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Before you hire anyone

Five questions to ask any advertising agency.

Including this one. These are the questions that separate an agency doing the work from an agency reporting on it, and the answers do not depend on who you end up hiring. Ask them early, while saying no is still cheap.

Ask us these directly →

01

My agency’s dashboard says the ads are profitable, but the bank account disagrees. Who is right?

The bank account, almost always. Ad platforms grade their own homework: view-through conversions, overlapping attribution windows and pre-discount revenue can make a mediocre account look excellent.

The only honest test is reconciling platform numbers against your actual sales system, order by order. That reconciliation is the first thing we build, because until it exists, every other number is a claim.

02

My current agency says the ad account is theirs and I’ll lose everything if I leave. Is that true?

Mostly no, and where it is true, it should never have been. The history in an account you funded is your business record, and Google’s own third-party policy entitles you to your account ID on request.

An agency that built your campaigns inside its own property has taken a deposit on your future loyalty. Ask for admin access under your own email; the reaction tells you most of what you need to know.

03

How can I tell whether my current agency is actually doing anything?

Ask for the change history: what was changed, when, and why. Every ad platform logs this, so “trust us, we’re optimising” is never the only available answer.

If months of fees map to a handful of budget nudges, you have your answer; if the log is full but performance is not moving, the strategy is the problem instead. Either way you have learned something a dashboard would not have told you.

04

Should I hire a freelancer instead of an agency?

Sometimes, honestly, yes: a good freelancer beats a bad agency at a fraction of the cost. The usual failure is bandwidth — one person, many clients, and your account drifts the week they are ill or on holiday.

Our shape is an attempt at a third option: senior judgement on every account, with execution volume carried by an operations layer that does not take holidays. Whether that fits you depends on how much is at stake when a week gets missed.

05

How much of my time will this take?

More at the start, then little. The first weeks need you: access, product truths, claims we may and may not make, what a good customer actually looks like.

After that it settles to reading a short fortnightly review, challenging what deserves challenge, and approving anything public-facing before it ships. If an agency asks for none of your time, worry; your business knowledge is the part it cannot generate.

Why we publish this. Every answer above can be turned on us, which is the point of writing them down. Our own commitments are on the how-we-work page: accounts opened in your name, terms agreed in writing before work starts, and every change logged. If our answers to these five ever stop matching what we do, you will have the receipts.

Ask us the same five.

Send your site and the accounts you currently run. You will get a straight read on whether there is a case, and whether we are the right partner for it.

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