Paid media pitches are easy to dress up. Reach, impressions, click-through rate — all real numbers, all relatively easy to hit if the only goal is to spend a budget. None of them tell you whether the campaign made the business money.

Before signing with any agency, a few questions cut through most of the noise:

What’s the cost per outcome, not per click? A cheap click that never converts is more expensive than an expensive click that does. Ask what “outcome” means for your business specifically — a lead, a sale, a booked call — and ask them to report against it, not against vanity metrics that happen to look good in a monthly deck.

Who actually built the landing page the ads point to? A great campaign sending traffic to a slow, unoptimized, or mismatched landing page is money burned at the last step. If the agency doesn’t control or at least closely coordinate with whoever owns that page, that’s a gap worth asking about directly.

What happens when a campaign underperforms? The honest answer involves testing, iteration, and sometimes killing a channel that isn’t working. Be wary of anyone who can’t describe what “this isn’t working” actually looks like in their process.

Can they show you the tracking setup, not just the results? Results are only as trustworthy as the tracking behind them. Ask to see how conversions are actually being measured, not just the final number.

None of these questions are complicated. They’re just the ones that get skipped when a pitch is optimized to sound impressive instead of to be useful.