You do not need to be a media expert to audit your performance agency. You need twelve questions and the patience to insist on numerical answers. Healthy agencies answer all twelve quickly because the answers live in their dashboards. Underperforming agencies answer with adjectives. Here are the questions, and what good sounds like.
Questions one to four: the money
One: what percentage of my spend went to media versus fees last month? Healthy sits at 80 percent media or better on meaningful budgets. Two: what is my blended cost per acquisition, and how has it moved over six months? Good agencies show the curve, not the month. Three: which 20 percent of spend produced the least? If they cannot name it, nobody is pruning. Four: what did you turn off last month? A partner that never kills anything is farming the budget, not managing it.
Questions five to eight: the structure
Five: how many creatives are live per audience right now? Fewer than three per audience means fatigue is eating your money. Six: what is the testing budget, and what did the last test prove? Expect 10 to 15 percent of spend on structured tests with written conclusions. Seven: who owns the account day to day, and how senior are they? You are entitled to know if your budget is a training ground. Eight: what happens in the first week if we doubled the budget tomorrow? The answer reveals whether a scaling plan exists or whether more money would just buy more of the same.
Questions nine to twelve: the truth
Nine: what portion of reported conversions would have happened anyway? Honest agencies talk about incrementality unprompted. Ten: how does platform-reported revenue compare to my actual revenue? A gap above 20 percent that nobody has flagged is a reporting problem. Eleven: what is the single biggest constraint on my account: creative, budget, landing page, or offer? The answer should be specific and slightly uncomfortable. Twelve: what would you do with this account that you have not proposed because you assumed we would say no? The best answers to this question are worth the entire audit.
Scoring it
Ten or more confident, numerical answers: you have a partner, keep them. Six to nine: schedule a working session and re-ask the failures in 30 days. Five or fewer: start a structured second-opinion process. Not because the agency is dishonest, but because the account has stopped being managed and started being administered.
Key takeaways
- Twelve questions, all answerable with numbers by any healthy agency within a day.
- Media-to-fee ratio, CPA trend, pruning, and kill decisions expose the money discipline.
- Creative count, testing budget, and seniority expose the structural discipline.
- Incrementality and revenue-gap questions expose the honesty.
- Five or fewer confident answers means the account is being administered, not managed.
Sources
- Add Hype: Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter 2026.
- Add Hype paid media audits across UAE and Pakistan accounts on Meta, TikTok, and Google.
If you ask the twelve and do not like the answers, we will run the second opinion. Write to us at hype@weaddhype.com.
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