Most agencies sound great on a sales call. The questions below are the ones that help you tell, before you sign anything, whether the team in front of you is actually going to help you grow your business — or whether you’ll be wishing you’d asked more questions about six months from now.
Before hiring a Facebook ads agency, get clear answers in seven areas: who will own your Business Portfolio and Pixel, how they handle conversion tracking, how they produce and refresh creative, how they structure campaigns, what their reporting looks like, how pricing works, and what happens to your account if you decide to leave. Aim for specific answers, not generic ones. If anything in those seven areas feels vague or evasive, that’s a signal worth taking seriously.
Most agencies have a good pitch. The real differences show up later: inaccurate tracking, days-long email response times, and reports focused on likes and clicks instead of leads and sales.
The questions below are designed to surface that gap early, in the discovery call. The mechanics on Meta are different from Google, so even if you’ve already read our companion piece on questions to ask before hiring a Google Ads agency, expect a different set of follow-ups here. And if you’re still deciding whether you even need an agency, the Facebook ads agency vs. freelancer comparison is a better starting point.
Before anything else, get clear on who owns what.
Your Meta Business Portfolio (the account that used to be called Business Manager) should be created under your business, not the agency’s. The agency then gets added as a Partner, which lets them manage your ad account, Pixel, Page, and Catalog without owning any of it. Per Meta’s own documentation on adding partners, agencies should be added via their Business ID, not as individual personal users. If an agency suggests setting up your Business Portfolio on their side and transferring it later, ask why. Meta doesn’t offer a simple tool for that kind of transfer, so it can be hard to undo.
This is the question most businesses never think to ask, despite having some of the biggest long-term consequences. Meta does not offer a straightforward way to transfer Pixel ownership between Business Portfolios. If your Pixel lives inside an agency’s Business Portfolio instead of your own, separating later can become messy or impossible. In many cases, businesses end up creating a new Pixel, losing years of historical data, audiences, and optimization learning in the process.
The same idea applies to your Facebook Page, any product catalog you use for Advantage+ Shopping, and your custom and lookalike audiences. All of those should sit inside your Business Portfolio. If an agency treats any of them as their property, that’s worth a careful conversation.
You should be the admin on your own ad account, with the agency added as a Partner with the roles they need. It’s also worth confirming, on the front end, that the agency will remove its access if the relationship ends.
This is where most Meta accounts quietly drift off course. If conversion tracking isn’t right, every other decision the algorithm makes is built on bad data.
You want a specific answer here, not just “we’ll set up the Pixel.” The current best practice on Meta is to run two things together: the Pixel (which fires in the browser) and the Conversions API, or CAPI (which sends events from your server). Running both, with the same events shared between them, helps Meta catch conversions the Pixel alone would miss, especially since iOS App Tracking Transparency made browser tracking less reliable.
Ask whether the agency plans to send qualified lead or sales data back into Meta through your CRM or offline conversion tracking. This is usually a premium setup that costs extra and typically only makes sense once the business is generating enough monthly conversions for the platform to learn from consistently.
Meta lets you choose attribution windows for reporting (7-day click and 1-day view is the modern default). It’s worth asking which window the agency reports against and why. None of Meta’s attribution windows give a perfectly complete picture, so a thoughtful agency will pair Meta’s reported numbers with a downstream view from your CRM or analytics platform.
Skip the question about whether they “follow best practices.” Ask how they actually implement them.
A good agency should be able to clearly explain how they plan to organize campaigns and ad sets based on your goals, budget, and audience. Different products, services, offers, or customer types often require different campaign structures, testing strategies, and budgets. The goal is to build an account that gives Meta enough data to optimize effectively without creating unnecessary complexity or fragmentation. Too many ad sets or campaigns without enough ad spend to support them can kill your ads.
Meta retired detailed targeting on January 15, 2026, so any interest-based audiences created before October 2025 no longer deliver. If an agency is still building campaigns the old way, performance has probably been slipping for months. A good answer here describes the new approach: calling out the target customer in the creative, broader audience groupings, lookalikes from first-party data, Advantage+ Audience, or some combination, and how they’re keeping audience quality from getting too loose.
Retargeting is cheap on Meta and easy to over-credit. It’s worth asking what share of spend the agency typically allocates to retargeting versus prospecting, and how they make sure audiences don’t overlap.
On Meta in 2026, creative does most of the heavy lifting. While Meta encourages ongoing creative testing, more creative is not always better. One strong ad can outperform 50 weak ones. High-quality creative also takes time and money to produce, so if an agency promises dozens of new ads every month at no additional cost, the quality is often going to suffer. The amount and frequency of creative testing should realistically scale with ad spend. A business spending $2,000/month does not need the same creative volume as one spending $50,000/month.
Ask whether creative is included and, if so, who actually produces it: an in-house designer, a videographer, an editor, or a media buyer working with stock imagery. If you’re expected to provide your own creative, find out what the agency expects from you and at what cadence. The economics of creative production can vary a lot between shops.
A workable Meta program usually has at least multiple ads in active rotation per campaign, with new creative introduced regularly. If the plan is built around one or two hero ads that will run for months, ask how that fits with how Meta’s delivery algorithm currently behaves.
You want to hear about structured testing rather than “we’ll see what works.” That means deliberate variation (hook, format, call to action, offer), a clear success metric (cost per conversion, hold rate, or thumb-stop rate depending on the goal), and a rhythm for retiring ads that aren’t working.
You’re hiring people, not a brand. It’s worth knowing who actually does the work.
The salesperson who runs the discovery call is rarely the same person who manages the account. Ask to meet the actual media buyer or strategist before signing, and ask how many other accounts that person is currently responsible for. Industry sources have flagged overloaded account managers as one of the more common reasons paid social accounts underperform, so the answer here matters.
Industry experience matters more in some categories than others, but you do not always need a perfect match. What matters most is whether the agency has successfully run campaigns with similar goals, sales cycles, and customer behavior. For example, a kitchen remodeler can still benefit from an agency with strong results for roofers because both are local, lead-generation-focused, high-ticket service businesses with similar targeting and buying behavior. Ask to see a few relevant case studies and pay attention to whether the campaign strategy actually resembles your business. As a reference point, our CK Baths case study walks through how disciplined creative, careful audience structure, and patient testing produced a 30x return on ad spend.
Reporting is where a lot of agency relationships fall apart. Setting expectations on the front end helps.
Ask for a sample report from a current client (with sensitive numbers redacted). What you want to see: spend, conversions, conversion value, cost per result, ROAS, and a short written interpretation that ties those numbers to actual business decisions. Reports built mostly of impressions, reach, and clicks — without a clear connection to leads or sales — tend to indicate weak performance.
Monthly is the floor for most Meta accounts. Accounts spending above roughly $25,000 a month usually benefit from a short weekly summary or a live dashboard on top of the monthly report. Whatever the cadence, reports should arrive on a regular schedule rather than whenever the agency gets around to it.
A confident agency will agree to one or two leading indicators — cost per acquisition, ROAS, cost per lead — and tell you what they’ll do if those metrics start to drift. If the answer is vague, there usually isn’t a real plan.
The cheapest agency on the invoice isn’t always the cheapest agency on a per-result basis.
The three common models are flat retainer, percent-of-spend, and hybrid. Each has trade-offs. Percent-of-spend pricing can create an incentive to push budgets higher, though most reputable agencies won’t recommend an increase that will hurt performance. Flat retainers are easier to budget but can mean your larger account gets the same attention as a smaller one. Hybrid models try to balance the two. The right model depends on your business and what you want the agency focused on.
It’s reasonable to avoid 12-month lock-ins with no notice period. A typical contract has a 30- to 60-day notice period and a clear description of what happens to your assets — ad account, Pixel, dataset, audiences, creative, conversion setup — when the relationship ends.
You should leave with full access to your ad account, your Pixel and dataset intact, your custom and lookalike audiences, and your Page. If any of those are treated as agency property in the contract, that’s worth questioning.
Industry sources tend to flag the same warning signs in Meta agency pitches:
One or two of these on their own aren’t always deal-breakers. A few of them together tend to be.
Plan on about 15–30 days for early signals, 60 to 90 days for meaningful optimization as the algorithm exits the learning phase, and 90 to 180 days before efficiency stabilizes. If someone promises results in two weeks, run as fast as you can in the other direction.
Sometimes. The trade-offs — breadth of skillset, accountability, redundancy, creative production capacity, continuity — are spelled out in our Facebook ads agency vs. freelancer comparison. A good freelancer can outperform a stretched agency, and a good agency can outperform a stretched freelancer. The right answer depends on the stakes and the scale.
Percent-of-spend pricing is the most common model in paid media. Some agencies may be tempted to push higher budgets because their revenue rises with spend, but a reputable shop won’t recommend an increase that will hurt performance, and will get any budget changes approved in writing first.
A useful rule of thumb is roughly $1,500 to $3,000 per month in ad spend. Below that, there usually is not enough budget or conversion volume for Meta’s algorithm to optimize effectively, which makes consistent results difficult. In most cases, spending under about $1,500/month simply is not enough data for the platform to properly learn and improve performance over time.
Three quick checks: (1) Are leads or purchases converting downstream, not just registering as platform conversions? (2) Has cost per result improved or stayed steady at higher volume over the last 90 days? (3) Can the agency explain, in plain English, what’s working and what isn’t, including which specific creative is carrying performance? If any of those are no, it’s worth asking why.
In many cases, yes. An agency retainer is a fairly small line item when it’s managing what could be one of your most valuable growth channels. The real value is in having experienced people watching performance, refreshing creative on a real cadence, and providing continuity so campaigns don’t stall when one person is out for a week.
If you’re talking to Facebook ads agencies and want a sanity check on what you’re hearing, reach out to Power Couch Media. We’ll review your account or your shortlist and share what we’d ask, what we’d push back on, and where we see real risk — whether or not you end up working with us. You can also see how we approach the work on our Meta ads management page.
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