What a Meta ads proposal should contain, and what it usually does

What was actually in the fourteen pages?

Six pages of credentials, three of scope, two of pricing, two of process diagram, and one of next steps.

That distribution is worth sitting with. Nearly half the document was about the agency: logos of past clients, team photographs, awards, a page of testimonials. Three pages described the work the client would be buying, and one of those was a list of channel names.

None of this is unusual. Proposal templates are built by agencies to win work, and credentials are what agencies believe wins work, so credentials get the space. The client reading it has the opposite need, which is to understand what will happen and whether it will work.

A useful test when one arrives: count the pages about them and the pages about you. If the first number is larger, you are holding a brochure.

Count the pages about the agency against the pages about your account. If the first number is bigger, it is a brochure, not a proposal.

What was missing?

Four things, and each one is the sort of omission that becomes an argument later.

There was no named account manager. The document referred throughout to our team and your dedicated strategist without ever saying who, which means the person in the pitch could be replaced on day one by somebody carrying nine other accounts and nothing would have been breached.

There was no stated target. Nothing in fourteen pages committed to a number, a range, or even a direction, which makes the engagement impossible to fail. There was no definition of a qualified lead, so the one metric everything depends on was left to be settled after signature.

And there was no exit description beyond a notice period. Nothing said who keeps the ad account, the pixel history or the creative.

Those four absences are more informative than any of the six credential pages.

1. No named account manager, only a dedicated team.
2. No target, in any form.
3. No definition of a qualified lead.
4. No description of what you keep when you leave.

What did the commercial terms actually say?

A monthly fee plus a percentage of ad spend, a sixty-day minimum term and thirty days notice.

The fee was four thousand five hundred pounds a month plus fifteen per cent of media spend. That structure is common and it is not dishonest, but it does mean the agency's income rises with the budget, and nothing elsewhere in the document acknowledged that or described who would raise the question of spending less.

The sixty-day minimum is the part worth noticing. Set against a channel that typically takes around ten weeks to produce a stable cost per qualified lead, a sixty-day commitment ends almost exactly when the account starts becoming readable. The term is shorter than the time the work needs.

That mismatch is not usually a trick. It is a template term nobody has checked against the reality of the channel, which is arguably worse.

What should a good proposal contain instead?

Seven things, and a proposal with all seven can be shorter than fourteen pages rather than longer.

Name the person who will run the account and how many others they run. State the target, in a unit both sides have defined, and define a qualified lead in the same document. Describe a normal month in specifics rather than adjectives. Separate the fee from the media spend as two lines. State what you need from the client as thresholds, not as prompt and timely. And say what the client keeps at the end.

Everything else is optional. Credentials can be a link. The process diagram can be a paragraph.

If a proposal contains those seven, you can make a decision from it. If it does not, you are deciding on the strength of the meeting, which is what the credential pages are for.

1. The named person running the account, and their other accounts.
2. The target, in a defined unit.
3. The definition of a qualified lead.
4. What a normal month contains, in specifics.
5. Fee and media spend as separate lines.
6. What the client must provide, as thresholds.
7. What the client keeps at the end.

How do our own proposals score?

Five of the seven, which is better than the document above and not good enough to be smug about.

We name the person running the account, state a target and define a qualified lead alongside it, separate the fee from the media spend, and say in writing that the client keeps the ad account, the pixel history and the creative. Those five are consistent.

The two we do not do well are the same two this whole site keeps returning to. Our description of a normal month is closer to a category list than a specific account of what happens in it. And our client-side conditions are still written as adjectives rather than thresholds, which is the flaw the guarantee article identifies in our own guarantee.

Both are being rewritten. Until they are, grade our proposal on this list the way you would grade anyone else's, and hold us to the two we are failing.

Ours scores five of seven. The two it fails are the same two the guarantee article admits to, and they are being rewritten.