Seven questions to ask before you sign with any agency

Take these to every firm you talk to, including us. Each one has an answer that should be immediate, and hesitation on any of them is information.

1. Whose name is on the ad account?

The right answer is yours, in your billing, from the first day, with the agency added as a user.

Agencies that run client spend through their own MCC or their own Business Manager can be doing it for legitimate operational reasons. It also means the account history, the conversion data and the machine learning built on top of it belong to them. When you leave, the campaigns can come with you and the history often cannot, and the history is what the bidding runs on.

If the answer involves the word "our", ask what you take with you when the relationship ends.

2. Who does the work day to day?

Not who is on the call. Who is in the account on a Tuesday.

There is nothing wrong with a junior doing execution under supervision. There is something wrong with being sold a senior and assigned a coordinator. Ask for the name and ask to meet them.

3. What happens to the tracking when I leave?

If the tag container, the conversion actions and the server-side setup live in the agency's property, you are renting your own measurement. When the engagement ends the tags stop, and the next firm rebuilds from nothing, which costs you a quarter of data and the fee to rebuild it.

Everything should be in your accounts, documented, with your credentials.

4. What can't you do?

This is the one that separates people.

The good answer is specific and comes quickly. Something like: we cannot guarantee your close rate, we do not have experience in your trade, this market may be too small for the budget you have in mind, or we will not know if this channel works for at least eight weeks.

The bad answer is a reframe. If a firm cannot name a limit inside ten seconds, either they have not thought about it or they are not going to tell you.

5. What is the reporting tied to?

Impressions, clicks and click-through rate are inputs. A report built on inputs is a report designed to look acceptable during a bad quarter.

You want cost per qualified lead and cost per booked job, and you want to know exactly how a lead gets classified as qualified and who does the classifying. If nobody can explain the definition, the number is decorative.

6. What does leaving look like?

Ask before you join. Notice period, what gets handed over, in what format, and how long it takes.

A firm that has a clean answer has done it before and is not afraid of it. A firm that has never thought about it is telling you something about how the last relationships ended.

7. Can I see a live account?

With their client's permission, on a screen share, with the date range visible.

A case study is a designed artifact. A live account is not. Ten minutes inside a real one tells you more about how somebody works than any deck will, and the reaction to being asked tells you the rest.

The ones we would rather you did not ask us

Two of these land awkwardly on us and you should ask them anyway.

Question 7. No client has given us written permission to show their account or publish their figures, so what we can offer is a walkthrough of the work with the client's numbers removed, which is a weaker answer than a screen share and we know it. Nobody has been asked yet, and asking a client to expose their acquisition costs is a real request rather than a formality.

Question 4. Ours: we cannot guarantee your close rate or your deal size. We have not sold and delivered every one of our service lines as a productized offering, and where you would be the first in a trade, we will say so before you sign rather than after.

Print the list, take it to three firms, and compare the pauses.

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