How to choose an ad account provider

Providers in this category are difficult to compare, partly because the product genuinely is similar between them and partly because the marketing is designed to prevent comparison. Rates arrive in private messages. Partner status is claimed and never evidenced. The company behind the brand is often not named anywhere.

You are handing this business your advertising budget, so the checks below are worth the twenty minutes they take.

Eight things to establish before you fund anything

1. Who is the legal entity?

A registered company name and the jurisdiction it is registered in. Not a brand, not a first name, not a messaging handle. If a provider will not tell you who you are contracting with, every other answer they give is unenforceable. Ours is on our about page for exactly this reason.

2. What are the fees, in writing, in advance?

You need the funding fee, any subscription, any setup charge and any minimum. Published beats quoted, and quoted in writing beats quoted in a call. A rate that only exists in a chat window is a rate that can change after your money is in.

3. What is the refund position?

Specifically: what happens to unspent balance if the account is suspended, if you stop using the service, or if the provider cannot supply what you paid for. This is where the money actually goes wrong, and a provider with a written policy is meaningfully safer than one improvising. Ours is published, including the parts that are not in your favour.

4. Can you see the account's data yourself?

Spend, balance, account status and campaign performance, visible without asking anybody. A provider who reports by sending a screenshot once a month controls what you know about your own advertising. This is the gap most of the category leaves open, and it is the one our dashboard exists to close.

5. Where will the account be registered?

Account country affects targeting, verification requirements and sometimes billing currency. A provider who cannot tell you before you apply is one who does not know what stock they hold.

6. Who owns the tracking?

Conversion tracking should live in an asset your business owns. If it is set up inside the provider's property, your conversion history is not portable, and you will discover that at the worst possible moment — when you want to leave.

7. What happens when something goes wrong?

Ask specifically what they do when a platform suspends an account. A good answer describes a process — review, appeal, escalation to the provider, possible replacement — and is honest that outcomes are not guaranteed. A bad answer is that it does not happen to their accounts.

8. Will they tell you not to buy?

The most useful signal available. Ask whether your vertical, market and budget are a good fit. A provider who says yes to everything is not evaluating you, which means they are also not evaluating whether your account will survive.

Five red flags

• Guaranteed approval. Nobody controls a platform's approval decisions. A provider claiming to is either lying or describing something that will get the account banned.
• Accounts that "never get banned". Same problem. Enforcement is the platform's to apply, and no supply chain prevents it.
• Claimed official partner status, unevidenced. Partner programmes are public and verifiable. If a provider claims a tier, check it. Most of these claims do not survive thirty seconds of checking.
• Any suggestion that an agency account gets you around policy. This is the belief behind a large share of lost accounts and lost balances. It is also, on every major platform, itself a violation.
• No written terms, no named entity, no refund policy. Individually a bad sign, together a business you cannot hold to anything.

What a straight answer sounds like

You are not looking for confidence. You are looking for specificity and for stated limits. A provider who tells you which countries they hold stock in, what their fee is, what they cannot promise and which parts of the process depend on the platform rather than on them is describing a real operation. One who answers everything with reassurance is describing a sales script.

Before you commit anywhere, it is also worth being sure you need an agency account at all — the comparison against opening your own is the cheaper conversation to have first.