Paid social is the easiest agency service to start and the hardest to evaluate. Starting is easy because the platforms will happily spend your money within an hour of getting access. Evaluating is hard because each platform reports the conversions it believes it caused, those reports overlap, and the totals from three platforms will comfortably exceed the orders in your own system. A buyer who does not resolve that in advance ends up in a quarterly meeting arguing about attribution instead of deciding anything. This page sets out what the work consists of, how agencies charge for it, what the disclosure rules require when creators are involved, and how to judge results without relying on the platforms to mark their own homework.
What the work consists of once the novelty wears off
Four activities, repeated. Audience and structure, meaning how campaigns are organised so the platform's optimisation has enough signal to work with, which matters more now that most targeting decisions have moved inside the algorithms. Creative production at volume, because paid social is a creative led channel where fatigue is measured in weeks and the winning ad is found rather than designed. Measurement plumbing, meaning conversion tracking that survives browser restrictions and server side event forwarding where it applies. And the weekly decision loop: what to cut, what to scale, what to test next. Notice that the second item is the one that consumes budget and the one that thin proposals gloss. An agency proposing to manage your accounts without producing or commissioning creative is proposing to manage a channel it cannot actually influence, which is worth knowing before you compare their fee to anyone else's.
How the fee is structured and what it does to incentives
Three models dominate. A share of spend is simple and pulls toward spending more regardless of marginal return. A flat retainer removes that pull and creates a mild disincentive to scale a winner, since more spend means more work for the same fee. Performance based structures sound fair and relocate the disagreement to attribution, which in paid social is the least settled measurement problem of the three. Whichever model you accept, insist on three things: media spend on a separate invoice line from agency fees, any platform rebate or incentive disclosed, and creative production quoted separately rather than assumed. Then check who owns the accounts. Advertising accounts, pixels, custom audiences and the historical performance data inside them should be registered to your business with the agency granted access, because those audiences were trained with your money and are the most valuable thing the engagement produces.
Creators, endorsements and disclosure
Once paid social involves creators, influencers or employees posting on the brand's behalf, disclosure law applies. The Federal Trade Commission's endorsement guides require that a material connection between an endorser and a brand, which includes payment, free product, discounts or an ongoing relationship, is disclosed clearly and conspicuously, and the FTC's disclosures guidance for social media influencers spells out what clearly and conspicuously means in practice: visible without tapping more, in the same medium as the claim, and not buried in a block of tags. The FTC also announced a final rule in 2024 addressing fake reviews and testimonials. The relevant question for a buyer is procedural: who briefs the creator on disclosure, who checks the published post, and what happens when a creator ignores it. An agency that treats this as the creator's problem is describing an arrangement where the liability lands on the advertiser, which is you. Anyone quoting for paid social media services should be able to answer that in one sentence.
Judging results without believing the dashboards
Set the ground rules before spend starts. Pick one source of truth for orders or qualified enquiries, normally your own commerce or customer system, and report platform figures alongside it rather than instead of it. Agree a simple check on incrementality, even a crude one: a holdout region, a spend pause of a fortnight, or a comparison of total orders against total spend across the period. Agree how long the learning phase gets before a campaign is judged, because assessing week two is assessing noise. Then look at what the agency actually changed each month and whether those were decisions or activity. Creative iterations shipped, audiences cut, budget moved between winning and losing sets: those are the work. Campaign counts and report cadence are not. A monthly meeting that spends most of its time on platform reported return and none on what will be tested next is a meeting where nobody is managing anything.
Questions people ask about paid social marketing
Why do platform reported conversions exceed our actual orders?
Because each platform counts conversions it believes it influenced, using its own attribution window, and a buyer who saw ads on several platforms gets counted by each. The totals therefore overlap by design. Resolve it by treating your own order system as the single count and using platform figures only to compare campaigns within that platform.
How much creative do we need to supply?
More than most buyers expect, since paid social fatigues quickly and the winning ad is usually found by testing rather than chosen in advance. Agree upfront whether the agency produces creative, commissions it, or expects you to supply it, and price that separately. This is the most common gap between two proposals that look similar on management fee.
What is a sensible starting budget?
Enough for the platform to exit its learning phase within a reasonable period and for you to reach a conclusion, which depends on your conversion rate and average order value rather than on a universal figure. Ask any agency to show the arithmetic behind the number they propose. If they cannot, the number came from their minimum rather than your economics.
Should the agency own the ad accounts?
No. Accounts, pixels and custom audiences should be registered to your business with the agency granted access. Agencies buying through their own accounts sometimes have operational reasons, but the effect is that the audiences your spend trained leave when they do. Ask what transfers on termination and get the answer into the contract.