A new agency relationship is usually judged on month-one sales, which is the wrong metric to judge it by. Sales in month one reflect a decision that was made weeks or months earlier, before the new agency touched anything. What a buyer can actually evaluate in month one is the quality of the work underneath: the search terms being targeted, how the funnel is structured, whether negative keywords are maintained, how the landing page performs, what sits between an ad click and a sale, and what data is being fed back into the account to train it. These six questions are a better test of a new agency relationship than a sales number that has not had time to reflect the new work yet.
1. What search terms are we actually showing up for?
A campaign can be spending against the right keywords in theory while the search terms report shows it is actually triggering on loosely related or irrelevant queries. A good agency pulls the search terms report early and often, not just the keyword list that was originally planned, since the two can diverge significantly once an account has been live for a few weeks.
The question a buyer should ask: can you show me the actual search terms this account is showing up for, not just the keywords we bid on?
2. What does the funnel look like end to end?
A click is not a lead, and a lead is not a sale. A good agency can describe every step between an ad impression and a closed sale: the landing page, the form, the qualification step, and the handoff to sales, not just the ad account. An agency that only talks about the ad platform and has no view of what happens after the click is only managing part of the problem.
The question a buyer should ask: can you walk me through what happens after someone clicks the ad, all the way to a sale?
3. How are negative keywords being managed?
Negative keywords stop a campaign from showing up for searches that were never going to convert, and a campaign without a maintained negative keyword list quietly wastes a share of its budget on searches that look active but never produce a sale. This is invisible in a standard performance dashboard, since the wasted clicks still show up as clicks and impressions.
The question a buyer should ask: how often is the negative keyword list reviewed, and can you show me what has been added recently?
4. How is landing page performance being tracked?
Two campaigns with identical targeting and identical ad creative can produce very different results if one sends traffic to a slow or poorly structured landing page. A good agency tracks landing page conversion rate as its own metric, separate from ad performance, and treats a weak landing page as a fixable problem rather than an assumed constant.
The question a buyer should ask: what is the conversion rate on the landing page itself, and has that been tested against an alternative?
5. What are the components in between?
Between the ad account and the sale sit a handful of components that are each easy to overlook individually: CRM setup, lead scoring, WhatsApp or email follow-up speed, and attribution tracking. A weak link at any one of these stages can undo otherwise good campaign work higher up the funnel, and a fresh account is especially exposed here since these components are often the last thing set up before launch, not the first.
Fresh accounts also start from a documented disadvantage before any of this is even accounted for: cost per lead across the FDC campaign dataset runs meaningfully higher in the first two months of a new account than it does once an account has matured, shown below with its context.
6. What data trains the algorithm?
Modern ad platforms use machine learning to optimise delivery, and that machine learning is only as good as the conversion data it is fed. If a new agency inherits an account with poorly configured conversion tracking, or if lead quality signals never make it back to the ad platform, the algorithm optimises toward the wrong outcome even while campaigns look active and well-managed on the surface.
One brokerage's account illustrated this directly: a mature account with clean feedback loops ran at a materially different cost per lead than a comparable fresh account without them, though that comparison is a single client's result, not an industry benchmark, and is presented here as one story rather than a promise.
The question a buyer should ask: what conversion data is actually being sent back to the ad platform, and who is responsible for keeping it accurate?
30 to 50%
cost per lead inflation in months 1 and 2 versus mature accounts
FDC benchmark · Global · Months 1 and 2
