Ask five things before you sign, and ask for the answers in writing: who runs the account day to day, who owns the accounts and the data, how the fee behaves when your spend changes, which revenue number the reporting is built on, and what you will be told when it is not working. A written answer to those five separates a shortlist faster than any case study, because the case study was chosen by the agency and these were not.
What does an ecommerce agency actually do?
It buys attention on your behalf, decides what that attention is pointed at, and tells you what happened. In practice that is media buying across Meta and Google, the feed and catalogue work that decides what can be shown at all, the pages the traffic lands on, the email that carries the second order, and the measurement that holds the four together. Most agencies do one or two of those and describe it as the whole thing. It is usually the ad account, because the ad account is the part with a login.
Who actually runs the account?
Ask for the name of the person who will open it on a Tuesday morning, and how many other accounts that person carries. The people in a pitch are frequently not the people in the account, and the gap between those two groups is the single biggest predictor of how the next year goes. There is no correct number of accounts per person, but there is a correct answer to the question, and a firm that cannot give you one has told you something.
Who owns the ad accounts, the pixel and the data?
You should, from the first day, in your own business manager and your own Google account, with the agency added as a user. The test is to ask what happens the day you leave. Anything other than "we are removed as a user and every account, every pixel and every conversion history stays exactly where it is" means part of your business is being held as collateral. Rebuilding an advertising history costs months, and a firm that knows this is a firm that never has to be quite good enough.
How are you paid, and what happens to the fee when my spend changes?
The only fee that does not quietly pay somebody to spend your money is a fee that does not move with your spend. A percentage of ad spend pays the agency more for spending more, in a job whose hardest single decision is when to stop, and it does that at exactly the moment you need honest advice about a budget. We work on a fixed monthly fee or a commission on the growth, never a percentage of ad spend. How the arrangement works is written out in full.
Which revenue number is the reporting built on?
It should be the store's, for the same dates, counted once. Every platform reports the revenue it believes it caused, and the sum of those claims is reliably larger than the shop, so a report assembled out of platform figures can show growth in a month the business shrank. Ask to see a week where the platform's number and the store's number disagreed, and ask what was written about it. The size of that gap on an account we owned is one of these notes, and the Monday report is shown in full.
What will you tell me when it is not working?
Ask for a bad month and the sentence they wrote about it at the time. Every account has one, so an agency that cannot produce one is either new or editing. What you are looking for is whether the bad news arrived before you asked, and whether it came with a decision attached rather than a paragraph of weather.
What to discount
- A return on ad spend screenshot with no spend and no dates. A ratio without a denominator is a picture of a ratio.
- Platform partner badges. Almost all of them are a threshold of client spend and a quiz, not a measure of results.
- Logos you cannot verify. Ask which of them are current and who runs them now.
- Headcount. A larger team means your account is more likely to be run by the newest person on it, not less.
- Awards. Almost all of them are entered by the agency and judged on the write up.
What to ask for before anything is signed
A written read on your own account. Not a proposal and not a deck: an actual look at what is running, what it is measured against, and what the first three decisions would be. It costs the agency a morning, it tells you more than any reference, and it is the closest thing to a trial run the industry offers. It is what we do before anything is signed, and you can ask for one on the contact page.