Resource
A buyer's guide written from the other side of the table. What to ask, what to verify, which answers should end the conversation, and why you should own your own ad accounts even if the agency would prefer otherwise.
Start here
Buyers usually compare decks, logos and monthly fees. Those are the three things easiest to fake and least predictive of whether the work will move revenue.
Is the problem volume, cost, lead quality, follow-up speed, or the fact that nobody can tell which campaigns produce sales conversations? These are four different problems with four different answers. An agency that is excellent at one of them may be irrelevant to another. If you cannot name the problem, every proposal will sound equally good and you will end up choosing on price or personality.
Ask any shortlisted agency to look at your live campaigns and landing pages and describe what they see. You are not looking for a free strategy. You are testing whether they can explain your current setup back to you accurately. Anyone can propose a rebuild. Fewer can tell you what is already working and should be left alone, and that restraint is worth more than a rebuild pitch.
A showroom that needs walk-ins, a B2B firm with a six-month cycle and a D2C brand chasing first purchase all need different definitions of success. Ask how the agency would define a qualified lead in your business specifically. If the answer is generic, the reporting will be generic too.
Red flags
Some of these are uncomfortable to publish as an agency, because they describe practices that are genuinely common and genuinely profitable for the agency doing them. They still cost the client more than they save.
Fee structures
There is no single correct pricing model. There is only the behaviour each model quietly encourages, and whether you are comfortable with it.
Common and easy to administer. The tension is obvious: the agency's revenue rises when your budget rises, whether or not the extra spend is efficient. It can work well when paired with a clearly agreed efficiency target, so that scaling spend requires holding cost per qualified lead. Without that guardrail, budget growth becomes the default recommendation.
A fixed monthly fee removes the pull toward higher spend, which is why many buyers prefer it. The risk moves elsewhere: a small account can end up subsidising a large one inside the agency, and a growing account can quietly outgrow the hours allocated to it. Agree what the retainer covers and revisit it as the account changes.
A base fee plus a performance component can align both sides well — provided the performance metric is one both parties genuinely influence and can measure the same way. Pure performance deals fail most often when the agency delivers leads and the client's follow-up loses them, or when nobody agreed in advance what counts as a qualified lead. Define that term in writing before the model matters.
Checklist
Work through these on the call. The pattern in the answers tells you more than any individual response.
Resource
Buyer's guide
How WIF works
WIF runs an Audit, Build, Launch, Scale sequence: find the leaks in spend, pages, tracking and follow-up; rebuild campaign architecture and the tracking map; launch controlled tests with clear budget limits; then move spend toward what shows useful cost and revenue behaviour. Clients keep ownership of their ad accounts and tracking throughout.
FAQ
You should. Create the ad accounts under your own billing and your own business manager, then grant the agency admin access. If the relationship ends you keep the spend history, the conversion data and the learning that history represents. An agency that insists on holding the account in its own name is protecting itself, not you.
Ask what they would do in month one and why, how conversions are defined and validated, who does the daily work, what the reporting cadence is, what happens if results are flat at ninety days, and how you exit. Vague answers to any of these are the answer.
Yes. Nobody controls auction competition, search algorithms or your sales team's follow-up speed. A guarantee means either the metric has been defined so loosely it cannot fail, or the agency is willing to say something it cannot support.
The three common structures are a percentage of ad spend, a flat retainer and a hybrid. Percentage of spend rewards the agency for spending more. A flat retainer removes that pull but can leave a small account under-served or a large one under-resourced. Hybrid models split the difference. What matters is that you understand the incentive the structure creates.
Look for someone who talks about conversion quality before they talk about cost per click, who asks about your sales follow-up in the first call, who wants access to your CRM outcomes, and who can explain your current account structure back to you before proposing to rebuild it.
Expect diagnosis and rebuild in the first month, controlled tests in the second, and evidence-based budget movement from there. Paid search can show signal within weeks. SEO and content take considerably longer. An agency should tell you which of your goals sits on which timeline before you sign.
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