Every city has hundreds of agencies and most of them will send you a deck within a day. The deck is not the problem. The problem is that the decks all look the same, and the differences that matter only show up three months in. These ten questions surface them in the first meeting.
1. Who owns the ad accounts?
If the agency runs your campaigns from its own Meta Business Manager or Google Ads account, your history, audiences and pixel data leave when the agency does. Insist that campaigns run in accounts you own, with the agency added as a partner. Any agency that resists this is protecting its leverage, not your results.
2. What exactly counts as a result?
Ask for the definition in writing before the first campaign: leads, qualified leads, calls, purchases, or, for awareness work, recall measured by a survey. If the answer is "engagement" or "reach", ask what business outcome those are a proxy for and how the agency will know when the proxy stops working.
3. Can we see a delivery report from a real campaign?
Not a case study slide. A platform-native delivery report, the kind Meta or Google exports, with the client's name removed. It shows whether the agency reports what the platform says or what it would like you to hear.
4. Who will actually work on the account?
The person in the pitch is often not the person in the weekly meeting. Ask who sets up the campaigns, who checks them daily in week one, and who writes the report. Then ask how many other accounts that person carries.
5. How is the fee structured, and what changes it?
Percentage of spend rewards spending. A flat retainer rewards keeping you. A project fee rewards finishing. None is wrong, but you should know which incentive you are buying, and it should be written down before any work starts.
6. What happens in the first two weeks?
A good answer involves research, tracking set-up and a written plan before any media runs. A bad answer involves launching on day three. Campaigns that start before the tracking works produce data nobody can use.
7. How do you handle languages other than English?
If your market reads Arabic, German or anything else, ask whether copy is written in each language or translated from one, and who checks tone. A caption that works in English and reads awkwardly in the local language costs you the larger half of the audience.
8. What will you tell us when something is not working?
Every campaign has a bad week. Ask for an example of a time the agency reported a failure to a client and what it changed. An agency that cannot name one has either never had a bad week or never reported it.
9. What do you need from us?
Serious agencies ask for access, approvals and decisions on a schedule, and they will tell you the plan slips when those slip. If the agency says it needs nothing from you, it is planning to do very little.
10. What happens when we leave?
You should receive the accounts, the audiences, the creative files, the tracking configuration and a document explaining them. Ask for this to be in the contract. An agency confident in its work makes leaving easy.
The question we would rather you did not ask us
"Show us the numbers." Our case studies describe what each client does, what we were asked to do and what we delivered, from a United States governor's race to a Berlin engineering firm and Saudi software launches. Performance figures are shared on request under each client's confidentiality terms, and we publish a number on our site only once it is verified against a platform report. We think the ten questions above are a better test of an agency than any headline figure anyway.