Nine questions to ask before you hire anyone to run your ads

Hiring someone to spend your money is an odd transaction. The work is largely invisible, the feedback loop is slow, and the vocabulary is designed to sound impressive. These are the questions that cut through it.

1. Will the ad account be in my name?

The single most important question, and the one that catches out the most people.

Some agencies run clients inside their own manager account. When you leave, you lose everything: conversion history, audience lists, the learning that took months to accumulate. You start from zero somewhere else, which is precisely the point.

The account should be created under your billing, with the agency granted access. Any hesitation here tells you what the exit will look like.

2. Who is actually doing the work each week?

You will be sold by someone senior. Ask who touches the account on a Tuesday. It is often a junior with a checklist and forty other accounts.

Not automatically wrong — but you should know, and you should know how many accounts that person handles. Doing weekly optimisation, creative and tracking properly is ten to fifteen hours a month per account. The arithmetic gets impossible past a certain client count, and the service degrades for everyone.

3. What happens in the first thirty days?

A good answer is specific and unglamorous: audit, tracking verification, restructure, new creative, then launch. A vague answer about "optimising for synergies" means there is no plan.

Ask what they would do first. If the answer is not something about tracking, be careful — everything downstream depends on measurement being right.

4. How do you report, and what is in it?

Impressions and clicks are activity, not results. The report should lead with cost per lead, lead volume, and — if you can attribute it — cost per acquired customer.

Ask to see a real report from another client, anonymised. If it is a screenshot of the platform dashboard with a logo on it, that is not analysis.

5. What is your minimum term, and why?

Three months is reasonable and defensible: that is roughly how long a rebuilt account needs to clear learning and prove itself. Twelve months with no exit is a red flag. Month-to-month sounds friendly but often means nobody invests in the difficult work.

6. Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?

Percentage-of-spend is common and has an obvious conflict built in: their income rises when your budget rises, whether or not that was the right call.

It is not disqualifying — at larger budgets it is often fairest — but ask how they handle the conflict. A good answer involves recommending spend reductions when the data says so, and being able to name a time they did.

7. What do you need from me?

Anyone who says "nothing, leave it with us" has not run a successful account. They need your margins, your close rate, what a customer is worth, and fast feedback on lead quality. Without that they are optimising toward form fills rather than revenue.

8. What would make you tell me to stop?

The best answer I ever heard from a candidate was "if your close rate means you cannot afford the leads at any realistic cost, I will tell you in week two rather than take six months of retainer."

Someone who cannot imagine any circumstance in which they would advise you to stop is selling, not advising.

9. Can I speak to a client who left?

Everyone has happy current clients. How someone talks about a client who left tells you far more — whether the handover was clean, whether the account went with them, whether it ended honestly.

The answers that should end the conversation

• "We guarantee X leads a month." Nobody controls the auction. This is either a guess dressed as a promise, or the leads will be junk to hit the number.
• "We have a special relationship with Google." Partner status is a volume badge. It buys you nothing.
• "We can get you to position one." Ad rank is set per auction, per user. It cannot be promised.
• "Our proprietary AI does the optimisation." Ask what it does. If the answer stays abstract, it is the platform's own automation with a logo on it.
• Any hesitation about account ownership. Walk.

None of this requires you to understand paid media. It requires you to notice whether the answers are specific. Specific answers come from people who have done the work.