How to Choose a LinkedIn Ads Agency

The Ten Questions

1. "Do you report on clicks or landing page clicks?"

Ask this first. LinkedIn's clicks field counts likes, comments, shares and profile clicks alongside real website visits. On thought leader ads the gap is 3–10×.

Good answer: they explain the difference immediately and say they report LP CTR and LP CPC as primary. Bad answer: confusion, or "we report CTR" without qualification. That means every report they have ever sent has been inflated, usually without them realising.

2. "Show me a mid-funnel retargeting campaign you've built."

Good answer: 180-day windows segmented by engagement depth — video viewers at 25/50/75%, ad engagers, lead form abandoners. Bad answer: one "all warm audiences" campaign, or a blank look. Most accounts have cold ads and demo requests with nothing between.

3. "Is your fee a percentage of my spend?"

If yes, ask what happens to their invoice when they cut £5,000 of monthly waste. Percentage-of-spend pays an agency more for spending more of your money. There are reasonable answers — some cap fees or share savings — but the question reveals how they think. See agency cost models.

4. "Who actually works on my account day to day?"

Bad answer: the person pitching is never seen again and an account manager relays messages to an unnamed executor. Ask to meet the person doing the work, and ask how many accounts they carry.

5. "Can you connect ad spend to pipeline?"

B2B buyers take 15+ touchpoints over three to six months and LinkedIn rarely gets last-click credit. An agency reporting only cost per lead will under-report LinkedIn's real contribution and optimise toward cheap leads that never close.

Good answer: CRM integration, influenced pipeline, a view of which closed-won deals had ad exposure before the opportunity existed.

6. "What will you switch off in the first week?"

Anyone experienced has a list: audience expansion, the LinkedIn Audience Network on most B2B accounts, campaigns with no destination, conversions that never fire. Bad answer: "we'd need to look" with no instinct at all. Everyone who has audited accounts has a mental checklist.

7. "What would make you tell me to stop spending?"

A genuinely good agency has conditions under which they would tell you LinkedIn is wrong for you — undefined ICP, transactional product, budget below the viable floor.

Bad answer: "LinkedIn works for everyone." It does not, and an agency unwilling to say so is optimising for closing you.

8. "How do you handle creative, and how often is it refreshed?"

UK audiences are small and saturate fast. Good answer: a rotation cadence tied to frequency and LP CTR decay, plus a view on thought leader ads versus company page ads. Bad answer: creative is your job, or refreshed "when performance drops" with no measure of what that means.

9. "What does month one actually look like?"

Good answer: audit, ICP and account list, tracking rebuild, then build. Honest about demand generation taking three to six months. Bad answer: campaigns live in week one and pipeline promised by day 30 on a cold account. That is not how B2B buying works.

10. "What happens to my account if we stop working together?"

Good answer: you own the ad account, creative, audiences and data, and spend runs on your own account. Bad answer: anything where the agency owns the ad account. Account history affects LinkedIn's algorithm, so leaving without it means starting from zero.

Red Flags

• Guaranteed leads or a promised CPL before seeing your account. Nobody can know this.
• A single ROAS number quoted as a forecast. Averages are not predictions.
• No published pricing and evasiveness on a call. Fees are not commercially sensitive.
• Reports leading with impressions. Nobody leads with reach when they have pipeline to show.
• Owning your ad account. Occasionally framed as a convenience. It is leverage.
• Twelve-month lock-ins. Three months is reasonable because demand gen needs time. Twelve is protecting them, not you.
• LinkedIn as one of fifteen services. Fine for some companies, but do not expect depth.

Green Flags

• They correct a wrong assumption you have, on the first call, at commercial risk to themselves
• They ask about your sales process and deal size before talking about ads
• They can name the specific thing they would check first, and why
• They tell you which of your ideas will not work
• They publish pricing
• They have written something you learned from before you ever spoke

A Sensible Selection Process

1. Shortlist three. One specialist, one full-service, one freelancer or offshore option, so you are comparing models rather than logos. Start from the UK shortlist.
2. Ask all three the ten questions. Same questions, same order. The differences will be stark.
3. Ask each for one specific finding on your account. Anyone serious will spot something in twenty minutes. Compare what they find.
4. Check the account ownership and notice terms before price.
5. Then compare price — and compare all-in, including media, not fee alone.

If you would rather run the diagnostic yourself first, the eight-layer audit and the nine signs your current agency is wasting budget will tell you what to ask about.