London: How To Hire An Instagram Ads Expert

Finding a decent Instagram ads agency in London feels like a nightmare. The market is flooded with people who talk a good game, flash impressive-looking dashboards, and then proceed to burn through your cash with little to show for it but a few extra likes. The truth is, most of them are selling you a service, not a result. They're focused on ticking boxes, not on making you money.

If you're tired of vague promises and want to find a partner that actually understands how to generate a return, you need to change your approach. You need to stop buying what they're selling and start vetting them like an investor interrogating a founder. It's not about finding someone to 'do your ads'; it's about finding someone who can build a predictable engine for growth. And that starts with asking completely different questions.

Why Are Most Instagram Ad Agencies a Waste of Time and Money?

Here's an uncomfortable truth. When you hire an agency and tell them your goal is "brand awareness" or "reach," you are paying them to find you the worst possible audience. You've given them a specific instruction: "Find me the largest number of eyeballs for the cheapest price."

The Meta algorithm is incredibly good at its job. It will dutifully find you users who are cheap to reach precisely because they never click, never engage, and certainly never buy anything. They're not in demand. You're paying a fortune to advertise to people who have been pre-qualified as non-customers. It’s the fastest way to feel busy while going broke.

A good agency knows this. A bad agency will happily take your money and produce a report full of big numbers for "impressions" and "reach," knowing full well it means nothing for your bottom line. Real awareness isn't a campaign objective; it's the byproduct of making sales. It's a customer telling their friend about you. Anything else is just noise you're paying for.

The second major failure is a total misunderstanding of your customer. They'll ask for your target demographic—"women aged 25-45 in Greater London"—and call it a day. This is lazy and leads to generic ads that speak to no one. Your customer isn't a demographic; they're a person with a specific, urgent problem. Your ads need to speak directly to that pain. If an agency's first question isn't about the "nightmare" your product solves for your customer, they're already on the wrong track.

So, What Should I Actually Be Looking For in an Agency?

You need to shift your mindset from hiring a supplier to finding a partner. This means their success has to be tied to your success. The first and most important filter is their track record. Not their client logos, not their polished pitch deck, but their cold, hard case studies.

Here’s the deal: any agency worth their salt will have detailed case studies showing their work. And I don't mean vague testimonials. I mean numbers. Specifically:

• -> The Niche: Have they worked with businesses like yours? Getting results for a B2C eCommerce brand is a world away from generating leads for a high-ticket B2B service. I've run campaigns that generated a 1000% ROAS for a subscription box and campaigns that got B2B leads on LinkedIn for $22. They are not the same skill set.
• -> The Platform: This article is about Instagram, but do they understand the whole ecosystem? Often the best results come from a mix of platforms. We've seen campaigns for recruitment SaaS, for instance, that only took off when we combined Meta Ads with Google Ads, slashing the Cost Per Acquisition from £100 down to just £7.
• -> The Metrics That Matter: Do their case studies talk about Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), and Revenue Generated? Or are they waffling on about Click-Through Rates (CTR) and impressions? If they aren't talking about money in and money out, they aren't focused on what matters.

If an agency can't show you this, the conversation is over. Don't fall for "every client is different" or "we build a custom strategy for you." That's code for "we don't have any results to show you." After you've seen their case studies and their work looks solid, only then should you get on a call. And on that call, your job is to continue the vetting process.

To help you visualise this process, here's a simple flowchart. Follow it, and you'll filter out 90% of the time-wasters.

How Do I Know if Their "Results" Are Any Good? The Math That Matters

Let's say an agency shows you a case study where they generated leads for £50 each. Is that good? Bad? Impossible to say without more context. The real question isn't "how low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but "how high a CPL can I afford to acquire a great customer?"

To answer that, you need to understand two things: your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and the relationship between LTV and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Most business owners I speak to haven't calculated this, and it's the single most powerful number you can know. Forget guessing. Let's do the maths.

Your LTV is the total profit you can expect to make from a single customer over the entire time they do business with you. Here’s how you calculate it:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average a customer pays you per month?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue?
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The formula is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's use the interactive calculator below to make this real. Play around with the numbers to see how they affect your LTV. You might be surprised at what you can afford to spend to get a new customer.

Now you have your number. If your LTV is £10,000, a £50 lead doesn't just look good, it looks like an absolute bargain. You can now approach agencies with a clear benchmark. You can confidently spend on channels that deliver high-value customers, even if the upfront cost seems high. This simple calculation frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads. For a deeper dive into the numbers, understanding your paid ads ROI is the best way to ensure you're actually building a profitable business.

What Killer Questions Should I Ask on a Discovery Call?

Once you've vetted an agency's case studies and you're on a call, you need to dig deeper than their sales pitch. Your goal is to test their expertise, not listen to a presentation. Ditch the generic questions. Here’s what you should ask instead:

1. "Looking at my business, what's the first campaign you'd run and why? What would be your primary objective?"
   This forces them to think on their feet. A good answer will be specific. They might say, "We'd start with a Meta conversion campaign targeting a lookalike audience of your past purchasers, optimising for sales. The ad creative would focus on [specific pain point] because your target audience [ideal customer profile] struggles with this." A bad answer is vague: "We'd do some testing to see what works."


2. "Show me a case study of a campaign that failed initially and tell me what you did to turn it around."
   This is my favourite. It tests for honesty and problem-solving skills. Every single agency has campaigns that don't work out of the gate. The ones who pretend they don't are lying. The experts will have a story about identifying the wrong audience, fixing the offer, or rewriting the ad copy to finally crack the code.


3. "Let's talk about the offer. My current call-to-action is 'Contact Us'. What are your thoughts on that?"
   A top-tier expert will likely tell you that 'Contact Us' or 'Request a Demo' are high-friction and low-value. They should immediately start brainstorming better, lower-friction offers. For a SaaS, it's a free trial. For a service business, it could be a free audit, a checklist, a calculator, or a short strategy session. We find a free audit is a great way to show expertise. If they just nod and say "that's fine," they lack strategic depth.


4. "How do you approach ad creative? Do you handle copy and design?"
   The ad itself is half the battle. You want to know if they truly understand direct-response copywriting. They should talk about hooking the reader, agitating a pain point, and presenting your product as the solution. For B2B, a great agency would know that a message like "Our FinOps platform saves you money" is weak. A killer ad says "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher, and your engineers have no idea why. Imagine opening that bill and smiling instead." If they just talk about "brand-aligned visuals," be wary.

Asking these questions will quickly separate the talkers from the doers. You're not just looking for someone to push buttons in Ads Manager; you're looking for a strategic thinker. To get this right, you need to understand how to pick a paid ads agency that is geared to drive profit, not just activity.

The London Factor: Does a Local Agency Even Matter?

It's a valid question. Does being based in London actually make an agency better for your London-based business? The answer is... it depends.

The main advantage of a London agency is a potential understanding of the local market. The consumer culture, the competition, the specific challenges and opportunities in the city—these can be valuable insights. If you're a luxury retail brand in Mayfair, an agency that understands the mindset of that clientele has a head start. The London advertising space is also incredibly competitive and expensive. CPCs are higher, and the noise is louder. An agency with a proven track record of getting ROI specifically in the London market has demonstrated they can navigate this tough environment.

However, a great remote agency with deep experience in your specific niche is infinitely better than a mediocre local one that's a jack-of-all-trades. Expertise in your industry trumps geographical proximity every single time. I'd rather have a team in Manchester who are the best in the world at eCommerce for women's apparel than a team in Shoreditch who has never sold a dress online. For example, one of our campaigns for a women's apparel brand achieved a 691% return. That expertise is what you're buying, not their postcode.

My advice? Prioritise niche expertise first. If you find two equally impressive agencies and one is in London, then the local knowledge might be the tie-breaker. But don't let it be your primary filter, or you might miss out on the best partner for your business. Finding the right PPC agency in London is less about their office location and more about their performance data.

Okay, I've Found Someone. What's a Realistic Plan?

No credible agency will promise you results overnight. Anyone who guarantees a specific ROAS in the first month is a salesperson, not a paid ads professional. The first 1-3 months of any engagement should be about testing, learning, and data collection.

Here’s a realistic breakdown of what to expect:

• Month 1: Foundation & Testing. This involves technical setup (pixel, tracking, etc.), audience research, and launching initial test campaigns. You'll be testing different audiences (e.g., interests, lookalikes) and creative angles (different ad copy and images/videos). The goal here isn't massive profit; it's to find signals of what works.
• Month 2: Optimisation. Based on the data from month one, the agency should be doubling down on winning audiences and creatives while cutting the losers. You should start to see metrics like CPA improve and hopefully see a positive return.
• Month 3: Scaling. Once you have a proven combination of audience, creative, and offer that is profitably acquiring customers, it's time to carefully increase the budget to scale the results.

To give you an idea of what good looks like, here are some benchmarks from campaigns we've run. These aren't promises, but they give you a sense of what's possible with a professional, optimised approach.

The key takeaway is that it's a process. Be patient, but also hold your agency accountable to a clear plan and regular, transparent reporting on the metrics that actually matter. Below is a summary action plan you can use as a final checklist before you sign a contract.

The Final Word: Stop Hiring Agencies, Start Partnering with Experts

Finding the right partner to manage your Instagram advertising in a market like London is tough, but it's not impossible. It requires you to be more diligent, more demanding, and more focused on business outcomes than on advertising jargon.

Stop letting agencies lead the conversation with their process and their promises. Take control by defining what success looks like for your business first—your LTV, your affordable CAC, your required ROAS. Armed with these numbers, you can turn the tables and vet them on your terms.

This process takes more effort than just picking the agency with the slickest website. But the payoff is the difference between burning through your budget for a handful of likes and building a scalable, profitable customer acquisition machine that fuels your growth for years to come.

If you've read this and feel like you need a hand cutting through the noise, that's what we do. We help businesses like yours implement these kinds of profitable advertising strategies. If you'd like a second pair of expert eyes on your current advertising or want to discuss a potential strategy, feel free to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation with us. We can walk you through a proper audit and give you some actionable advice you can use, whether you decide to work with us or not.