A media buyer can make your Shopify brand more money. They can also burn $20,000 a month while sending a polished report full of clicks, reach and cheerful arrows pointing up.
That is why the best questions before hiring media buyers are not about whether they are “passionate about paid social”. You are hiring someone to control a major revenue lever. Ask questions that expose how they think, what they measure and whether they will own the commercial result when performance turns ugly.
Start with the question most agencies avoid
What revenue outcome will you be accountable for?
If the answer is “we can’t guarantee anything”, you have learned something useful. Nobody controls every variable in ecommerce. Your offer, landing page, stock position, pricing and creative all affect Meta performance.
But a good media buyer should still be willing to define the outcome they are working towards. That might be profitable new customer revenue, a target cost per acquisition, a contribution-margin threshold or a revenue-growth target over a defined period.
Be suspicious of agencies that only promise activity: new campaigns, weekly optimisations, more testing or monthly strategy calls. Activity is not an outcome. You do not pay Meta with optimisation notes.
Ask what happens if the target is missed. Is there a clear recovery plan? Do they reduce fees? Do they keep working until the result is reached? The structure matters because it tells you where the risk sits. Most agencies put all of it on the founder.
Which metrics do you use to decide whether the account is healthy?
ROAS is useful, but it is not the whole business. A media buyer who treats blended ROAS as the only number that matters can easily optimise your account into a corner – chasing cheap retargeting sales while new customer acquisition stalls.
You want someone who can explain the relationship between platform ROAS, blended revenue, new customer revenue, customer acquisition cost, average order value, conversion rate and margin. They should also ask about repeat purchase behaviour. A brand with a strong second purchase can afford a very different acquisition model to a brand that gets one sale and never sees the customer again.
The right answer depends on your business. The wrong answer is a generic dashboard with 40 metrics and no commercial point of view.
Questions before hiring media buyers about their process
What do you audit before changing anything?
A weak operator opens Ads Manager, duplicates the campaign with the best-looking ROAS and calls it testing. A serious operator starts with diagnosis.
They should review account structure, attribution settings, pixel and Conversion API health, campaign overlap, audience exclusions, budget allocation, creative fatigue, landing-page alignment and the economics behind the offer. They should also look at what has changed in the business recently: stockouts, price rises, promotions, website changes or a drop in creative output.
Ask for the first 30 days in plain English. If they cannot explain the order of operations before they have your account, do not expect clarity once they are inside it.
How will you rebuild campaign architecture without disrupting sales?
There is a difference between fixing a messy account and detonating it. Some accounts need a clean rebuild because years of duplicated campaigns, fragmented audiences and random budget decisions have made performance impossible to read. Others need controlled changes because the existing account is still producing profitable volume.
Ask how they decide which situation you are in. They should describe a staged approach: protect what is working, isolate tests, move spend deliberately and assess results against meaningful spend and time thresholds.
Anyone promising to “scale aggressively” on day one without understanding your revenue, margins and creative capacity is selling adrenaline, not media buying.
How much of performance depends on creative, and who owns it?
For most Shopify brands, Meta performance eventually becomes a creative problem. You can only adjust audiences and budgets so many times before the market has seen your ads too often or your message has stopped earning attention.
Ask how the buyer develops creative strategy. Do they identify angles from reviews, objections, competitor positioning and customer language? Do they provide briefs your team can actually produce? Do they have a system for analysing why one hook, format or offer beat another?
Do not accept “we’ll tell you what content to make” as a complete answer. Ask how often, based on what evidence, and what happens when creative production is the bottleneck. Media buying and creative strategy cannot live in separate silos if you want consistent scale.
How do you test without wasting budget?
“Test everything” sounds sophisticated until you realise your budget has been divided across 18 ad sets, five audiences and 30 ads, none of which receives enough spend to teach you much.
A capable buyer can tell you what they test first, why it has priority and how much budget is required before a decision is made. Usually, the biggest gains come from testing the offer and creative message before endlessly fiddling with detailed targeting.
Ask how they define a failed test. If they cannot give you a decision framework, they will keep weak ads alive because they are afraid to make a call.
Demand transparency, not a theatre performance
Will I retain ownership and access to my ad account?
The answer should be yes. Always.
Your Meta ad account, pixel, catalogue, data and historical learnings are business assets. An agency can manage them, but it should not hold them hostage. You should retain full admin access and be able to see what is being changed, where money is going and how performance is being reported.
If a provider insists on running ads from its own account, ask why. There can be legitimate technical exceptions, but for a founder-led ecommerce brand, account ownership should be the default.
What will you report each week, and what decisions will that report drive?
Reporting is where mediocre agencies hide. They send a screen recording, read out a few platform numbers and hope you are too busy running the business to ask what any of it means.
A useful report answers three things: what happened, why it happened and what changes follow. It should connect ad performance to the commercial numbers you care about, not just the metrics that make the agency look busy.
Ask to see a de-identified example. Look for clarity, not visual polish. You should be able to tell whether revenue is improving, whether customer acquisition is becoming more efficient and what the next priority is within a few minutes.
Who actually manages my account day to day?
The person who sells you the service is often not the person making decisions in Ads Manager. That is not automatically a problem. The problem is finding out after signing that your account has been handed to a junior buyer managing 25 other brands.
Ask who owns strategy, who implements changes and how many accounts they manage. Ask whether you will have direct access to the person accountable for performance. Boutique attention is not a buzzword when ad spend is material to your growth plan. It is capacity.
Test whether they understand your business, not just Meta
What do you need from us to make this work?
A credible media buyer will qualify you as hard as you qualify them. They should ask about your monthly spend, gross margin, hero products, inventory, fulfilment capacity, conversion rate, offer calendar and creative resources.
That is a good sign. Meta ads cannot repair a poor product-market fit, a slow site, weak margins or a business that cannot fulfil the demand it wants to create.
Be wary of anyone who says they can work with every brand at every budget. Specialisation matters. The playbook for a $5,000-per-month account is not the same as the playbook for a brand ready to deploy $50,000 profitably.
Can you show me relevant results and explain the conditions behind them?
Case studies without context are advertising. Ask what the brand sold, where it started, how much it spent, how long the improvement took and what changed beyond the ad account.
A 300 per cent ROAS can be brilliant or terrible depending on margin, repeat purchase rate and growth goals. A revenue increase can also be meaningless if discounting destroyed profit. Good operators do not cherry-pick screenshots. They explain the constraints, the decisions and the trade-offs.
You are not looking for identical results. You are looking for evidence that they can think clearly under similar commercial pressure.
What is the exit arrangement if this is not working?
Read the contract before you are frustrated. Ask about minimum terms, notice periods, account access, creative ownership and what happens to campaigns if you leave.
A confident agency does not need to trap clients with long lock-ins and confusing offboarding clauses. Reasonable commitment can make sense because meaningful testing takes time. But the terms should reflect a partnership built on performance, not a supplier trying to make cancellation painful.
Hire for ownership, then verify it
The best media buyer is not the one with the smoothest pitch deck. It is the one who can look at your numbers, identify the constraint, explain the plan and put meaningful skin in the game.
At Underdog Marketing, that standard is simple: growth has to show up in revenue, not in a report full of vanity metrics. Before you hand over your ad budget, ask the hard questions, listen for direct answers and choose the partner willing to be judged by the same scorecard you use to run the business.