Ask them in writing before you sign. Each takes a minute. Each is easy to answer if the work is being done and hard if it is not. You do not need to know anything technical, only what a real answer sounds like.
Three questions. Ask them in writing, on email, before you sign anything.
Each one takes a minute to ask. Each has an answer that is easy to give when the work is happening, and hard when it is not.
You do not need to know anything technical. You need to know what a real answer sounds like.
"Of the appointments you book for me, how many actually happen? Send me last month's number."
Why it works. Nobody can produce this by accident. No franchisor files it. Most CRMs mark an appointment complete when its date passes, whether or not anyone attended. So the number only exists if somebody built a way to collect it.
A real answer names a figure and says who counted it. "Sixty two percent last month, from the tap the office does after each visit." Or it says "we do not count that yet", and then says how it would start.
A fake answer reaches for the calendar. "You booked forty last month" is the booking count, which you already had. "Around seventy percent" with no source is the number everyone says.
Why this number is so hard to get
"What event does my account optimise on, and how many of it did each ad set get last week?"
Why it works. Meta's own guidance says the bidding needs about 50 of your optimisation event per ad set per week before it settles. Below that, delivery goes uneven and costs swing.
At the trade's filed average a bath remodeler gets 169 leads a month. That is 39 a week, across every ad set. So the answer tells you at once whether the money is spread too thin to learn.
A real answer is two numbers and a name. "Lead, and the two ad sets got 22 and 17 last week."
A fake answer talks about reach, impressions or engagement. Those are not events you buy. If the reply explains why the count does not matter, the count is low.
The floor, and what to do when you are under it
"When my office marks an appointment as happened, where does that go? Does Meta see it?"
Why it works. Ads get better at buying whatever you send back. Send form fills and you buy people who fill in forms. Send appointments that happened and you buy people who open the door.
Most setups send the form fill and stop. The rest of the chain never reaches the platform at all.
A real answer names the event and the path. "It goes to Meta from the server as EstimateSat, on your own dataset, within the hour."
A fake answer says "the pixel handles it". A pixel sits in a browser. Your office marking a visit two days later is not in a browser, so a pixel cannot carry it.
If you want the follow-up question, ask whose dataset your conversions land in. It should be yours and nobody else's.
The engineering notes, for whoever runs your tracking
Do not ask this one. Open your own ad on your phone. Tap the button the way a homeowner would. Try to book next Tuesday at half past ten.
We opened 28 bath companies' pages this way. Not one could hold a time, and two of them were running Meta's "Book now" button.
A good one answers in a paragraph and thanks you for asking. The questions are the job description.
An agency that cannot answer question one is not being dishonest. Almost nobody in this trade collects that number. What matters is whether they say so, and what they propose to do about it.
The reply that should worry you is the one that explains why the question is the wrong question.
We built this business around question one, so it would be strange to publish the list and dodge it.
Not yet. No client has run a full month. What runs today is the booking page at the foot of this site, live on a real calendar, and the count of the bath trade we publish every week.
Ask us the three on a call and you get the same paragraph answers we just described.
Copy the three quoted lines into an email. Send it to whoever runs your ads.
Do not explain why you are asking. The value is in the unprompted reply.
Then open your own ad on your phone and try to book a time.
No. You are asking what your money bought. A good agency has these three answers in a dashboard already, and the ones that do not will usually thank you for the clarity. Ask in writing so the answer is on the record.
Then the problem is further up, in the offer or the market, and you have ruled out three expensive things. That is worth the email on its own. Run your month through the steps and see which one loses the most.
Question one and question three do. They ask about appointments and about what goes back to the platform, not about a channel. Question two is specific to paid social and search. Ask the first and the third of anyone.
No. Both platforms export conversion data, and your CRM exports appointments. What is usually true is that nobody has joined the two, which is a different answer and an honest one.
Before. A proposal that answers these three is a different document from one that does not. You want to see which kind arrives.
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