Choosing a Paid Ads Agency in Egypt: What to Ask.

Paid advertising is the easiest service to sell and the easiest to fake, because anyone can turn on a campaign and produce a chart. The difference between a media buying team and a boost button with an invoice shows up in one number, and it is not reach.

1. Ask for cost per result, with the volume

A screenshot of one good week proves nothing. Ask what a single result cost and how many of them there were. Ours are published with both: 4.87 EGP per conversion across 2,235 conversions, 1.74 EGP per lead across 1,764 leads, 1.13 EGP per conversation across 594 orders, 10.66 EGP per qualified real-estate lead across 93. The full table with client names is on the benchmarks page.

Then ask the follow-up that separates most agencies: did it hold while the budget scaled? Nearly every account is cheap when small. Holding a cost while spending grows is a different and much harder claim.

2. Settle ownership before anything else

Ads must run from a Business Manager registered to you, with the agency added as a partner. The same applies to the pixel, the catalogue, the page and the analytics. Setting this up correctly costs nothing on day one and is painful to unwind later.

An agency that runs your ads from its own account controls your audiences, your historical data and your learning. We wrote about what that costs when the relationship ends in who owns your ad accounts.

3. Understand what the fee does and does not include

Any proposal that merges the first two into one figure is hiding one of them. Ask which, and ask it early — this is the single most common source of a relationship souring in month three.

4. Ask who actually runs the account

The person who pitches is rarely the person who executes. Ask for a name, their role, how many accounts they carry, and who covers when they are away. There is no magic number; a straight answer tells you the agency understands its own capacity, and a refusal tells you more.

5. Judge the pricing model against the incentive it creates

• Flat monthly fee. Predictable; the incentive is to keep the client, which usually means keeping results good.
• Percentage of ad spend. Works at large budgets, and creates a direct incentive to increase your spending rather than reduce your cost per result. If you use it, cap it.
• Pay per result. Attractive, and it rewards volume over quality. In categories where a cheap lead is a worthless lead — real estate, clinics — it usually produces the opposite of what you want.

6. What a competent first ninety days looks like

1. Week 1. Tracking audited and fixed, access settled, the offer agreed. No spending until the pixel is verified.
2. Weeks 2–3. Creative produced — several genuinely different angles, not four colourways.
3. Week 4. Campaigns live, budget consolidated enough to leave the learning phase.
4. Week 6. First real read on cost per result; weak angles cut.
5. Weeks 7–12. Weekly creative, scaling only what holds below target.

If the first month's plan is made of words like awareness and engagement with no mention of tracking or offers, nobody has thought about your account yet.

What to check in their own marketing

An agency that cannot market itself is a signal worth weighing. Look at whether their prices are published or hidden, whether their case studies carry volumes or only percentages, and whether their own site ranks for anything beyond their name.

None of these is disqualifying on its own — plenty of good teams are too busy on client work to tend their own. But a site full of claims with no numbers, from a company selling measurement, is a fair thing to raise in the first meeting.

7. The warning signs

• Guaranteed results or guaranteed cost per sale. Nobody controls an auction.
• Reporting that shows reach and engagement but never cost per result.
• A refusal to work inside your Business Manager.
• No named account manager, or a different face each meeting.
• A contract with no exit clause, or one that keeps your assets after exit.
• A report that never contains bad news.

The longer Arabic list is in 12 red flags, and the clauses a fair contract needs in what belongs in an agency contract.

Judge month one on process, not profit

Thirty days is not long enough to judge outcomes and is more than long enough to judge method: did tracking get fixed, did creative actually ship, were questions answered in hours, did the first report tell you something you did not already know. Teams with a good process almost always reach good numbers; teams that produce one good month without process do not repeat it.

What our media buying work covers is on the service page, prices are on pricing rather than behind a form, and if you are comparing proposals, send us the brief — if the fit is wrong we will say so.