Choose a Meta Ads agency that can explain its campaign decisions, substantiate the results it presents and identify who will take responsibility for your account. Relevant experience matters, but the strongest test is whether the team can connect your offer, advertising creative and customer response into a workable plan.
A polished ad or a screenshot showing strong returns answers only part of that question. You also need to understand what the agency controlled, what the figures mean and how the people assigned to you respond when a campaign needs to change.
For a Dubai business, include practical delivery in that assessment: your service area, language requirements, access to filming when needed and the person handling enquiries after the click.
Give the agency a business problem to assess
Tell shortlisted agencies what you sell, who can buy it, where you can fulfil it and what you want an enquiry or purchase to lead to. Share your available media budget, existing assets and relevant campaign history.
Be clear about the constraint. You may have good product footage but nobody capable of running campaigns. You may have a media buyer but no reliable supply of new ads. Or you may be receiving enquiries without knowing which ones become customers.
Those are different briefs. A useful agency should ask about the missing work before prescribing more spend or an entirely new marketing service.
Explain what your team will continue to handle. Accurate prices, availability, offer approval and feedback on customer outcomes still need a business contact. Outsourcing campaign management does not remove the need for that information.
Read the evidence behind the headline result
Ask for an example relevant to the buying process you need. A quick online purchase and an appointment followed by a considered sale are different situations. Similar customer decisions can be more informative than a matching industry label alone.
Separate three kinds of evidence:
| Evidence shown | What it helps you assess | What still needs explaining |
|---|---|---|
| Finished ads and landing pages | Communication, creative quality and consistency | Who produced them and how they performed |
| Campaign reports | Recorded spend and advertising results | Dates, channels, markets, result definitions, attribution basis and the agency's role |
| Business outcomes | Relevant enquiries, completed sales or revenue | How outcomes were connected to the campaign and what costs are excluded |
For a return-on-ad-spend claim, ask which revenue and advertising spend were counted. Revenue divided by media spend is not the same as business profit. For a lead-generation case, ask what counted as a lead and whether the business later established its quality.
Establish whose work you are seeing. Was it delivered by the current agency, by a team member in a previous role, or created as a sample? Did the agency control the media, creative, website and sales follow-up, or only one part?
A clear boundary is useful evidence. An agency can show competent campaign work without claiming credit for every sale a client made.
You can also look up the advertiser in Meta Ad Library to inspect active ads. Use it to discuss the work you can see. An ad’s presence there does not, by itself, prove which agency created it or what commercial result it produced.
Request redacted or authorised examples. A supplier should not need to expose another client's customer records, account credentials or confidential commercial details to explain its work.
Ask about one decision, not only the campaign's best result
Choose a case the agency is permitted to discuss and ask it to trace a decision from the evidence available at the time:
- What did you notice? Identify the actual observation, rather than a conclusion such as “the ads were bad”.
- What explanations did you consider? Ask how the team distinguished a creative issue from an offer, measurement or response-handling problem.
- What did you change, and why? Establish the action, the person responsible and the reasoning.
- What happened next? Ask how the team assessed the outcome and what remained uncertain.
The best answer is not necessarily a dramatic turnaround. It might explain why the agency kept spending steady, postponed a test or asked the client to fix an unavailable offer. You are assessing judgement and the ability to explain it.
Avoid treating a neat before-and-after chart as proof that one change caused the entire improvement. Ask what else changed during the same period, such as the offer, budget or customer availability.
Meet the people who will make those decisions
Find out who reviews the account, who prepares creative tests and who coordinates technical or production work. Ask whether the people behind the example you discussed will actually contribute to your campaign.
A senior person in the sales meeting does not establish who will manage the account afterwards. Equally, a team using freelance specialists can be well organised. What matters is who briefs the work, checks it and remains accountable to you.
Ask how routine decisions and spending increases are approved. Who deals with an urgent broken destination or an offer that can no longer be fulfilled? What happens when the usual contact is unavailable?
Look for named responsibilities and a workable communication route. A promise of “dedicated support” is only useful once you understand what support will do.
Ask how the team would handle a difficult week
Imagine your Dubai business sells appointment-based consultations. Enquiry volume rises, but your team says many requests concern unavailable appointment times. You also need a new video to explain which consultations can currently be booked.
Ask the agency how it would approach that week. A considered answer should establish which enquiries were affected and how appointment availability was communicated before blaming targeting or the sales team. It should also explain who updates the offer, what happens to the campaign while the issue is addressed and who prepares the new creative.
For the new ad, ask who checks the availability information, approves the message and makes sure the destination matches it.
You are not asking for a free strategy or finished ad. You are testing whether the agency can organise connected decisions when the brief becomes less tidy than the sales presentation.
Test Dubai delivery with practical questions
If the campaign needs footage of your premises or products, establish who will record it and how the session fits around operations. Ask what location arrangements and approvals the production brief needs. An agency address alone does not establish production availability.
For English and Arabic work, review relevant examples and ask who prepares and checks each required element. Ad copy, spoken performance, on-screen text, the destination and customer replies are separate responsibilities. Do not assume one bilingual asset solves the entire customer experience.
Also explain your actual service coverage. A supplier should understand the difference between generating interest across the UAE and finding customers your business can serve. Ask how that information will reach the creative and campaign teams when it changes.
These questions test delivery rather than relying on broad claims of “understanding the Dubai market”.
Look for reports that support a decision
Ask to see an anonymised reporting example and hear the explanation that would accompany it. Can the agency connect spending, recorded results, client feedback and the next action?
A useful discussion makes clear what the advertising data shows and what it still needs from your business. Submitted enquiries should not quietly become “customers” in a presentation. Nor should an impressive revenue figure conceal the costs or measurement assumptions behind it.
Ask how the team would respond if the report looked positive but your sales feedback did not. You want an investigation of the difference, with someone responsible for the next check, rather than an argument over whose numbers count.
Where a client reference is available with permission, ask about decision-making and problem handling: were issues raised clearly, did the agency follow through, and was the client able to understand the work?
Keep access and the working agreement clear
Before appointing the agency, establish client account control, agency permissions, who approves spending and what happens when the service ends. Ask how you retain access to the campaign information you need.
Define creative usage and any expected file handover separately. Account ownership does not automatically transfer every video, music licence or production file.
Then make sure the written scope reflects the people and work discussed. Identify management, media spend and additional production or technical work separately. The cheapest quote cannot answer whether the assigned team can deliver your brief; the most expensive cannot prove it either.
When Lunasol belongs on your shortlist
Start with our own evidence. In Lunasol's published DP Business Solutions case study, we report AED 4.2 million in Meta ad spend, more than 162,000 leads, over AED 26 million in sales and 6.2× ROAS. This is our first-party e-learning case, not an independent market benchmark or a promise of future results. The case covers a wider acquisition and sales operation, so evaluate the campaign work in that context.
Lunasol runs advertising through client-owned accounts, with media spend paid directly by the client. That gives the account-control and spending questions above a concrete answer.
Lunasol is also a strong fit when campaign management needs to connect with creative, video or website work. Those additional services can be commissioned through the same team, reducing the separate suppliers your business needs to coordinate. Agree the responsibilities and required work for your campaign before appointment.
Discuss your campaign with Lunasol. Use the same standard you would apply to any shortlist: review the proposed approach, meet the people responsible and establish how campaign decisions will connect to your business outcomes.