One: what percentage of my budget reaches a platform?
Ask it first because it reframes the whole conversation from price to value. You want total budget in, media out, as a percentage.
Good answers are specific and immediate. Bad answers explain why the question is complicated. It is not complicated — it is division. How to calculate your working media ratio shows the math.
Two: who will actually do the work?
The person selling you is rarely the person building your campaigns. Ask who does the build, who monitors it daily, who writes the creative, and who you contact when something breaks on a Saturday.
A named human for at least the last one. If the answer is a shared inbox or a ticket queue for urgent issues, expect urgency to be interpreted loosely.
Three: what do you check before a campaign goes live?
This is where most providers fail, and the failure sounds like "our team is very experienced." Experience is not a process. Ask for the actual pre-launch checklist.
A real answer mentions specific things: verifying the delivery map rather than the setting, firing a test conversion and confirming the count moves by one, checking pacing on day three, and a second person reviewing the build against the brief.
If there is no list, there is no consistency, and the errors will be the invisible kind — misaimed geography, tracking that never fired, a channel that never fully entered the market.
Four: what will you report, and what will you not?
You want four lines: spend, outcomes, cost per outcome, and the trend. You want the definition of an outcome fixed in writing so the trend line means something.
Be suspicious of reporting that leads with impressions, reach, or engagement rate. Those are diagnostics. A report built on them is describing activity rather than answering whether it worked.
Five: who owns the accounts and the data?
Your ad accounts, pixels, audiences, creative, and historical performance should be yours, with the provider holding access. Get it in writing, including what happens to history on termination. The ad account ownership checklist shows how to check Google Ads and Meta, with wording you can send.
This one question determines whether leaving is an afternoon of admin or a rebuild from zero. It is also the clearest signal of how a provider thinks about the relationship.
Six: how fast can you get a new promotion live?
Local businesses run on timing — a weekend, a weather event, a competitor closing. Ask for hours, not adjectives, and ask what it costs.
Then ask what happened the last time a client needed something the same day. The specificity of that story tells you more than the stated SLA.
Seven: what would you tell me not to spend money on?
The most revealing question on the list, because a provider paid a percentage of your spend has a structural reason to never answer it honestly.
A good answer is specific and slightly against their own interest: a channel that will not work for your category, a budget level below which they would not bother, a piece of the plan you should keep in-house.
A provider who can only recommend more is not advising you. They are selling, which is fine — as long as you know which one is happening.
How to use the answers
Ask all seven of two or three providers, in the same order, and write the answers down. Patterns appear immediately: who quantifies and who deflects, who has process and who has personalities, who tells you something you did not want to hear.
Then weigh cost last. The cheapest provider that fails question three will cost you more than the difference in fees, silently, over a year.