Every few weeks someone shows me a screenshot of a 5x ROAS and asks why the business doesn't feel like it's making money. Nine times out of ten, nobody is lying. They're just looking at the wrong number for the question they're asking.

ROAS and MER both measure revenue against spend. They answer completely different questions.

What ROAS actually measures

ROAS (return on ad spend) is the revenue a platform says its ads drove, divided by what you spent on that platform.

If Meta reports £20,000 of purchases from £5,000 of spend, your Meta ROAS is 4.0.

The important words there are "Meta reports". That £20,000 is Meta's view of which sales it should get credit for, based on who clicked or saw an ad within its attribution window. Google does the same thing with its own rules. So does TikTok. So does every other platform you pay.

Each one is marking its own homework.

What MER measures

MER (marketing efficiency ratio) is your total revenue divided by your total marketing spend, across everything.

If the business took £60,000 last month and you spent £20,000 on all your marketing, your MER is 3.0.

MER doesn't care which platform claims a sale. It just asks: for every pound we put into marketing, how many pounds came back into the business?

You'll also hear blended ROAS. It's the same idea using paid ad spend only, rather than all marketing costs. Use whichever fits how you budget, and stick to it so the trend means something.

Why the two numbers disagree

Add up what every platform claims and you'll often find it comes to more revenue than you actually took. A few reasons:

• Double counting. Someone sees an Instagram ad, then Googles you a few days later and buys. Meta counts it. Google counts it. You only sold one thing.
• View-through credit. Platforms can claim sales from people who saw an ad and didn't click. Some of those people were coming anyway.
• Customers who'd have bought regardless. Returning customers, people searching your brand name, people who heard about you from a friend. Ads often reach them on the way to buying and take the credit.

None of this makes ROAS useless. It makes it a poor answer to "is our marketing working?"

So which one should you trust?

Both, for different jobs.

Use MER for the big decisions. Is marketing paying for itself? Should we spend more next month or less? Is the business more efficient than it was last quarter?

Use ROAS for the decisions inside an account. Which campaign is doing better? Is the new creative beating the old one? Should budget move from this ad set to that one? Within one platform, comparing like with like, ROAS is a useful signal.

The mistake is using ROAS to answer the first set of questions. That's how you end up scaling spend on a platform that looks brilliant in its own dashboard while the bank balance goes the other way.

MER has blind spots too

MER isn't perfect either, and it's worth knowing where it falls short.

• It counts revenue you'd have got anyway. A brand with lots of loyal repeat customers can have a healthy MER while its ads are barely finding anyone new.
• It doesn't tell you what to change. It tells you whether the whole thing is working. For the why, you go back into the platforms.
• It ignores margin. A 3.0 MER is great for a business with 70% margins and a problem for one with 25%.

That's why I usually report MER alongside two other numbers: new customer acquisition cost (what it costs to win a customer you didn't already have) and contribution margin (what's left after product, shipping and marketing costs).

Work out the MER you actually need

Here's a quick way to find your break-even MER. Take your margin before marketing costs, as a decimal, and divide 1 by it.

If you keep 40p of every pound after product, packaging and shipping, your break-even MER is 1 ÷ 0.4 = 2.5. Below 2.5, marketing is costing you more than it brings in. Above it, you're making money on those sales.

That one number makes every conversation about budget clearer. It also stops anyone celebrating a 3x ROAS on a business that needs 4x to stand still.

How to start tracking it

You don't need software. A spreadsheet with one row per week is plenty:

• Total revenue (from your shop or accounts, not from the ad platforms)
• Spend on each marketing channel
• Number of new customers

From that you get MER, blended ROAS and new customer cost every week. Look at the trend over months, not the number on any single Monday.

Then keep using ROAS inside the platforms, for what it's good at.

"Ads Manager says we made £30k from Meta last month. Shopify says we made £34k in total. That can't be right."

I hear a version of this a lot. Usually it isn't a tracking disaster. It's two systems counting different things, in different ways, on different days.

The usual reasons they don't match

1. Attribution windows

Meta gives itself credit for purchases made within a set number of days after someone clicks an ad, and a shorter window after someone views one. Shopify's own reports usually credit the last place someone came from before they bought. Same customer, two different stories.

2. View-through conversions

If someone saw your ad, didn't click, then bought later through Google or by typing your web address, Meta can still count that sale. Shopify will put it down to search or direct. Neither is wrong. They're just using different rules.

3. Different dates

By default, Ads Manager reports a conversion against the day the ad was shown or clicked. Shopify reports it on the day of the order. If someone clicks on the 30th and buys on the 2nd, the two systems put that sale in different months.

4. Modelled conversions

Since Apple's privacy changes, Meta can't see every purchase directly. It fills some of the gaps with modelled estimates. They're often reasonable, but they're estimates, and they won't line up with real orders.

5. What counts as "revenue"

Meta records whatever purchase value your pixel sends it. That might include tax and shipping. Your Shopify report might be showing net sales after discounts and returns. Check which numbers you're comparing.

6. Refunds and cancellations

Meta doesn't know about a refund three weeks later. Shopify does.

7. Everyone claims the same sale

Google, Meta, TikTok and your email platform can each claim one order. Add their numbers together and you'll often get more than you actually sold.

When the gap is a real problem

Some differences are a sign your setup is broken, not just different. Worth checking:

• Duplicate purchases. If you run the Meta Pixel and the Conversions API together, they need to share an event ID so Meta counts each order once. If not, purchases can be counted twice. Events Manager will show you whether deduplication is working.
• Missing purchases. Compare the number of purchases Meta records for a week against actual Shopify orders from people who came via Meta. A big shortfall usually means the purchase event isn't firing reliably, often after a theme change or a new checkout app.
• Wrong values. Check that the purchase value Meta receives is the order value, in the right currency.

If those are all fine, the gap you're seeing is mostly the attribution differences above. That's normal.

Is there a "normal" gap?

Not one number that applies to every business. It depends on your price point, how long people take to decide, how many channels you run and how much of your revenue comes from returning customers.

What matters more is the trend. If the gap between what Meta claims and what the business takes is growing month after month, the platform is probably taking credit for more sales it didn't really drive.

What to judge performance on instead

Don't try to force the two numbers to agree. Use each for what it's good at.

• Your own revenue and MER tell you whether marketing as a whole is working. More on MER here.
• Meta's numbers tell you which campaigns and ads are doing better than others inside Meta.
• A post-purchase survey ("How did you first hear about us?") gives you a rough, human view that no attribution model can.
• Holdout tests are the most reliable way to see what ads really add. Pause or reduce spend in one region and compare it with the rest. Larger advertisers can also ask Meta about conversion lift studies.

When the platform, your shop and your bank account are all roughly telling the same story, you can trust the decisions you're making. When they're not, the bank account wins.

I should say upfront: I'm a freelancer, so weigh this accordingly. But I've also worked agency-side at dentsu and two Sydney agencies, and in-house at Jaguar Land Rover, where I was the one hiring and briefing. I've seen this decision from every side.

Neither option is better. They're good at different things.

What an agency gives you

• A team. Media buyers, strategists, designers, editors, analysts. If you need lots of things done at once, an agency has the hands.
• Cover. When someone's on holiday or leaves, somebody else picks it up.
• Creative production. Many agencies can make your ads as well as run them, which saves you finding and managing creators or designers.
• Process. Good agencies have checklists, QA and people reviewing each other's work.
• Breadth. If you need Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest and programmatic all at once, one agency can cover it.

Where agencies can fall short

Not every agency, but often enough to ask about:

• The seniority gap. The experienced person in the pitch isn't always the person in your account every day. Day-to-day work is often done by someone more junior, looking after several clients.
• Layers. You talk to an account manager, who talks to the strategist, who talks to the media buyer. Things get slower, and some detail gets lost on the way.
• Cost. You're paying for the people, the office, the management and the margin. That's fair, but it means less senior time per pound.
• Turnover. Agencies lose people, and every new account manager has to learn your business from scratch.

What a freelancer gives you

• Direct access to the person doing the work. No messages relayed through someone else.
• Seniority for the money. A good freelancer is usually someone with years of experience who no longer wants to manage a team or sit in pitches.
• Knowledge of your account. One person, a small number of clients, and every decision in their head.
• Flexibility. Easier to scale up, down or change scope without a contract renegotiation.

Where freelancers can fall short

• Capacity. One person can only do so much. If you need twenty new ads a week designed, edited and launched, a freelancer will need help or you'll need a production partner.
• Cover. If they're ill or on holiday, there may be nobody else in the account. Ask what happens.
• Nobody checking their work. In an agency, someone senior might spot a mistake. With a freelancer, you're relying on them.
• Quality varies a lot. "Freelance Facebook ads specialist" covers everyone from a twenty-year veteran to someone who did a course last month. Check their background properly.

Questions to ask either one

These work whichever way you're leaning:

1. Who will actually run my account every day? Get a name. Ask to meet them.
2. How many other accounts does that person look after?
3. What will you report on? If the answer is only ROAS, CTR and CPM, keep looking. You want business numbers: revenue, new customers, cost per new customer.
4. Who owns the ad account, pixel and data? It should always be you. Never let anyone run ads through an account you can't access.
5. What happens when they're off?
6. What's the notice period? Long lock-ins are a warning sign for either.
7. Can I speak to a current client?

So which should you choose?

An agency is probably right if you need lots of creative made, several platforms run at once, cover at all hours, or you simply don't want to manage anything yourself.

A freelancer is probably right if you want one experienced person who knows your numbers, you can sort creative production yourself or with partners, and you value direct access over a big team.

Some businesses use both. A freelancer to own strategy and run the main accounts, with a production studio or creators making the ads. Or a freelancer brought in to keep an existing agency honest.

The worst option is the one where you're not sure who's in your account or what they're doing there.

Agencies are often exactly right for a business at one stage and wrong for it at the next. That isn't a criticism of them. You've changed, and the setup that worked when you were spending a few thousand a month might not fit now.

Here are the signs I look for when a founder tells me something feels off.

1. You don't know who's actually in your account

You know your account manager. You met the strategist at the pitch. But who logs into Ads Manager every day and makes the changes? If you can't name them, or it's changed three times this year, that's the first sign.

2. The reports are about the platform, not your business

Pages of CTR, CPM, reach and platform ROAS, and nothing about your revenue, your margin or how many new customers you won. Platform metrics are useful for diagnosing problems. They shouldn't be the headline.

3. Every answer is more budget or more creative

Results dip and the recommendation is to spend more. Results stay flat and the recommendation is more ads. Sometimes that's right. But if nobody is asking about your offer, your website, your pricing or your measurement, they're only looking at the part they control.

4. You keep explaining your business to new people

Every handover costs you time and momentum. If you've briefed three different account managers in a year, the knowledge isn't staying with the people doing the work.

5. Performance has plateaued and nobody can say why

Plateaus happen. What matters is whether anyone has a clear view on the cause and a plan to test it. "The algorithm's been volatile" isn't a plan.

6. You're the one bringing the ideas

If most of the new angles, tests and insights come from you or your team, you're paying for execution, not thinking. That might be fine. Just make sure the price reflects it.

7. You're paying for things you don't use

Monthly strategy decks nobody reads. A dashboard nobody opens. Platforms you were told you needed that haven't moved the numbers. As you grow, you often need fewer, more senior hours rather than more services.

Before you move, try this

Switching costs time and some risk. Have one direct conversation first:

• Ask who exactly is working on your account and how many other accounts they look after.
• Ask for reporting built on your business numbers: revenue, new customers, cost per new customer, MER.
• Ask for a written view on why performance has stalled and what they'd test in the next 90 days.
• Agree what good looks like for the next quarter, in numbers.

A good agency will welcome that. If it changes things, brilliant. If it doesn't, you've got your answer.

What next

If you do move, you've broadly got three options: another agency with a better fit, building the role in-house, or a senior freelancer who does the work directly. Each suits different businesses. I wrote about the trade-offs in freelancer or agency for Facebook ads.

Whatever you choose, make sure you own your ad accounts, pixel and data before you start the conversation. It makes any move much simpler.

You don't need an agency or a consultant to get a decent read on your Meta Ads account. You need an afternoon, Ads Manager, Events Manager and your shop's sales report.

This is roughly the order I go in when I audit an account. Times are a guide for a typical account.

1. Tracking (30 minutes)

Start here. If tracking is wrong, every number after it is wrong too.

• In Events Manager, check your Purchase event is firing and that the recent activity looks like your real order volume.
• If you use the Pixel and the Conversions API together, check deduplication is working, so each order is counted once.
• Look at the event match quality score for purchases. Low scores mean Meta struggles to connect purchases to the people who saw your ads.
• Pick one week and compare the number of purchases Meta recorded with your actual orders. You're looking for big gaps, not an exact match.

2. Structure (30 minutes)

Count how many campaigns and ad sets are actually spending. A common problem is budget spread across too many ad sets, none of which get enough conversions for Meta's algorithm to learn.

Meta's own guidance is that an ad set needs roughly 50 optimisation events a week to get out of the learning phase. If most of yours show "Learning limited", you probably need fewer, bigger ad sets.

Also check for audiences that overlap and ad sets competing with each other for the same people.

3. Where the money goes (30 minutes)

Set the date range to the last 90 days and sort campaigns by amount spent. Then ask:

• What share of spend goes to prospecting (new people) versus retargeting (people who already know you)?
• Which campaigns take the most money, and are they the ones getting the best results?
• Is anything spending steadily that nobody has looked at in months?

Heavy retargeting often looks great in Meta's numbers, because those people were close to buying anyway. It rarely grows the business on its own.

4. Creative (45 minutes)

This is usually where the biggest wins are.

• Sort ads by spend. How old are your top five? If the same ads have carried the account for months, they're probably getting tired.
• Check frequency. If the same people are seeing the same ads many times a week, costs tend to rise.
• Count your genuinely different concepts, not versions. Five videos with different captions is one concept.
• For each top ad, ask what question it answers for the customer. If the answer is "none, it's just a discount", there's room to improve. I wrote about that in creative for premium products.

5. Audiences and exclusions (20 minutes)

• Are existing customers excluded from campaigns meant to find new ones?
• If you use Advantage+ campaigns, do you know how much of the spend is reaching existing customers? Check the settings and any customer reporting available to you.
• Are any old interest or lookalike audiences still running out of habit?

6. The business view (30 minutes)

Now step outside Meta.

• From your shop, take total revenue and new customers for each of the last three months.
• Add up your total marketing spend for the same months.
• Work out your MER (total revenue ÷ total marketing spend) and your cost per new customer.
• Compare those trends with what Meta's own ROAS says over the same period.

If Meta's ROAS is going up while your MER and new customer cost are getting worse, Meta is probably taking credit for sales it didn't really drive. More on MER and ROAS here.

7. Write down three actions (15 minutes)

Not twenty. Three. Usually one about tracking, one about structure or budget, and one about creative. Do those properly before looking for the next three.

If you get halfway through and want a second pair of eyes, that's what my paid media audit is for.

When a premium product isn't selling well on Meta, the first instinct is usually a discount. Sometimes that's right. More often it fixes the wrong problem.

If someone is hesitating over an expensive product, it's rarely because they can't afford it. It's because they're not yet sure it's worth it, or something about buying it worries them. A discount doesn't answer either of those. It just makes the price the main thing they're thinking about.

A real example

I worked on Meta Ads for a US business selling Wagyu beef online. The ads were doing what most e-commerce ads do: product shots, price, offer. They worked, up to a point, and then they stopped improving.

When we looked at why people weren't buying, it came down to two questions:

1. Why does this cost so much more than the steak in the supermarket?
2. Will an expensive piece of meat actually arrive in good condition?

So the creative changed. Ads explaining what Wagyu is and why it commands the price. Ads showing exactly how it's packed, shipped and delivered. Less reliance on offers to do the persuading.

Between 2024 and 2025, blended performance improved while ad spend stayed broadly the same. [Add the figure once you have it, e.g. MER from X to Y.] The full case study is here.

Start with the objections, not the ad

Before you brief any creative, write down every reason someone might not buy. Get them from:

• Customer service emails and chat logs
• Reviews, especially the three and four star ones
• Comments on your ads
• Your sales or support team, if you have one
• Questions people ask before buying

You'll usually end up with five to ten. For most premium products they fall into a few groups: price, trust, delivery, fit or suitability, and "is it really different from the cheaper option?"

Make one ad per objection

Each objection becomes a creative concept. Some formats that work well:

• The explainer. Why it costs what it costs. Materials, process, sourcing, time. Show it rather than claim it.
• Behind the scenes. How it's made, who makes it, what goes into it.
• The delivery. Exactly what happens after you order, and what arrives. Unboxing works because it removes uncertainty.
• The comparison. Next to the cheaper alternative, honestly. What's actually different.
• The founder. A real person explaining why they started the business and what they won't compromise on.
• The customer. Real people using it, in their words, ideally addressing a specific worry.

That gives you genuinely different concepts to test, rather than ten versions of the same product shot with different captions.

Test concepts, not captions

Meta's algorithm is good at finding the right people for an ad. What it can't do is invent a better reason to buy. That's your job.

So test at the level of the idea. Run the "why it costs more" concept against the "how delivery works" concept. Once you know which ideas work, then make variations of the winners: different hooks, lengths, formats.

Measure it properly

Education-led creative can look worse on click-through rate than a bold discount ad. People watch, learn and come back later rather than clicking straight away.

So judge it on what matters: cost per new customer, MER and how both move over a few months. Not on which ad got the cheapest click this week.

When a discount does make sense

Discounts aren't banned. They're useful for genuine moments like a seasonal sale, a launch, or bringing back lapsed customers. The problem is when they become the only reason anyone buys. At that point, you've trained your customers to wait, and you've lowered the value of the very thing that makes your product premium.

Sell the reason first. Save the discount for when it's earned.

Performance Max is Google's all-in-one campaign type. You give it budget, products, images and a goal, and it decides where to show your ads across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Maps.

For a lot of e-commerce brands it works well. But it has one habit worth watching: it's very good at finding people who were already going to buy from you.

What brand cannibalisation means

Someone sees your ad on Instagram, remembers your name, and searches for it on Google a few days later. If Performance Max shows them an ad and they click, it can count that sale as its own.

That person was already looking for you. Your normal organic listing, or a cheap branded search campaign, would very likely have got the sale. So Performance Max ends up looking brilliant, while doing less new work than its ROAS suggests.

The same thing happens with returning customers and people coming back from abandoned baskets. They're easy wins, and they flatter the numbers.

Signs it's happening

• Performance Max ROAS is much higher than any other campaign, and it improved soon after launch with little else changing.
• Your branded search campaign got quieter after Performance Max went live. Fewer impressions and clicks, as if something else picked them up.
• Total revenue didn't rise in line with what Performance Max claims it's adding.
• New customer numbers are flat while Google-attributed revenue climbs.

How to check

Google keeps changing what Performance Max reports, so the exact menus may look different in your account. Broadly:

• Look at the search terms. Performance Max shows search term insights, and in many accounts now a search terms report. See how much of the traffic includes your brand name.
• Compare before and after. Look at your branded search campaign's impressions and clicks for the months before and after Performance Max launched.
• Line it up against your own revenue. If Google says it added a lot of revenue but your total sales and MER barely moved, much of it was probably already coming your way. More on MER here.

How to set it up properly

Use brand exclusions

Performance Max lets you exclude your brand terms, so it can't show ads on searches for your own name. Then run a separate, low-cost branded search campaign to cover those searches, where you can see exactly what's happening.

Point it at new customers

Performance Max has customer acquisition settings that let you bid more for new customers, or only for new customers. If growth is the goal, use them, and upload your customer lists so Google knows who's new.

Keep feeds and assets strong

Much of Performance Max's spend in e-commerce goes through Shopping. Clean product titles, accurate prices, good images and sensible product groups do more than almost any other setting.

Judge it on business numbers

Don't decide on Performance Max budgets from its own ROAS. Look at new customer acquisition cost, total revenue and MER over a few months. If you can, test it: turn it down in one region, or for a short period, and see how much total revenue actually moves.

Should you switch it off?

Usually not. Performance Max can find genuinely new customers, especially through Shopping and YouTube. The aim isn't to get rid of it. It's to stop it taking credit for the easy sales, so you can see what it's really adding and spend accordingly.

Before I went in-house, most of my reports looked the same. CTR, CPM, CPC, ROAS, reach, frequency. All neatly charted, all moving roughly the right way, all completely meaningless to the people who actually ran the business.

A year leading paid social at Jaguar Land Rover Australia changed that.

The brief was cars

Agency-side, the brief is usually a campaign objective. Get leads. Drive traffic. Hit a cost per lead.

In-house, the brief was simpler and much harder: help sell cars. A lead was only the start. Someone still had to book a test drive, visit, and eventually buy. Whether the paid social was working depended on all of that, not on how cheaply we got a form filled in.

[Optional: one specific moment from JLR that made this click for you, if it's something you can share.]

Nobody asked about CTR

One of the best things I learned in-house was how little anyone outside the marketing team cares about your click-through rate. Or your CPM. Or your platform ROAS.

Leadership wanted to know a few things. Is it bringing in people who buy? What does that cost us? Is it getting better or worse? Should we spend more or less?

If your report can't answer those in the first minute, it isn't really a report. It's a list of numbers.

Lead quality beats lead volume

In a business with a long buying cycle, it's easy to make the numbers look good by optimising for cheap leads. You get lots of them, the cost per lead drops, and the chart goes up.

Then the people who have to follow up with those leads tell you most of them were never going to buy.

A slightly more expensive lead from someone serious is worth far more than three cheap ones from people who clicked by accident. That's true in automotive, and it's true for almost every lead generation client I've worked with since.

Platforms only see part of the journey

Buying a car takes weeks or months. Ad platforms track conversions over a matter of days. So by the time someone buys, the platform has long since stopped counting.

That forces you to connect your advertising to what happens later: in the CRM, in sales data, in the conversations the sales team is having. It's harder work, but it's the only way to know whether the money is doing anything.

E-commerce has a shorter version of the same problem. Someone sees an ad today and buys next week through a Google search. The platform report is never the whole story.

How I report now

I brought all of this back into client work. Every report I send now follows the same order:

1. The business outcome. Revenue, new customers, bookings or qualified leads, depending on the business. Against spend. Against last month and last year.
2. What changed and why. In plain English. Two or three sentences.
3. What I'm doing next.
4. Platform metrics, only where they explain something above.

It's usually one page.

The lesson for anyone hiring

If you're choosing an agency or a freelancer, look at an example report before you sign. If it leads with platform metrics and never mentions your revenue, margin or customers, that tells you what they're optimising for. Whatever goes in the report is what they'll end up working towards.

It's one of the first things people ask, and one of the least clearly answered online. So here's how pricing for freelance Meta Ads work generally works in the UK, and what to look for.

The four ways freelancers charge

1. Monthly retainer

The most common for ongoing management. A fixed monthly fee for running your account: strategy, optimisation, creative briefs and reporting. It's predictable for both sides, and the scope should be written down so you both know what's included.

2. Day rate

Common for project work, in-house cover and specialist support. You pay for a set number of days, either on-site or remote. Useful when the work comes in bursts rather than steadily.

3. Percentage of ad spend

More common with agencies, but some freelancers use it. The fee rises as your spend rises. It's simple, but it does mean your specialist earns more when you spend more, whether or not that spend is working. If you go this way, agree a minimum and a cap.

4. One-off audit

A fixed fee for reviewing your account and giving you a written plan. A good way to test someone's thinking before committing to a retainer.

What the market looks like

Freelance briefs posted by London recruiters give a rough benchmark. Recent paid social and paid media roles have listed day rates of around £250 to £350, with a senior social consultant role at around £500 a day. Profiles on freelance marketplaces show similar ranges for experienced paid social managers.

Those are for contract roles, often working inside an agency or brand team. Direct client retainers vary a lot more, because they depend on how much time your account needs each month.

A simple way to think about it: a retainer is roughly the number of days your account needs each month, times a day rate. An account that needs two days a month at £400 a day is around £800. One that needs five days is around £2,000. Those are worked examples, not quotes.

What affects the price

• Experience. Someone who has run large budgets for well-known brands will cost more than someone just starting out, and should be faster and less likely to make expensive mistakes.
• Scope. Meta only, or Meta and Google? Creative strategy and briefs included? Tracking setup? Reporting?
• Complexity. Several markets, currencies, product ranges or a lead generation funnel all take more time than one product in one country.
• Spend level. Bigger budgets usually mean more campaigns, more testing and more at stake.
• How often you want contact. A weekly call takes more time than a weekly written update.

Freelancer or agency on cost

A freelancer is usually cheaper than an agency for the same amount of senior time, because you're not paying for account managers, offices and margin. An agency gives you more people and more capacity for the money. Which is better value depends on what you actually need. I compared the two here.

Red flags

• Guaranteed results. Nobody honest can promise a ROAS figure.
• Very cheap with lots of clients. If someone is charging very little, they need a lot of clients to make it work, which means less time on yours.
• Running ads through their own ad account. You should always own your ad account, pixel and data.
• Long lock-in contracts. A reasonable notice period is fair. Twelve months with no way out isn't.
• Reports that only show platform metrics. You're paying for business results, so the reporting should show them.

What I charge

[Your pricing in one or two sentences: management from £X a month, audits from £X, specialist support at £X a day. Plus anything you don't charge, such as a percentage of spend.]

If you'd like to know what your account would need, book a 20-minute call and I'll tell you straight.