How to Choose a Facebook Ads Agency in Hull

Most Facebook ads agencies sound the same on their websites. Everyone gets results and everyone is an expert. If you run a trade, a dental practice or a solar firm in Hull and you’re comparing them, none of that helps.

What does help is a handful of plain questions, asked on the first call and before you sign anything. We run one of these agencies ourselves, so we’re hardly neutral, but every question below works just as well if you sign with someone else.

Who will actually run your account?

Search for a Facebook ads specialist in Hull and you’ll find plenty of agencies claiming to be one. What matters is who logs in to your account on a wet Tuesday afternoon. At some agencies the person who sells you the service hands it straight to a junior, or to a freelancer you’ll never speak to.

So ask for a name. Then ask how often that person checks the account and what they change when something isn’t working. In our view a live lead campaign needs looking at a few times a week, not once a month when the report is due. And when you ring with a problem, a direct line to the person doing the work beats a support inbox every time.

A good Facebook ads expert doesn’t have to live round the corner, but knowing the area saves money. Someone who knows Hull and the East Riding won’t need telling that Anlaby, Willerby and Kirk Ella sit just over the city boundary but are still on your patch, or that a job in Goole is a long way from a base in Hedon.

They’ll also know that a radius drawn around your premises can stretch across the Humber into North Lincolnshire. That’s great if you work there and wasted money if you don’t.

Whose name is the ad account in?

This one sounds dull, and it matters more than it looks. Ideally your ad account, your Facebook Page and your Meta Pixel sit in your own business’s name, with the agency given access as a partner.

If the campaigns run inside the agency’s own account instead, ask what happens if you ever leave. The ad history, the audiences and months of Pixel data are worth having, and a good agency will give you a straight answer about who keeps them.

Not sure your website even has the Pixel on it? Our free Facebook Pixel checker will show you, along with whether Google Analytics, Tag Manager and a cookie banner are installed.

What happens the moment a lead comes in?

The ads are only half the job. The other half is what happens when someone fills in your form at half six while you’re having your tea.

Get them to show you, step by step. Where does the lead land? Does it go into a proper CRM, or sit in an inbox? What message goes out first, how quickly, and who rings them back? In our experience the business that replies first usually wins the job, and a lead left until tomorrow afternoon has often booked someone else.

One simple test before the sales call is to fill in the agency’s own enquiry form and time how long they take to reply. That’s a fair preview of how your leads will be treated.

Find out what they build before the first ad goes live, too. If the answer is nothing, your leads will arrive with nowhere sensible to go. We put the landing page, the CRM and the instant follow up in place first, and our page on how we work sets out the order.

Who makes the ads, and where do the clicks go?

Stock photos of a smiling family outside a house that’s clearly nowhere near East Yorkshire won’t win you many enquiries. In our experience real footage of real work does far better: your team, your vans, a rewire in an east Hull terrace, a heat pump going in at a semi in Cottingham. People trust what they recognise.

So who makes the creative? Will they come out and film your actual jobs, or ask you for a few photos and fill the gaps with stock images? Where it helps, we film ours on site, on content days.

Then look at where the clicks go. Sending people to your homepage hands them a menu full of ways to wander off. A landing page built for the ad, with one offer, your proof and a short form, gives them one obvious thing to do.

What should a Facebook ads report show?

Reach, impressions and likes don’t pay wages. The numbers worth reporting are what you spent, how many leads came in, what each one cost and how many turned into booked jobs.

Getting those last figures right depends on the tracking. The Meta Pixel tells Meta when someone enquires on your website. The Conversions API sends the same information from your server or your CRM, so less gets lost to ad blockers and privacy settings. Meta’s own guidance suggests running the two together.

What often gets missed is the final step, telling Meta which enquiries became paying jobs. Once it has that, we’ve found it gets better at showing your ads to more people like them.

Take Yates Electrical Solutions, an East Yorkshire electrical contractor. We ran a Meta campaign for them across Facebook and Instagram, and in the first 28 days it brought in 40 new leads at an average of £8.67 per lead, from £346.86 of ad spend. More than £8,000 of new work was confirmed, a return of over 23x. Those are the figures a report should lead with, and the full breakdown is in our Yates Electrical case study.

If you know roughly what a lead costs you and what a job is worth, our free Facebook ads ROAS calculator shows what your spend brings back in leads, jobs, revenue and return per £1. And whoever you choose, ask for the monthly report to be walked through on a call rather than dropped in your inbox. That’s how we do ours.

Red flags to watch for

Whether the agency is in Hull or at the other end of the country, these are the signs to walk away:

• A guaranteed number of leads. No agency controls Meta’s ad auction, your prices or how quickly you ring people back.
• Boosted posts sold as Facebook ads management. Boosting gets a post seen, and you can press that button yourself.
• Reports full of reach and likes, with nothing about enquiries or jobs.
• A long contract before you’ve seen a single lead. Ours is a three month agreement, then 30 day rolling.
• No limit on how many of your direct competitors they’ll take on.

That last one deserves a straight question. If the agency already runs ads for a firm down the road doing exactly what you do, ask how they’d handle you both chasing the same customers. We only work with two businesses per industry in each area, and whoever you speak to should give you an honest answer on this.

None of these are trick questions, and a good agency will answer every one without squirming. If you’d like to put them to us, that’s what the first call is for. We’re a Facebook ads agency in Hull, based at Bridgehead Business Park in Hessle, and we work with service businesses across East Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the rest of the UK.