Most pitch meetings with the best pay-per-click companies in the region follow the same script. Polished slides, confident claims, and a lot of selective truth. If you want real answers, you have to push past that.
1. When a user clicks more than one ad before converting, how do you decide what actually gets credit?
People who know what they are doing usually pause before answering this. That pause tells you more than the answer itself.
2. Tell me about a campaign that went sideways. Not “underperformed,” but actually failed. What happened?
Some agencies dodge this completely. Others explain it in painful detail. Only one of those is worth paying for.
3. How do you test new ad ideas without blowing up what is already working?
If the response sounds like guesswork dressed up as confidence, that is exactly what it is.
4. Who is the person I’ll deal with when I have a problem, not when things are going well?
Titles don’t matter here, but access to someone who answers your questions does.
5. Google changes things constantly. What do you do when an update breaks a campaign overnight?
Anyone can claim they “stay updated.” Very few can explain how they react under pressure.
6. Are any of your current clients competing directly with my business?
This question gets uncomfortable fast, which is precisely why it matters.
7. How are your fees tied to my total ad spend, in real numbers?
Vague answers now usually become expensive ones later.
8. What tools do you rely on for bidding and competitor tracking?
You are not looking for brand names here. You are listening to how decisions are made.
9. Once ads are created and paid for, who owns them?
If this isn’t clear, it will become a problem eventually.
10. Can your reporting connect directly to our CRM, or does everything live in spreadsheets?
This separates agencies built for scale from agencies built for demos.
