The Ultimate Guide to Hiring a Paid Ads Expert

You're here because you're probably fed up. You've poured money into paid ads, maybe on Meta or Google, and the return has been rubbish. You're watching your budget drain away for a handful of clicks, maybe a few low-quality leads, but certainly not the flood of profitable customers you were promised. It feels like you're just funding the tech giants' next lavish office party. And now you're thinking it's time to call in a professional, a paid ads consultant or an agency, to fix the mess. That’s a smart move. But it's also a dangerous one.

Let's be brutally honest. The world of paid advertising consultancy is full of cowboys. It's packed with smooth-talking 'gurus' who promise you the world, flash a few vanity metrics, and then vanish when the results don't materialise, leaving you with an even bigger hole in your pocket. They'll talk about 'brand awareness' and 'engagement', but they won't talk about profit. They'll show you a rising graph of clicks, but they'll quietly ignore the flat-lining sales chart.

So how do you tell the difference between a genuine expert who can transform your business and a charlatan who will just accelerate your losses? It's not about the slickness of their website or the size of their team. It's about the questions they ask, the strategy they propose, and the numbers they focus on. This guide is your shield. It's a look behind the curtain, showing you exactly how a top-tier paid ads expert thinks. It will arm you with the right questions to ask and the red flags to look for, so you can hire a partner who will build you a predictable growth engine, not just run a few ads. Before you sign a contract with anyone, read this. It might just be the most profitable thing you do all year.

What's the very first question a real expert will ask you?

This is the ultimate litmus test. When you get on a call with a potential consultant or agency, pay very close attention to their first few questions. A lazy or inexperienced marketer will ask about your budget, your target audience in vague terms, or what you've tried before. They'll want to jump straight into the fun stuff: making ads.

A true expert, a genuine consultant, will ask you something that might sound a bit boring. They'll ask about your business maths. They'll ask about your customer lifetime value (LTV), your gross margins, and your churn rate. If a potential partner doesn't ask about your unit economics within the first 20 minutes of the conversation, you should politely end the call and run for the hills. Why? Because without these numbers, advertising is pure guesswork. It's gambling. And you don't pay a consultant to gamble with your money.

The obsession with cheap clicks and a low Cost Per Lead (CPL) is a trap that keeps businesses small. It forces you into a race to the bottom, competing for low-quality traffic that never converts. The real question isn't "how low can my CPL go?" but "how high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?". The answer to that is your LTV. Once you know this, you can stop advertising with fear and start advertising with confidence. It's the only way to build a paid advertising strategy that is actually profitable in the long run.

Let's break down how a proper consultant would think about this with you. They'd want to calculate your LTV. It's not as scary as it sounds, and it's the foundation of everything.

Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's an average customer worth to you each month? Let's say it's £500.

Gross Margin %: What's your profit on that after all your direct costs? Let's say it's a healthy 80%.

Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? Be honest. Let's say it's 4%.

The calculation is simple:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

So, in our example: (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04 = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000.

Here it is in a table to make it clearer:

There it is. Every new customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin. A healthy business aims for at least a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer. If your sales team closes 1 in 10 qualified leads, you can afford to pay £333 for that lead. Suddenly, a £250 lead from LinkedIn doesn't look expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain.

A good consultant brings this clarity. They build the entire ad strategy on this foundation. An amateur ignores it and just hopes for the best. This is the single biggest difference, and it's why you need to find someone who starts with the maths.

Why will a good consultant challenge your offer, not just your ads?

The second thing a top-tier consultant will do is scrutinise your offer. The number one reason paid ad campaigns fail has nothing to do with the ads themselves. It's the offer. A brilliant ad for a weak offer is just putting lipstick on a pig. It might get a few clicks, but it won't build a business.

I've audited hundreds of failing ad accounts, and the pattern is always the same. The founder has built a product they love, but they haven't validated that it solves a real, urgent, and expensive problem for a specific group of people. Or, even if the product is great, the way they're asking people to buy is full of friction and offers no upfront value. A good consultant knows that fixing the offer is cheaper and more effective than trying to brute-force a bad offer with a massive ad spend. It's the reason so many businesses find their ads are failing; the problem starts long before the click.

The most common failure point, especially in B2B, is the "Request a Demo" button. It's the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another vendor begging for time. A good consultant will tell you to delete it. Immediately.

Your offer's only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. A great consultant helps you create what we call a 'value-first' offer. You have to solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the big one. This isn't just theory; it's the core of our entire philosophy on building high-converting landing pages.

If a consultant just accepts your current offer and immediately starts talking about ads, they are not an expert. They are a button-pusher. A real partner will get their hands dirty and help you fix the most important part of your sales process: the offer itself. We've seen it time and time again with our clients. For one B2B SaaS client, we helped them generate 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each, and for another, 1535 trials. It wasn't because of a magic ad; it was because we first helped them nail a frictionless, value-first offer.

How can you tell if they actually know how to find your customers?

So, the prospective consultant has asked about your LTV and challenged your offer. They've passed the first two tests. Now, you need to know if they can actually execute. This comes down to targeting. Anyone can log into Meta Ads and target "small business owners". That's easy. It's also a complete waste of money. A real pro thinks about targeting in a completely different way.

As we've touched on, a good consultant will tell you to forget demographics. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is not a demographic; it's a problem state. A "nightmare". Your consultant's job is to become an expert in that nightmare and then figure out where people suffering from it congregate online. This is the real work of an ad strategist. They become a detective.

They should be asking you questions like:

-> "What niche podcasts do your ideal customers listen to on their commute?"
-> "What industry newsletters do they actually open and read every week?"
-> "What specific SaaS tools, like HubSpot or Salesforce, do they already pay for?"
-> "Are they members of any specific Facebook groups or subreddits?"
-> "Who are the key influencers or thought leaders they follow on LinkedIn or Twitter?"

This intelligence is the blueprint for the entire targeting strategy. It's how you move from a useless demographic to a powerful, targetable "nightmare". A good consultant should be able to explain this thought process to you. They should be able to show you how they'd approach finding your unique audience. If their answer is just "we'll target interests like 'business' and 'marketing'", they're an amateur. It's this deep-dive approach that forms the bedrock of our troubleshooting guide for underperforming Meta ads; it all starts with the audience.

This is the level of strategic thinking you should be looking for. It's the difference between hoping you find your customers and knowing exactly where to look.

What should their creative strategy actually look like?

The final piece of the puzzle is the creative itself—the ad copy and the visuals. A good consultant won't just talk about making "pretty ads". They'll talk about making ads that convert. This means they'll have a systematic approach to both messaging and testing. They should tell you two things that might sound controversial: stop running awareness campaigns, and prioritise authenticity over polish.

The "Brand Awareness" objective on Meta is a trap for 99% of businesses. When you select it, you're telling the algorithm "find me the cheapest people to show my ad to". The algorithm does this perfectly. It finds people who never click, never engage, and certainly never buy. A good consultant knows that real awareness is a byproduct of sales, not a prerequisite for it. They should tell you that all of your campaigns will be optimised for a conversion action, like a lead or a purchase, from day one.

Next, they should talk about crafting a message that speaks directly to the "nightmare" you've identified. This is where copywriting frameworks come in. They aren't just writing ads; they're engineering a psychological response. They should be able to explain frameworks like Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) or Before-After-Bridge (BAB) to you. It's the core of our entire playbook on making creative that converts.

Finally, a good consultant will tell you that for platforms like Meta and TikTok, User-Generated Content (UGC) and authentic, lo-fi video often outperform slick, expensive corporate videos. A real customer talking about their results on their phone is more trustworthy than an actor in a studio. The goal is to make ads that don't feel like ads. They should look native to the platform. If your prospective consultant is only talking about high-production video, they might not understand the culture of the platforms they're advertising on.

How do you spot a good consultant from all the fakes?

Alright, you're armed with the technical knowledge. You know what a good strategy looks like. Now, how do you actually vet the person on the other end of the Zoom call? It comes down to a few key signals.

1. Case Studies vs. Vague Promises: A good consultant will have detailed case studies. And I don't just mean a logo on a page. I mean a proper walkthrough of the problem, the strategy they implemented, and the real business results (ROAS, CPA, revenue generated). They should have examples relevant to your industry. We can talk about how we took a medical job matching SaaS from a £100 CPA to £7, or how we generated $115k in revenue for a course creator, because we've actually done it. A bad consultant will talk in generalities: "we help businesses like yours grow". Ask for specifics. Ask for numbers.

2. The Free Consultation: Value vs. Sales Pitch: The initial call should be incredibly valuable to you, whether you hire them or not. They should be auditing your account, asking smart questions, and giving you actionable advice on the spot. This is how they demonstrate their expertise. Our free 20-minute strategy sessions are designed to do just this. If the call feels like a high-pressure sales pitch where they're just trying to get you to sign a contract, that's a huge red flag.

3. Realistic Expectations vs. Unrealistic Guarantees: This is the big one. Anyone who *guarantees* you a specific result, like a "4x ROAS in 90 days", is lying to you. It's impossible. There are too many variables in paid advertising to make that kind of promise. A true expert will talk about a proven process, a methodical testing plan, and realistic timelines. They'll talk about gathering baseline data and optimising from there. They'll be confident in their ability to improve your results, but they will never, ever guarentee a specific number. Tbh, if someone asks us for references after we've shown them detailed case studies and given them a free account audit, it's a bit of a red flag for us. It signals a lack of trust that will likely continue, suggesting we're not a good fit.

So what kind of results are actually realistic?

This is the final piece of the puzzle. You need to go into this with your eyes open. A good consultant can't perform miracles, especially overnight. They're implementing a system, and that system takes time to work. But what should you expect to pay for a conversion? The answer depends hugely on your industry and target country, but we can provide some rough ballpark figures based on the hundreds of campaigns we've run.

These are for simple conversions like a lead, a signup, or a newsletter subscriber.

For eCommerce sales, conversion rates are naturally lower, so the costs are higher. A 2-5% conversion rate is considered pretty good.

A good consultant should be able to look at your business, your LTV, and these benchmarks, and give you a realistic picture of what's possible. Their job is to build a system that gets you conversions at a cost that is profitable for *your* specific business.

Your Paid Ads Consultant Vetting Checklist

I know this has been a huge amount of information. But you are now armed with the knowledge to make a much smarter hiring decision. To make it even simpler, here is a final checklist. This is the main advice I have for you. If you can tick all these boxes with a potential consultant, you've likely found a winner.

So, is hiring an expert worth it?

Hiring a top-tier paid ads consultant isn't an expense; it's an investment. It's an investment in speed—the speed to get results faster and avoid months of costly trial-and-error. It's an investment in expertise—getting access to years of experience and data from hundreds of campaigns. And it's an investment in focus—freeing you up to do what you do best: run your business.

The wrong consultant can burn your budget and set you back months. The right one can build a predictable, scalable engine for customer acquisition that transforms your business. The goal of this guide was to give you the tools to tell the difference. We've used this exact strategic thinking to deliver incredible results for our clients, from generating $71k in revenue at an 8x return for an eCommerce store, to getting B2B leads for just $22 on LinkedIn. It's not magic, it's a process.

If you've read this and feel that your business deserves this level of strategic thinking, we'd be happy to talk. We offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can dive into your specific business, look at your current campaigns (if you have any), and give you actionable advice on the spot. There's no hard sell, just honest, expert guidance to help you see a clear path forward.