17 Questions to Ask Before You Hire Anyone to Run Your Ads

Hiring someone to run Google Ads or Meta Ads is strange: you're paying a specialist precisely because you can't evaluate the specialty. Bad hires don't fail loudly — they send polished reports while your money quietly buys the wrong clicks for six months.

I sit on the other side of these interviews, and I'd rather be questioned hard by a prepared client than hired on vibes by an unprepared one. So here are the questions I think every business should ask — with the answers that signal competence and the ones that should end the call.

TL;DR

Ask about tracking and economics before tactics. Anyone can talk targeting; few ask what a conversion can afford to cost.

"Who touches my account?" and "who owns my accounts?" eliminate the two most expensive surprises.

Guarantees are a red flag, not a reassurance.

The best predictor of quality is how many questions they ask you before quoting.

Questions about tracking and measurement

1. "What would you audit first in my account?"

You want to hear: conversion tracking, then search terms or event quality, then structure. If the answer jumps straight to "your creatives" or "your audiences," they're starting from tactics with no baseline. Compare against my actual Google Ads audit checklist and Meta audit checklist.

2. "How will you verify my conversion tracking is correct?"

Acceptable answers involve comparing platform-reported conversions against store orders or CRM records, checking for duplicates, and validating values. "We'll install our pixel" is not an answer.

3. "What happens when platform numbers and my bank account disagree?"

They will disagree. A good manager explains attribution over-crediting, especially on retargeting and brand traffic, and tells you which number they steer by. Someone who has never faced this question has never been challenged on a report.

4. "Which single metric will you optimize toward, and why?"

The answer must connect to profit or qualified pipeline — not CTR, not CPM, not even raw ROAS without a margin conversation. If they can't explain why a high ROAS can still lose money, keep interviewing.

Questions about economics

5. "What can a conversion afford to cost in my business?"

The best candidates flip this into questions for you: your margin, average order value or lead close rate, repeat rate. That's the correct instinct — targets derive from your economics, not industry benchmarks. Anyone who quotes a "good CPA" without asking about your margins is guessing with your money.

6. "How do you decide when to scale budget, and when to stop?"

Listen for marginal thinking: performance at the next spend level, not blended averages. "We scale winners" is fine; better is "we scale until the marginal cost per conversion approaches what the conversion is worth."

7. "Have you ever told a client to spend less?"

Anyone who says no has never prioritized the client's money over their own retainer or percentage fee. It's my favorite trap question in the industry.

Questions about the work itself

8. "Who will actually work in my account each week?"

At agencies, the seller and the doer are usually different people. Ask for the doer's name and how many accounts they handle. With a freelancer, confirm they do the work personally rather than subcontracting it.

9. "Walk me through a campaign that failed. What did you do?"

Everyone has case studies of winners. Judgment lives in the failures: how fast they diagnosed, what they changed, when they called it. Someone with no failure stories is either brand new or lying.

10. "What do you need from me to succeed?"

Good operators have a real list: account access, margin data, offer input, creative assets, response-time expectations for leads, feedback on lead quality. A candidate who needs nothing from you plans to operate in a silo — and ads run from a silo plateau fast.

11. "What if the problem isn't the ads?"

This is the question that exposes scope. Often the account is fine and the constraint is the landing page, the offer, tracking, or follow-up speed. Can they fix those directly, coordinate the fix, or only report it and keep billing? Any honest answer is acceptable — but you need to know which service you're buying.

12. "How often will you actually make changes, and how will I know?"

Beware both extremes: daily fiddling that never lets learning stabilize, and the set-and-forget retainer. Weekly hands-on review with documented changes is a healthy norm. Ask to see a sample report — it should explain decisions, not just paste screenshots.

Questions about business terms

13. "Who owns the ad accounts, pixel, and tags?"

The only correct answer: you do, always, with them as an invited user. Agencies that run your ads inside their own accounts are building a hostage situation — if you leave, your account history, pixel data, and audiences leave with them.

14. "How do you charge, and what does that incentivize?"

Flat fees incentivize efficiency; percentage-of-spend incentivizes higher spend; performance-only deals incentivize short-term extraction and attribution games. None is evil, but the candidate should be able to discuss their model's bias honestly.

15. "What's the contract term and exit?"

Month-to-month or short initial commitments signal confidence. Twelve-month lock-ins for an SMB account signal that retention is handled by lawyers instead of results.

16. "Can you guarantee results?"

The correct answer is no — with an explanation of what they can control (process, transparency, speed of iteration) versus what they can't (your market, offer, and platform volatility). A confident guarantee is the loudest red flag in this industry, because the person offering it either doesn't understand variance or doesn't plan to be around when it lands.

17. "Why shouldn't I hire you?"

Honest specialists know their edges: wrong industry, budget too small to test properly, timeline unrealistic, or you actually need an agency's breadth or an in-house hire. See freelancer vs agency vs in-house for how I'd break that decision down.

The meta-signal: who interviews whom

Across every good hire I've seen, one pattern holds: the strongest candidates ask YOU more questions than you ask them. Your margins, your close rates, your capacity, your best customers, why past efforts failed. Someone who quotes a price after ten minutes without asking any of this is selling a package, not solving your problem.

Ask me these

I publish this list because I'm happy to answer every question on it — including number 17. If you're evaluating help for Google Ads, Meta Ads, or the tracking and landing pages around them, send your site and goal through the project fit page and ask away. How I work is laid out on the PPC strategist page.

Related reading:

PPC Freelancer vs Agency vs In-House

Google Ads Audit Checklist

Meta Ads Audit Checklist