How to Choose a Meta Ads Agency

1How do you choose a Meta Ads agency?

You choose by comparing four things, and price is the last of them: who produces the creative, how the account is structured, what gets measured, and how the agency is paid. An agency that answers those four clearly is a serious candidate. One that only talks about a promised ROAS and "advanced optimisation" is not.

This guide is written from the other side of the table. We run Meta Ads and TikTok Ads campaigns every day, we have audited accounts inherited from other agencies, and we know exactly where the money leaks. What follows are the questions we would ask if we had to hire, the documents to request before signing, and the signals that almost always predict a bad year.

2What does a Meta Ads agency actually do?

A Meta Ads agency runs a brand's advertising on Facebook and Instagram: campaign structure, targeting, budget, measurement and, increasingly, the production of the creative itself. That last part is what has changed the craft over the past three years, and it is where agencies differ most.

It is worth understanding why. Meta's delivery system has absorbed most of the decisions a media buyer used to make: who to reach, when, and at what bid. Advantage+ and automated conversion campaigns do that with more data than any individual has. What the algorithm cannot do is invent the creative. So the real room for improvement has moved from the targeting panel to the video.

That has a practical consequence when choosing a supplier: an agency that only manages the account and waits for you to send materials is competing with one hand tied. And one that produces creative but cannot read an account makes attractive videos nobody can judge.

3What should you ask before hiring?

Twelve questions separate an agency that knows what it is doing from one that will learn on your budget. Take them written to the meeting and record the answers: comparing written answers across two or three candidates is the most useful exercise in the whole process.

"In 2026 the lever that decides a Meta Ads account is not targeting. It is how many distinct creative angles you can produce and refresh every month."

About the creative

About the account and measurement

About the relationship and the money

4How do Meta Ads agencies charge, and which model suits you?

There are four common pricing models and none is inherently better. What matters is that the model aligns what the agency earns with what your business earns, and that you understand the incentive you are creating.

Two warnings that save money. First, be wary of any proposal guaranteeing a specific ROAS. Nobody can guarantee it, because it depends on your margin, your offer, your seasonality and an auction that changes daily. Second, ask explicitly whether video production is included or billed separately, because it is the line item that breaks the most budgets from month two onwards.

5What is the minimum budget to work with an agency?

There is no universal figure, but there is a rule that works: your media budget has to be large enough for Meta's system to leave the learning phase within a reasonable window, and that depends on your cost per acquisition, not on the agency.

The practical way to calculate it runs backwards from how it is usually done. Estimate your target cost per acquisition from your margin, multiply it by the number of weekly conversions an ad set needs to stabilise, and that is your weekly floor per campaign. If the number that comes out is uncomfortable, the problem is not the agency: the account is not ready to scale yet, and the right move is a smaller test phase and creative production first.

• Media budget and fees are separate lines. An agency absorbing half your investment in fees leaves too little to learn with.
• Reserve a line for production. Creative cost is recurring, not upfront, because it gets refreshed.
• Allow two or three months before judging. Switching supplier every eight weeks guarantees none of them ever learns anything about your account.

"If the ad account and the pixel sit in the agency's Business Manager, changing supplier stops being a decision and becomes a negotiation."

6What are the warning signs in a proposal?

These seven signals show up again and again in the accounts that later need rescuing. None is automatically disqualifying, but two or more together is.

• They guarantee a specific ROAS or sales figure. The most common and the easiest to spot. A professional talks in ranges, hypotheses and timeframes.
• They do not ask about your margin. Without margin nobody can say which ROAS is profitable for you. A 3x can be excellent or ruinous depending on the business.
• The case study has no context. A screenshot with a big number, no sector, no budget and no period says nothing.
• The proposal never mentions creative. In 2026 a Meta Ads proposal without a production plan is half a proposal.
• They want the ad account opened in their name. See question 11.
• The promised report is a dashboard export. A useful report interprets and decides. Dumping metrics is something the platform already does.
• A long lock-in with no justification. Six months can be reasonable when there is production and learning behind it. Twelve months with no exit is a red flag.

7How does a Meta Ads agency compare with a TikTok or influencer agency?

They are not substitutes, and confusing them is an expensive mistake. Each solves a different problem, and many brands need two of the three at once.

The most common case we see is a brand that believes it has an account management problem when it actually has a production problem: the structure is fine, the pixel is fine, and what has run out is the creative repertoire. Changing media buyer does not fix that.

8What should you expect in the first 90 days?

The first three months are diagnostic, not definitive. A well-framed plan looks broadly like this.

If by day 90 nobody can tell you which angle works and why, the budget was not the problem.

9How we handle the creative side of Meta Ads

PlusROI Media is a UGC and paid social agency based in Barcelona: we produce the creative with our creator network and put it to work inside the campaigns, rather than treating production and account management as two separate worlds. That is our entire thesis, and it is also why we press so hard on the question of who films.

In practice it means that when a piece of creative shows fatigue, the next version is already filmed, and the angles being tested come from what the account is saying rather than from a brainstorm.

If you are comparing suppliers right now, take the twelve questions above and ask us too. The comparison is the useful part.