Rank them by who actually touches the account. Ask where that person sits, whether they are an employee, and what they can change without approval. Then diagnose your own account first, because much of what presents as an advertising problem turns out to be a price, page, or stock problem.
The short version
- The work is done by a person, not a firm. Find out who, where they sit, and how many accounts they carry.
- Subcontracting is common and rarely disclosed. Ask directly whether any part of the work leaves the building.
- Most advertising symptoms have non-advertising causes. Diagnose before you rank, or you will hire a specialist for someone else's problem.
- Fee model matters more here than anywhere. A percentage of ad spend pays the manager to spend more of your money.
- Private label economics are unforgiving. Without landed cost in the model, efficiency ratios are decoration.
Diagnose the account before ranking the firms
Private label sellers usually arrive with an advertising complaint and a spreadsheet. Run the symptom through this first. The right hand column is what to fix, and in half these cases it is not a campaign setting.
| What the report shows | What it usually means | Which function has to fix it |
|---|---|---|
| High clicks, low orders on your best keyword | The query is right and the page is losing the visitor | Creative and pricing |
| Efficient advertising, flat total revenue | Advertising is harvesting demand you already had | Organic search and channel expansion |
| Spend rising, orders flat | Bid inflation or a competitor at the same slot with better economics | Advertising, then pricing |
| Good ratios on brand terms, poor everywhere else | The account is being measured on the easiest traffic | Advertising, with reporting split by term type |
| Sudden efficiency collapse in one week | Stock position, a suppression, or a price change nobody logged | Supply and listing operations |
| Strong sales, weak profit | Landed cost, returns, or fee changes, not the campaigns | Finance and product |
Take this table into the first call. Ask each candidate what they would check first for your specific symptom, and rank the answers on how quickly they leave the advertising console. A manager who only ever looks inside the ad platform will optimize the part of your problem they can see.
The question that separates firms
Ask who does the work and where they sit. Then ask the follow ups: are they employed by the firm, in which country, how many accounts do they handle, and is any part of the work passed to a contractor or a partner agency.
Flapen keeps this simple. Everything is 100 percent in house with no subcontracting, our own technology team builds the advertising and marketing tools our operators use, and the person on your account is on our payroll. I am not claiming subcontracting is always wrong. I am saying that undisclosed subcontracting means the quality control you evaluated in the pitch is not the quality control applied to your account, and you have no way to inspect the difference.
Three answers should change your ranking immediately. "We have a partner team for execution" means a margin is being taken between you and the work. "Our specialists are assigned dynamically" means nobody owns the account. "That is proprietary" to a staffing question means the answer would cost them the deal.
What a competent operator changes in month one
- Rebuilds the structure so results are readable. Terms grouped by intent, brand traffic separated from everything else, so performance is attributable rather than blended.
- Cleans the search term report. Adds negatives for the queries that will never convert, and promotes the ones already converting into their own controlled targets.
- Models contribution per order. Landed cost, fees, and returns, so an efficiency target is derived from your margin rather than borrowed from a benchmark.
- Fixes budget pacing. Campaigns that exhaust their budget before your best hours are a silent tax that nobody notices in a monthly summary.
- Flags the non-advertising blockers in writing. Images, price position, review deficit, stock cover. The first month should produce a list you can act on outside the ad platform.
If a firm cannot describe its first month in that kind of detail, it does not have a method, it has a login.
What most agencies will not tell you
A percentage of ad spend is still the most common fee model in advertising management, and it puts your interests and theirs in direct opposition at the one moment that matters. Your goal is the lowest cost per acquired customer. Their revenue rises as your budget rises. The conflict never shows during growth, which is why it survives. It shows when the honest advice is to cut spend on a product that is not working, and that advice costs them money to give. We charge a flat monthly fee with no commission and no revenue share, precisely so nobody in the room profits from a bigger budget.
The second omission is about attribution. A large share of the revenue an advertising firm reports would have arrived anyway, particularly on branded search. Ask for reporting that separates branded from non-branded, and ask what happened during any period when a campaign was paused. If nobody has ever tested a pause, nobody knows what the advertising is actually adding.
Related answers
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Ask us who would be on your account and where they sit, at Flapen.
