Questions to Ask a PPC Agency
Questions for vetting a paid search or paid social agency before you sign, covering who does the work, how they charge, who owns the ad accounts, how conversions are tracked, and how the relationship ends.
The questions
Open any question for the note
Who would be working on my account day to day, and how many other accounts do they handle?
Why ask it
Pitches are often run by senior staff and accounts by junior ones. A named person with a workload figure gives you something to hold them to. Refusing to name anyone usually means the account will be assigned after you sign.
What accounts have you run at a budget close to ours?
Why ask it
Tactics that work at fifty thousand a month rarely transfer to five thousand, and the reverse is also true. An agency whose case studies are all an order of magnitude away from your spend will be learning on your money.
How do you charge: a flat fee, a percentage of spend, or on performance?
Why ask it
Percentage of spend rewards raising your budget rather than your return, which matters most when results are flat. Ask what happens to the fee if they recommend cutting spend in half.
Would the ad accounts and data be owned by us or by you?
Why ask it
Agencies that run campaigns inside their own accounts keep the conversion history when you leave, which resets performance for whoever comes next. This is the single most expensive thing to discover late.
Which platforms would you put the budget on first, and why not the others?
Why ask it
The reasons for exclusion tell you more than the recommendations. An agency that proposes every channel at once is either avoiding a judgment call or selling capacity it needs to fill.
What would you spend the first thirty days doing before you change anything?
Why ask it
Good answers involve reading the existing account, checking tracking, and finding out what your margins are. An agency that plans to rebuild everything in week one has not asked what the current setup was trying to do.
What would you consider a good cost per acquisition for us by the end of the first quarter?
Why ask it
You are testing whether they will commit to a number before they are paid. Watch how they hedge: reasonable caveats about seasonality and data quality are fair, refusing any figure at all is not.
How do you track conversions given how much platform reporting is now modeled?
Why ask it
Since consent rules and browser changes, reported conversions and actual sales can diverge sharply. An agency that has no view on server-side tracking, offline imports, or reconciling platform numbers with your own back end is reporting figures it cannot defend.
Who writes the ad copy, and how many versions get tested before you settle on one?
Why ask it
Ask to see a real set of variants. If every headline is a rewording of the same claim, you are paying for volume rather than testing, and results will plateau quickly.
How do you build keyword lists, and how often do you prune search terms?
Why ask it
Pruning is the unglamorous work that decides whether budget goes to buyers or browsers. "Monthly" is a reasonable answer; a blank look means nobody has been reading the search terms report.
How much do you leave to automated bidding, and when do you override it?
Why ask it
Most accounts now run on the platform's own bidding, so the value an agency adds sits in feeding it the right goals and constraints. If the answer is that the algorithm handles everything, ask what exactly you are paying them to do each month.
Do you work on landing pages, or is that our side?
Why ask it
Campaign performance is capped by the page it lands on, and this is where responsibility most often falls between two parties. Settle it before results are disputed rather than after.
How do you decide to turn a campaign off?
Why ask it
Listen for a threshold: a spend level, a conversion count, a time limit. Without one, losing campaigns get kept alive because nobody wants to admit the test failed.
What would you need to see before telling us to spend less?
Why ask it
This is the question agencies paid on a percentage of spend find hardest. A clear answer, such as a rising cost per sale at flat volume, suggests they will tell you an unwelcome truth.
How would you handle our best-performing ad being disapproved?
Why ask it
Anyone with real experience has a story about a policy rejection and a route to a human reviewer. Someone who has never dealt with one has not run accounts for long, whatever the pitch deck says.
What does your reporting look like, and can I see a real example with the figures redacted?
Why ask it
Ask whether the report explains decisions or just lists metrics. Dashboards full of impressions and clicks, with no line about what was changed and why, are designed to look busy.
How often would we speak, and who would be on those calls?
Why ask it
Weekly calls with the person doing the work beat monthly calls with an account manager relaying messages. Note whether the specialist is included at all after onboarding.
What do you need from us, and what happens when we are slow to provide it?
Why ask it
Most stalled engagements stall on the client side: no creative, no product feed, no access. An agency that has thought about this will describe how they escalate rather than quietly billing while blocked.
Tell me about a client where results went badly and what you did.
Why ask it
The useful part is whether they describe their own misjudgment or blame the client's product and market. An agency that claims never to have had a poor engagement is either new or not being straight with you.
What is the notice period, and what do we keep if we leave?
Why ask it
Twelve-month lock-ins, ownership of creative, and access to historical data all belong in this answer. Ask for it in writing, since verbal reassurance about handover is worth nothing during a dispute.
Choosing a Paid Media Agency
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Before the Pitch
Know your own numbers first
Bring your average order value, gross margin, and what a customer is worth over a year. Without those, any agency can only optimize toward clicks and leads, and you will have no basis for judging whether a cost per sale is good.
Give every agency the same brief
Same budget, same goal, same access. Otherwise you are comparing writing styles rather than approaches, and the most confident deck wins.
Ask for a read of your current account, not a generic audit
Grant read-only access and see what they notice. Agencies that come back with observations specific to your campaigns have done the work; those that return a checklist of standard findings have run a tool.
Warning Signs During the Process
Guaranteed positions or guaranteed cost per lead
Auction prices are set by competitors bidding against you, so no agency controls them. A guarantee usually means a narrow definition of a lead, or a plan to chase cheap traffic that does not convert.
Certifications presented as results
Platform badges reflect spend thresholds and exams, not outcomes for clients like you. Treat them as a baseline rather than evidence.
No named specialist
If nobody in the room will be doing the work, ask to meet the person who will. An agency that resists this is protecting a staffing model it does not want you to see.
Reporting that only ever improves
Real accounts have bad months. A pitch built entirely on upward graphs suggests either selective reporting or a habit of quietly redefining the metric.
Settle These in Writing
- Who holds the advertising accounts, and confirmation that you retain access and history if the relationship ends.
- What the fee covers and what is billed separately, including creative production, landing pages, and feed management.
- The notice period on both sides, and what happens to work in progress during it.
- Which metrics the monthly review will use, agreed before the first report rather than after a disappointing one.
- Who has permission to change budgets, and the ceiling above which they must ask you first.