The Right Questions to Ask an Agency Before Handing Over Your Meta Ads

Handing your Meta Ads over to an agency means putting part of your marketing budget in their hands and, more importantly, part of your flow of new customers. Yet most business owners choose based on a well-delivered pitch, a portfolio of screenshots with sky-high ROAS, and a gut feeling that they're dealing with "good people." Then, three months later, they end up with a report full of impressions and clicks and not a single line about revenue.

The problem isn't a shortage of good agencies. It's that, without the right questions, you can't tell an agency that generates sales apart from one that generates inflated metrics during the selection phase. And on the dashboard, at first, the two look remarkably alike.

This guide gives you the concrete questions to ask before signing, grouped by area: goals and KPIs, data transparency, lead handling, creative, contract. They're not meant to put the agency through an exam. They're meant to help you understand how they really work, and to help them see whether you're a serious client. Strong agencies appreciate a business owner who asks precise questions.

Before the questions: get clear on what you actually want

You can't evaluate an agency if you don't know what you need. The upstream question is one: should Meta Ads drive direct sales (ecommerce, bookings) or generate contacts you'll qualify and close yourself (lead generation)? These are two different worlds, with different metrics.

If you sell online, your north star is real ROAS and MER at the P&L level. If you generate leads, what matters is cost per lead, contact quality, and above all how many of those leads become paying customers. An agency that shows you a €4 cost per lead without knowing how many you actually close isn't telling you anything useful. Dig into the difference in brand vs. performance marketing to align expectations from the very first meeting.

Bring three numbers of your own to that first meeting: the average value of a customer, what you can afford to spend to acquire one (your sustainable cost per lead), and how many new customers you want per month. If an agency doesn't ask you for these numbers — or worse, doesn't know what to do with them — that's already a signal.

Block 1. Goals and KPIs: what numbers they promise, and how they measure them

"What metric do you judge yourselves on as an agency?"

The answer reveals the philosophy. If they immediately talk about in-platform ROAS (what Meta calculates inside Business Manager) without ever mentioning revenue, margin, or closed customers, you're facing a dashboard-oriented agency. Meta's ROAS tends to overstate results, because it takes credit for conversions that would have happened anyway and counts the same user more than once. A mature agency talks about MER vs. ROAS and can explain the difference clearly.

"Which vanity metrics will you NOT use to justify the work?"

An uncomfortable question, and useful precisely for that reason. Impressions, reach, clicks, CPM, and even CTR in isolation are activity metrics, not outcome metrics. A high CTR with zero sales is a problem, not a success. You want to hear them name the Meta Ads KPIs that actually matter: cost per acquisition, conversion rate down the funnel, value generated. If the agency defends CTR as the main metric, you already know what the report will look like at month's end.

"What results do you commit to in the first 90 days, and what happens if you miss them?"

Be wary of anyone who guarantees exact numbers ("I'll get you 50 leads at €10 each") before having seen your product, your market, and your historical data — that's a sales pitch, not a forecast. But be just as wary of anyone who never commits to anything. The healthy answer is a range based on industry benchmarks, a declared test phase (usually 4-6 weeks), and progressive targets. They need to be able to explain how they build the baseline.

Block 2. Data transparency: who owns the accounts, and who sees the real numbers

This is where the most important — and most overlooked — battle is fought. Data transparency isn't a courtesy: it's what keeps you from being held hostage by the agency.

"Does the ad account and the pixel stay registered under my name?"

This is the question that saves companies. The Meta account, the Business Manager, the pixel, and the Conversions API must be owned by you, with the agency added as a partner. If the agency works on its own account and "hosts" you, the day you switch providers you lose your optimization history, your built audiences, and your conversion data. It's lock-in in disguise. Proper setup of server-side tracking with the Conversions API needs to live in your own house.

"Do I have direct, ongoing access to the dashboard — not just the monthly report?"

You should be able to log into Business Manager whenever you want and see spend, results, and creative in real time. An agency that sends you only a PDF once a month, without giving you access to the raw data, is asking you for an act of faith. The data must be yours and always visible. Also ask how they set up conversion tracking: if they can't answer in detail, in the post-privacy era their metrics will be unreliable regardless of good intentions.

"How do you handle attribution, and what happens when Meta and my own system don't match?"

No platform tells the absolute truth. Meta overstates, Google Analytics understates, your CRM knows the truth about revenue but doesn't always know where the customer came from. A competent agency understands the limits of attribution models and doesn't hide behind whichever number is most convenient. You want someone who, when real sales don't match the reported ROAS, investigates instead of handing you a prettier chart.

"How do you report on ad spend versus your own fee?"

You need to clearly understand how much goes to advertising (the money that ends up with Meta) and how much goes to the agency as a fee. Be careful with percentage-of-spend models: they create a perverse incentive to get you to spend more, not to spend better. That's not necessarily wrong, but it needs to be disclosed and discussed openly. Have them walk you through the logic behind the proposed advertising budget.

Block 3. Lead handling: where most of the ROI dies

This is the section that separates agencies that bring in customers from those that bring in clicks. Generating the lead is half the job. The other half — almost always ignored — is what happens to the lead afterward.