cannot be written down.
• No clear list of what the fee excludes.