Who owns the ad account, what the agency earns on your spend, and what happens the day you leave. Three answers you can verify before you sign anything.
Choosing an acquisition agency is mostly a question about what you can undo. Almost every claim a supplier makes about performance is unverifiable at the point of signature. What is verifiable, before you sign, is who will own the accounts, what the supplier earns on your money, and what happens on the day you leave. Those three answers predict more about the engagement than any case study.
The platforms have published the ownership rules, and they are not symmetrical. The industry has published research on its own compensation practices, and it is not flattering. Both are usable as selection criteria today.
Ask the ownership question before anything else
Where the account is created determines who controls it forever, and on one platform the word forever is close to literal.
Meta is the strict case. Meta states that if you create a new ad account in a business portfolio, “it will permanently be a part of that portfolio”, and that “the ad account can’t be deleted or transferred from the portfolio”. The same applies to datasets: “you can’t delete a dataset or transfer it to another business portfolio.”
The consequence, in practice. An agency that opens your ad account inside its own business portfolio has created an asset you can never take with you. You can be granted access to it, and that access can be revoked. There is no later remedy, because the platform documents none.
Google is the permissive case. Google states that manager account owners have full administrative access “but do not take data ownership or administrative rights away from client accounts”, and that “the client account still owns its data and has the ability to remove ownership access by unlinking.”
LinkedIn sits in between. LinkedIn states that only one Business Manager can own an ad account, and documents no transfer procedure. Its guidance where nobody with access is reachable is that “you might need to create a new ad account.”
Which gives you one instruction. Create the accounts yourself, in your own business portfolio or manager account, then grant the agency access. It costs an afternoon before the engagement and removes an entire category of dispute at the end of it.
The only supplier claim you can check at signature is whether the claim is the kind that can honestly be made at all.
Google’s position is unambiguous. “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” Its guidance adds that you should “beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a ‘special relationship’ with Google, or advertise a ‘priority submit’ to Google.”
The same logic covers paid media. Auction outcomes depend on competitor bids, on quality signals and on demand, none of which a supplier controls. A guaranteed cost per lead is either a claim about things outside the supplier’s control or a promise to buy worse leads to hit the number.
And there is a legal dimension in the US. The FTC’s substantiation doctrine requires advertisers to hold a reasonable basis for objective performance claims before making them. The Commission has acted on this in the sector: FTC v. Pointbreak Media, 2018, concerned deceptive claims made to small businesses about Google listings.
What to ask instead of accepting a guarantee. Ask what the supplier will commit to that it actually controls: response times, change logs, the definitions in reporting, the cadence of tests. Those are commitments that can be met or missed, and therefore mean something.
One nuance worth stating. A supplier declining to guarantee results is not evasion. It is the only accurate answer, and the ones who give it are usually the ones who will tell you the truth later as well.
Ask what the agency earns on your money, not what it charges you
The invoice is one number. What the supplier makes on the media can be another, and the industry’s own research says so.
The study that established this. In 2016 the Association of National Advertisers published a study conducted by K2 Intelligence into media transparency in the US market. It drew on 150 sources, 117 of them working in US media buying, and 59 reporting direct experience of non-transparent practices, 34 of them relating to rebates and 33 to principal-based buying.
The magnitudes reported. Rebates ranging from 1.67 percent to around 20 percent of spend. Principal markups, where the agency buys inventory on its own account and resells it, of roughly 30 to 90 percent.
The context that matters for reading it. Five of the six largest holding companies declined to participate, and the 4A’s, the agencies’ own trade body, called the study “anonymous, inconclusive, and one-sided”. Both facts belong in any honest citation of it.
Why it still applies to a small B2B engagement. Not because a ten-person agency runs principal-based buying, but because the disclosure question it raises is the right one and costs nothing to ask: does anything you receive from a platform, a reseller or a technology vendor depend on what I spend?
And the model most engagements now use. The ANA’s compensation survey, 18th edition, fielded in the second quarter of 2022 across 101 marketers and 336 relationships, found 82 percent of relationships fee-based, up from 68 percent in 2016, with performance incentives present in 41 percent, down from 48 percent and from 61 percent earlier.
None of them are about results. All of them have answers you can check.
Who creates the accounts, and in whose portfolio. The single most consequential answer, for the reasons above. Anything other than “yours” needs a written explanation.
What do you earn on my media beyond your fee. Rebates, volume arrangements, reseller margins, technology commissions. The answer “nothing” is fine and should be in writing.
What will you commit to that you control. Response times, change logs, reporting definitions, test cadence. A supplier who cannot name three is selling outcomes it cannot deliver.
What is your reporting attribution window, and can you change it. Ask for a sample report before signing and check whether it states its own window, model and counting setting. Reports that do not carry their definitions cause the argument at month six.
What access will you need, and at what level. Google’s own SEO guidance recommends granting a prospective supplier read access to Search Console only, and specifically “at this stage, don’t grant them write access”. The same restraint applies across tools during evaluation.
What happens on the day I leave. Which accounts, tags, audiences and datasets stay with me, in what format, and within how many days. Get the answer against the platform rules above, not against the supplier’s intentions.
Who actually does the work. The named person, their other accounts, and what changes if they leave. This is the question most often answered by whoever will not be doing the work.
What would make you tell me to stop spending. The answer separates a supplier from a vendor. A supplier who has never advised a client to reduce budget has either never had a client below the volume thresholds or has never said so.
Read the credentials for what they actually certify
Badges and scores are real, but most of them certify something narrower than the impression they create.
Platform partner status certifies spend and process, not judgement. It tells you the agency clears a management threshold and passes a certification requirement. It says nothing about whether its judgement suits an account of your size.
Optimization score is not a performance measure. Google defines it as “an estimate of how well your Google Ads account is set to perform”, scored from 0 to 100 percent, and says applying recommendations “can help improve” performance. A supplier presenting a high optimization score as a result has presented a configuration setting.
Quality Score does not aggregate the way it is usually quoted. Google states plainly: “There is no such thing as ad group-level, campaign-level or account-level Quality Score.” It is computed on exact search terms over a 90-day window. An account-average Quality Score in a pitch deck is a number the platform says does not exist.
Case studies without denominators say nothing. A percentage improvement with no base, no period and no attribution window is compatible with almost any underlying reality, including a base of four conversions.
What does carry signal. A named practitioner who can talk about an account that did not work and explain what they changed as a result. It is not a credential, and it is the most predictive thing in the room.
A short paid engagement before a long one is sensible, provided it is scoped to produce a readable answer.
What a trial cannot test. Performance. The learning periods and volume thresholds mean a 30-day trial ends before the account is in a steady state, whatever the supplier does.
What a trial can test, and test well. Whether tracking gets fixed, whether reporting arrives with definitions, whether the change log exists, whether questions get answered in the time promised, and whether the structure is explicable.
So scope it accordingly. A paid diagnostic and setup engagement with named deliverables: a tracking audit with a test conversion verified end to end, a documented account structure with rationale, a first report carrying its definitions, and a written 90-day plan.
Which produces a decision on evidence. At the end you hold four documents. Their quality is a far better predictor of the next twelve months than any cost per lead measured inside a learning phase.
And it protects the incoming work. A trial framed as a setup phase gives the stabilization window a name, so the relearning clock starts cleanly rather than being restarted repeatedly by a supplier trying to show movement inside thirty days.
Once the questions are answered, the comparison is between documents, not between pitches.
The sample report. Does it state its attribution window, model and counting setting on the page? Does it separate provisional days from settled ones?
The proposed account structure, with a rationale. Not a screenshot of somebody else’s account. A written explanation of why campaigns would be split the way they are, given your volume.
The contract’s exit clause, read against the platform rules. If it promises to transfer a Meta ad account created in the agency’s portfolio, the supplier has either not read the rule or is describing something it cannot do.
The named practitioner’s availability. How many accounts, and whether your account is one where they will be doing the work or reviewing someone else’s.
And the answer on volume. A supplier who looks at your monthly conversion count and tells you the account is below the optimization thresholds is a supplier who has read your data. One who does not raise it either did not look or decided not to say.
What to do with this
Create your own ad accounts, in your own business portfolio and manager account, before any conversation moves to contract. Then ask the eight questions in writing and keep the answers.
If you are already in an engagement where the accounts sit in the supplier’s portfolio, check which platform. On Google you can unlink. On Meta, check whether the ad account and the dataset were created inside the agency’s business portfolio, because if they were, the practical remedy is to create new ones under your own portfolio and plan the migration, not to request a transfer that the platform does not support. If it is useful to read one supplier’s answers to these questions before you put them to a shortlist, ours are on the page describing how we run B2B paid acquisition, including who owns the ad account and why we will not guarantee a cost per lead.
You should, and the platform rules make the timing decisive. Meta states that an ad account created inside a business portfolio can never be deleted from or transferred out of it, so an account opened inside an agency's portfolio stays there.
Is a performance guarantee a good sign?
No. Google states plainly that no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and lists guarantees among the warning signs. In the US, the FTC requires advertisers to hold substantiation for objective performance claims before making them.
What compensation model should I ask for?
Ask what the agency earns on your media, not only what it charges you. The ANA's 2016 study found rebates ranging from 1.67 percent to around 20 percent of spend, and principal markups of roughly 30 to 90 percent, none of which appears on an invoice framed as a fee.