Every agency says it runs Meta and Google Ads. That sentence tells you almost nothing. Anyone can build a campaign, set a budget, and press publish. The gap between a good media buyer and a bad one is invisible on a pitch deck and very visible in your bank account six months later.

I run Done For You, so I have inherited a lot of accounts from agencies that looked competent and were not. The tells are consistent, and most of them are things you can check before you sign, even if you have never run an ad in your life.

This is what real media-buying expertise looks like in practice, and the specific questions that separate a team that understands the platforms from one that is just pushing buttons.

Publishing a campaign is the smallest part of the job. Real media buying is the work around it: how the account is structured, how budget is split across intent and stage, how bids are set, and how the whole thing is wired to learn from the right outcome.

A skilled buyer separates branded from non-branded demand, keeps campaigns from competing against each other, and controls budget so the algorithm gets clean signal instead of noise. A weak one dumps everything into one campaign, lets broad match eat the budget, and cannot tell you what the account is learning. The structure is invisible to a founder, but it decides everything downstream.

The simplest test is to ask what the account is optimizing toward. If the answer is a form fill, the buyer is optimizing for volume. If the answer is a qualified lead fed back from the CRM, they understand that the goal is buyers, not browsers. I unpack that difference in qualified leads versus cost per lead.

If I could ask an agency only one question, it would be about tracking. A basic media buyer fires a form-fill event from the browser pixel and stops there. A serious one sends events server to server and feeds real sales outcomes back into the platform.

On Meta, that means the Conversions API, which sends events directly from your servers and CRM rather than only from the browser, so the algorithm can learn from qualified leads and closed deals, not just clicks. On Google, it means enhanced conversions and offline conversion import doing the same job. This is the plumbing that makes everything else work, and it is exactly what our CRM tracking and nurture work sets up. The mechanics are covered in CRM-based optimization for Meta Ads.

When an agency cannot explain how it tracks a lead past the form, that is your answer. It is running the account blind, and no amount of clever targeting fixes a campaign that is optimizing for the wrong event.

Founders assume targeting is the magic. It is not. The single biggest lever in modern ad platforms is the creative, because the algorithm handles most of the targeting for you now. Your job, and your agency's job, is to feed it a steady stream of hooks and angles to choose from.

The data backs this up. An NCSolutions and Nielsen analysis of hundreds of sales-effect studies attributes roughly half of incremental sales, around 49 percent, to the creative itself (US data). A team that treats creative as a one-time design job and runs the same three images for months is leaving the largest lever untouched.

So ask to see a creative testing log from a live account. A real media buyer ships new statics, videos, and angles on a cadence and can tell you which hook is producing qualified leads. A shrug is a red flag.

Watch how a media buyer talks about the account. Experts live in the search terms report, cutting the queries that waste spend and finding the ones that convert. They read placements, they watch the auction, and they treat the platform's optimization signals as inputs to a decision, not as a scoreboard.

They also think in experiments. A change is a test with a hypothesis and a result, not a random tweak because the numbers dipped this week. When you ask why they made a change, a strong buyer gives you a reason tied to data. A weak one says the platform recommended it.

This discipline is what turns a budget into compounding learning. Without it, an account plateaus and the agency blames the market.

Meta Business Partner and Google Partner badges are worth checking. They confirm certified people, real managed spend, and an account in good standing, which is a genuine baseline. If an agency claims to run serious spend and holds neither, ask why.

But a badge is a floor, not proof of skill. It says nothing about whether the team can turn your spend into qualified pipeline. I wrote a whole piece on how much weight to give them in do Meta and Google Partner badges matter. Use the badge to filter, then judge the tracking and the creative process.

Two numbers reframe how you should judge an agency. First, creative. NCSolutions and Nielsen put roughly 49 percent of incremental sales down to the creative, which means an agency without a real testing engine is under-using your biggest lever, no matter how good its targeting looks.

Second, measurement. Google reports that advertisers who move to data-driven attribution typically see a 6 percent average increase in conversions (global data), simply by counting the right touchpoints. Better signal in, better decisions out. A media buyer who ignores attribution and tracking is optimizing on a distorted picture.

“Anyone can launch a campaign. A real media buyer can tell you what the account learned this week, and prove it with the tracking.”

You do not need to know the platforms to run this test. Ask four questions and listen for specifics. What event will my campaigns optimize toward, and how do you track it past the form? How do you send qualified leads back from my CRM? How often do you ship new creative, and can I see a testing log? And what would you change in the first 30 days, and why?

A skilled team answers in detail and in plain language. A weak one retreats to jargon or to platform recommendations. For the wider hiring decision, our pillar on how to choose a B2B Meta Ads agency in India puts media buying in context, and you can see how we run Meta Ads and Google Ads.