Ask one question first and let the answer do most of the work: what did total store revenue do over the same weeks as the return you are showing me? Meta reports on its own view of causation and its own attribution window, so an account can post a return of four while the store makes the same money it made last month. An agency that has already put the two side by side is doing the job. One that has never been asked is about to find out live.
Ask what share of the account they think Meta actually drives
This is the honest version of the first question and it has a real answer. On Curated Chrome, our own brand, Meta was 26.6% of store revenue over seventeen months, and we say that on the case study rather than quoting the platform figure alone. A channel share is a harder number to produce than a platform return, which is exactly why it is worth asking for.
Any agency can screenshot a return. Very few can tell you what share of the business the channel actually carries.
Ask who makes the creative, and be careful what you buy
Meta performance is mostly creative. That is not a slogan, it is where the variance lives once the account structure is sane. So the question is not whether the agency talks about creative but who produces it, at what volume, and who owns the files afterwards. Some agencies produce, some advise on what to produce, and both can work. Buying the wrong one by accident is what does not work, so make them say plainly which they are. We advise on creative and we do not produce it, and we say so before anyone signs.
Ask what they do when the account stops converting
Every Meta account has a week where the return collapses for no visible reason. The useful question is what the agency does in that week. An answer that starts with duplicating ad sets or resetting learning is a reflex. An answer that starts with checking whether the conversion signal is still arriving is somebody who has seen a tracking failure dressed up as a performance problem.
Ask about the email side, because it decides the number
Paid social buys a first order. What happens next decides whether that order was profitable. On our own brand, 72.7% of email revenue came from flows rather than campaigns, which is to say from the sequences that fire after the ad has done its job. An agency running Meta with no view of what happens after the purchase is optimising half a system, and the other half is usually the cheaper half to fix.
Ask what you keep
The ad account, the pixel and dataset, the catalogue, the creative files and the audiences should be yours in your own Business Manager, with the agency holding access. Ask it directly and ask what the offboarding looks like. It is a two minute question that saves a bad quarter.
What we do with it
We answer these on your account, in writing, before anything is signed, and we start with whether the numbers on the screen match the numbers in the bank. How the channel runs week to week is on the Meta ads page, and the working arrangement is on how we work.