A local business owner we spoke with signed with an agency after a good pitch. Slick deck, confident rep, a setup fee that "covered everything." He paid it.
Three months later he wanted to leave. That's when he learned the ad account was in the agency's name. So was the pixel, the tracking, the audiences the algorithm had spent months learning. Leaving meant starting from zero. He stayed another six months he didn't want to stay, not because the agency was good, but because leaving was too expensive.
He never asked the one question that would have saved him: who owns the account? Here are the eleven questions to ask before you sign — and, just as important, what a good answer and a bad answer sound like.
What's the most important question to ask first?
Ownership. Before anything about strategy or price, ask: who owns the ad account, the pixel or tracking, the creative, and the lead data?
The right answer is short: you do. You own all of it, the agency works inside accounts that are yours, and if you leave, you take everything with you. A bad answer sounds reasonable at first — "we manage it all for you so you don't have to worry about it." That's not convenience. That's lock-in. When the agency owns your account, you're renting your own marketing, and the day you leave you lose the account history, the audience data, and sometimes the leads themselves. This is the question that decides how much power you keep, so ask it first and get the answer in writing.
What should you ask about leaving — before you've even joined?
Ask what happens on the way out while you can still walk away: "If I leave in six months, what exactly do I keep, and how do I get it?"
It feels awkward to ask about the exit before the relationship starts. Ask anyway. This is an industry with a lot of turnover — project-based agencies lose around 42% of their clients a year, so leaving is normal, not rude. A good agency answers cleanly: you keep the account, the data, the creative, and here's the simple handoff. A bad agency gets cagey, mentions "proprietary" systems, or explains that the account "stays with us." Anything that makes you hard to fire is designed to make you hard to fire. The easier they make leaving, the more they're betting on results to keep you.
How do you test whether their reporting is honest?
Ask: "Show me a real client report. What's the headline number?"
The headline tells you everything. A strong agency leads with money: spend in, leads or booked jobs out, and cost per real outcome — a signed client, a booked consult, a closed case. A weak agency leads with impressions, reach, and clicks. Those aren't lies, exactly, but you can't pay rent with reach, and a report built on vanity metrics is usually hiding a return that isn't there. Here's a quick way to read the answer:
| What they lead the report with | What it usually means | | --- | --- | | Cost per signed client / booked job | They measure what pays you, and it's probably working | | Leads and cost per lead | Reasonable — but ask what happens to those leads next | | Impressions, reach, clicks, "engagement" | The money story isn't good enough to lead with | | A dashboard you can't get a straight answer on | You'll be guessing for the length of the contract |
If you can't understand the report in the pitch, when they're trying to impress you, you won't understand it later, when they're not.
What are the money questions most owners forget?
Two of them. First: "Is there a setup fee, and exactly what does it buy?" A setup fee isn't automatically bad — it can pay for building the funnel, tracking, and creative. It's bad when nobody can itemize it. Ask for a written list of what's included and when each piece ships. Second: "How long is the contract, and how do I cancel?" Watch for auto-renewing annual deals with painful cancellation terms. Those protect the agency, not you. A fair setup gives the work a few months of runway to prove out while keeping your exit clean and penalty-free. If an agency needs a year-long lock-in to hold onto you, that's them telling you the results might not.
What should you ask about who actually does the work?
Ask: "Who runs my account day to day — the person in this room, or someone I'll never meet?"
Pitches are often delivered by the closer. The work is often done by someone else entirely, sometimes junior, sometimes juggling forty accounts. That's not automatically a problem, but you deserve to know. A good agency is upfront: here's your actual point of contact, here's how often you'll talk, here's how many accounts they carry. A bad agency keeps it vague so you don't notice that the confident person who sold you isn't the person touching your money. You're not buying the pitch. You're buying whoever opens your account on Monday.
What's the question that reveals if they'll waste your ad spend?
Ask: "When you generate a lead for me, how fast does it get followed up — and by whom?"
This is the question that separates agencies who think their job ends at the click from ones who know it doesn't. Great ads feeding slow follow-up is money on the floor: the lead comes in, sits for hours, and a competitor signs it. A sharp agency has an answer — instant auto-text to the lead, an alert to your team, a clear owner for the first call. A weak one looks at you blankly, because in their mind delivering the lead was the whole job. It wasn't. The lead is the halfway point.
What does a good answer actually look like?
Fast, plain, and in writing. That's the whole test. The best agencies answer every one of these questions in about a minute each, without flinching, because they've built the business to survive exactly these questions. You own everything. Leaving is easy. The report leads with money. The fee is itemized. The contract lets you go.
Here's the proof that this model works, not just sounds nicer. A med spa we work with in Nice owns its own account and data, and put about 620 euros of ad spend through a tight funnel — clear offer, matched page, instant follow-up — for 193 leads at 3.21 euros each and 88 paying clients. A 71x return. The point isn't the number. It's that the client can see the number, because the account, the data, and the reporting all belong to them. An agency confident in its results has no reason to hide any of that from you.
The 30-Second Audit
Three yes/no questions — whether you're vetting a new agency or rethinking the one you have.
- Do you own your ad account, pixel, data, and creative — with proof in writing?
- Does your reporting lead with cost per signed client or booked job, not impressions?
- Could you leave in 30 days and take everything with you, with no penalty?
If any answer was no, book a free audit — we'll pull your numbers and tell you exactly what's broken, even if you don't end up working with us.
The pitch is designed to impress you. The answers are designed to protect you. Ask for the answers.