A Meta ads agency proposal usually arrives as a deck: logos, a philosophy slide, a four-quadrant framework, and a monthly figure on the last page. Almost none of it predicts whether the account will work. The things that do predict it are specific, checkable, and easy to ask for.
Here is the list we would want if we were the ones buying.
1. A named person and their account load
Not "a dedicated team". A name, a role, and the number of other accounts that person carries. If the people who presented are not the people who will log in, ask who will and why they are not in the room.
2. What they found in your account already
Any proposal written without looking at the account is a template with your logo on it. A serious one names two or three specific things that are wrong now — a conversion event firing twice, a campaign still optimising for link clicks, an audience excluding nobody. This is the clearest single signal in the document.
3. The tracking they need before anything can be judged
Meta cannot optimise towards an event it cannot see reliably. The proposal should say what the optimisation event will be, whether the Conversions API is in place and matching well, and what has to be fixed before the numbers mean anything. An agency happy to run on whatever is already there is not planning to measure carefully.
4. A budget floor and the reasoning
Delivery needs roughly fifty optimisation events a week to stabilise. That arithmetic sets a minimum spend for your cost per event, and a proposal that ignores it is promising a result the platform cannot produce. We say ours on the first call rather than raising it on the third, and the pricing page explains how the floor is set.
5. The creative plan, as a rate rather than a list
Creative is the main lever in paid social. The question is not which three images they will run but how many genuinely different concepts arrive each month, who produces them, and whether that is included in the fee or billed separately. Vague answers here are the most expensive kind, because production invoices appear later.
6. The first ninety days, with dates
Audit, tracking fixes, structure, first tests, first read. A good plan is boring and specific. A bad one is a strategy framework. The point of asking is not the plan itself — it is that specific plans can be checked against what actually happens in month two.
7. How you will be reported to, with a sample
Ask for a real report sent to a real client last week, redacted. You are looking for decisions and next steps, not a screenshot of Ads Manager. Most reports fail this test, and the ones that pass tend to come from teams that are actually making decisions. Our view of what a useful report contains is a short list.
8. The commercial terms, in full
Fee model, what is excluded, notice period, who owns the ad account and the pixel data, and what happens on the day the right advice is to spend less. That last one matters most when the fee is a percentage of spend. The incentive built into each model outlives everyone's good intentions.
What a Meta ads agency proposal misses most often
In order: the named person, the budget floor, and anything about what happens when it does not work. The third is the one worth pressing on. Every agency has an account that failed. The ones worth hiring will describe it.
If a proposal you have been sent is thin on these, the fastest way to fill the gaps is to ask for them in writing before the call, and compare what comes back. For an independent read on the account itself, our free ad account audit covers points two and three without any commitment.
Questions people ask before hiring
What should a Meta ads agency proposal include?
A named account owner and their workload, specific findings from your current account, the tracking required before results can be judged, a budget floor with reasoning, a creative production rate, dated first-ninety-day deliverables, a sample report, and full commercial terms including account ownership.
How do I know if a proposal is a template?
It will contain nothing specific about your account. A proposal written after someone actually looked will name two or three concrete problems — a misconfigured event, the wrong optimisation goal, missing exclusions — and those claims are checkable.
Should the proposal state a minimum ad spend?
Yes. Meta delivery needs roughly fifty optimisation events a week to stabilise, which sets a floor given your cost per event. An agency that does not mention it is either not thinking about it or is content to take a fee while the account never leaves the learning phase.
Who should own the ad account?
You should, always, with the agency added as a user. If the proposal has the agency creating the account in its own Business Manager, the history, the pixel data and the audiences leave when the relationship does.