Choosing a paid media partner is mostly a game of telling operators apart from account babysitters. Both have nice decks. The difference shows up in how they answer a handful of specific questions. Here are the ten that matter, and what a good answer sounds like.
1. Who will actually run my account, day to day?
The most common bait and switch in this industry is a senior pitch followed by a junior on the account. Ask for a name, and ask how many other accounts that person manages. You want the people in the room to be the people in the ad account.
2. What single number do you hold yourself to?
Weak answers orbit platform ROAS. Strong answers name a blended metric: MER, contribution profit, or true CAC against margin. This matters because platform ROAS flatters, and an agency that manages to it can make an account look healthy while your bank balance shrinks. The number they choose tells you whose side the reporting is on.
3. How do you handle measurement and tracking?
If they wave this away, walk. Modern accounts lose 20 to 40 percent of conversion signal to iOS, ad blockers and cookie limits, and optimisation on bad data just spends faster. A real operator talks fluently about server-side tracking, the Conversions API, event deduplication and a single blended dashboard. Measurement is not a nice-to-have; it is the foundation everything else stands on. See how we approach it.
4. What is your creative process?
Targeting is largely automated now, so the lever that actually moves accounts is creative volume and testing. Ask how many new concepts they ship a week, how they decide what to test, and who makes the assets. "We will use your existing creative" is a quiet way of saying the ads will fatigue and stall.
5. What happens in the first 30 days?
A good answer is unglamorous: audit and fix measurement, clean up structure, establish a baseline, then start testing. Be sceptical of anyone promising to double your sales in week one. The honest version is "month one we fix the machine," and it is a better sign, not a worse one.
6. Will you show me what you would change before I pay?
Confident operators will open your account and point at specific leaks with dollar figures attached, for free, because they know the findings sell the work. That is the entire idea behind a paid media leak audit. An agency that will not look under the hood until you sign is asking you to buy blind.
7. Is there a lock-in contract?
Long minimum terms with no accountability protect the agency, not you. A short initial term to let the work compound, then month to month, is fair to both sides. If the only thing keeping you in the relationship is a contract, the relationship is already broken.
8. Do you guarantee results?
The right answer is no. Too much sits outside an agency's control: your product, pricing, margin and market. Anyone guaranteeing a specific ROAS or revenue number is either naive or selling. What they should guarantee is the work, the transparency and the direction of travel.
9. How and how often will you report?
You want a short weekly pulse and a monthly report built around the number that matters, not forty slides of platform screenshots. Ask to see a sample report. If it leads with platform ROAS and buries the blended picture, you have your answer.
10. Can I speak to a client you work with now?
References are worth more than case studies because you can ask your own questions. Ask the reference the awkward ones: did month one feel slow, do they get the founder or a manager, would they sign again. How an agency handles this request tells you as much as the answer does.
Red flags and green flags
Walk away from: guaranteed ROAS, reporting built only on platform metrics, a senior pitch and a junior account, vague measurement answers, no creative process, and long lock-ins.
Pay for: a named senior owner on your account, a blended number they manage to, fluent measurement, a real weekly creative pipeline, a willingness to audit before you buy, and honest expectations about month one.
The fastest way to decide
You can learn more from one free audit than from three sales calls. Watching how a prospective partner reads your actual account, what they notice, how specific they get, whether they attach numbers to problems, tells you exactly what you would be paying for. If you want that read on your account, book a free audit. Thirty minutes, no deck, no obligation, and you keep the findings either way.