What questions should I ask before hiring a marketer?

Every marketer interviews well. The portfolio is curated, the deck is polished, and the discovery call is a sales instrument. These seven questions cut under that, in order of how much they reveal.

1. Who personally touches my account?

The single most predictive question in the set.

At agencies, the senior person on the pitch call hands your account to a coordinator after signing. Ask for names: who builds the campaigns, who writes the copy, who reviews the data weekly. If the answer is a role (“your account team”) instead of a person, you have your answer.

The follow-up that closes the loophole: how many other accounts does that person hold? A senior operator on eight accounts and a coordinator on twenty-five are different products at the same price.

2. Show me two live results, with numbers

Not a logo wall and not “we grew a brand like yours.” Two accounts, stores, or campaigns you can look at, with the before-and-after numbers and what specifically changed.

Real operators keep these ready because the work produces them. A useful shape to expect: a ninety-day window, a structural change described in one sentence, and a number attached. “Brand pulled out of a do-everything Performance Max campaign, feed rebuilt with custom labels, server-side tracking repaired: 1.9x blended ROAS lift and 147% non-brand revenue growth over ninety days.” That is one of mine, and the format is the point. Change, window, number, method.

Ask how each result was measured while you are at it. A result nobody can explain the measurement of is a screenshot, not a result.

3. How do you measure success, and how will I see it?

Listen for revenue, qualified leads, cost per acquisition: business numbers. Be wary of impressions, engagement, and “brand lift” arriving in month one.

Then ask what the reporting looks like and how often. A weekly written summary in plain language beats a monthly dashboard nobody opens.

Push once more on the hard version: what would make you tell me a result is not claimable? A marketer who has never declined to claim a number has not thought about measurement. My own standard for what counts is published at /how-i-measure-results, and I would hold any marketer to something like it, including me.

4. Who owns my conversion tracking?

The quiet killer. Ads optimize against tracking, and when tracking is nobody’s job, the account learns from wrong data for months before anyone notices.

The right answer: the marketer owns pixel-to-purchase measurement personally, or names exactly who does. If they point vaguely at “your developer,” the most important input to your ad spend is unowned.

Here is what unowned looks like with numbers on it. On one Shopify store, the measurement path had degraded to the point that ten days of traffic produced two recorded add-to-carts, while campaigns spent the whole time. Rebuilding the server-side path took monthly ad-attributed add-to-carts to 509 and recovered 31.7% of events and 50% of purchases that browser tracking prevention had been eating. Documented here.

On another account the whole failure was two competing GA4 installs and one wrong character, written up here. Both were invisible in reporting. Both were expensive. What a complete setup looks like is documented in the Tracking Stack.

5. What happens when something breaks in month two?

Launch month has everyone’s attention. Ask about the Tuesday in month two when conversions flatline: who notices, how fast, and what the response time commitment is.

Operators with monitoring name the system. Everyone else improvises, and you find problems by watching your own revenue dip.

Ask for the worst example they have. A real operator has one, and the answer tells you both how bad things get and how fast they get caught.

6. What would you refuse to do for me?

A specialist has opinions about what fails. Ask what they would push back on if you demanded it: a channel they think is wrong for you, a tactic they consider spend-burning, a timeline they call unrealistic.

Someone who agrees with everything you have said is mirroring, not advising, and will keep mirroring after you have hired them. My own version of this answer is a published list of who should not hire me, which sits on the pricing page under the prices at /pricing.

7. If we part ways, what do I keep?

The clean answer: everything. Ad accounts under your ownership, admin access to your own analytics and tag manager, documentation of what was built, and a handoff without hostage negotiations.

Any hesitation here, any mention of “proprietary account structures” living in their business manager, is a reason to walk regardless of how good the rest of the interview went. Accounts inside someone else’s manager account can mean starting bidding history from zero when you leave, which is a switching cost nobody quotes.

What the answers should cost

Vetting is easier when you know the bands. Single-channel management runs $1,500 to $3,000 a month for paid search and $2,000 to $4,000 for email. Multi-channel agency retainers run $5,000 to $12,000. Fractional engagements run $3,000 to $15,000, with operator-style engagements clustering at $4,000 to $8,500. One-time audits run from free graders to $5,000 senior teardowns, mapped at /google-ads-audit-cost.

A quote far under a band means junior hands. A quote far over it needs proof attached. The full pricing breakdown has the rest.

Checking the answers afterward

Ask for one client reference and call it, with one question: “what went wrong, and how did they handle it?” Every engagement has a wrong moment, and how it was handled is the only part of the reference that predicts your experience.

Then verify a number from question two against anything public: a case study page, a review, a screenshot with context.

I’m Conner Crowe, a fractional marketing lead. My answers to all seven live on this site: the results at /results, the measurement standard at /how-i-measure-results, the pricing at /pricing, and you keep everything, always. Bring the list to whoever you interview, including me.