Your first 90 days with a paid social agency should establish reliable measurement, produce a focused testing plan, and turn the results into clear budget and creative decisions. A sensible sequence is to learn and validate in month one, test in month two, and refine in month three.
This is a planning framework, not a promise that every account will be ready to scale on day 91. Access delays, budget, conversion volume, production timelines, and your store’s starting point all affect the pace.
Before kickoff: bring the business context
Your agency needs more than an Ads Manager login. Share your margins, best-selling products, inventory constraints, promotional calendar, customer insights, and previous creative. Explain what success means for the business and which tradeoffs you can afford.
Keep ownership of your business assets and grant the access needed for the work. Confirm who owns approvals, who can fix tracking or site issues, and how quickly creative feedback can happen. A campaign can wait days for a ten-minute decision if those responsibilities are unclear.
Days 1–30: understand the account and establish the baseline
The first month should answer two questions: what is happening, and how confidently can we measure it?
- Review campaign history, audiences, offers, creative, and landing pages.
- Check purchase events, product feeds, and relevant tracking connections.
- Compare platform reporting with store data and document differences.
- Agree on primary business measures and the attribution settings used in reports.
- Identify the most important constraints and build an initial testing backlog.
Useful deliverables include a baseline report, a prioritized audit, a measurement plan, and a creative brief. You should know what the agency will change first and why.
Best Practice Media’s Pip Pop Post case study describes inconsistent conversion tracking and fragmented campaigns as starting problems. Establishing a stronger tracking foundation was part of the work before scaling. That is a useful reminder that the first task is not always spending more.
Days 31–60: run focused tests
The second phase should turn the diagnosis into experiments. Each test needs a question: does a product demonstration address a buying objection? Does a different offer improve the economics? Does a landing-page change reduce friction?
Make the creative ideas meaningfully different. A new background color is not the same as a new reason to buy. Test concepts rooted in customer needs, objections, use cases, and product benefits.
Agree on the budget and evidence needed to evaluate a test. Low-volume accounts may need longer observation periods. Avoid calling a winner after a handful of purchases or changing several major variables without a way to interpret the outcome.
Useful deliverables include a test log, new creative, clear observations, and the next round of decisions. The report should explain what the team learned, including what did not work.
Days 61–90: refine the plan and decide what earns more budget
By the third phase, the agency should be able to explain which approaches deserve further investment, which need revision, and which should stop. “More budget” is one possible decision, not the required conclusion.
- Compare performance with the original baseline using consistent definitions.
- Check whether margin, customer mix, promotions, or inventory changed.
- Develop new variations of promising creative ideas.
- Review the pace of creative production and approvals.
- Set the next quarter’s priorities, budget assumptions, and open questions.
If results are weak, you should get a diagnosis and a specific response. If results are strong, you should get a reasoned plan for testing additional spend without assuming efficiency will stay unchanged.
What should happen throughout all three months?
Agree on a communication rhythm at kickoff. That might include a short weekly working update and a deeper monthly review, depending on the engagement. The important part is a predictable place for decisions, blockers, and accountability.
A useful update answers: what changed, what happened, what remains uncertain, and what we are doing next. A dashboard is helpful, but it cannot replace those explanations.
What if the first 90 days are not profitable?
Ask whether the gap was anticipated, what evidence has been gathered, and what would need to change. Compare the actual investment with the agreed testing budget and payback expectations. Do not keep spending indefinitely because an account is supposedly “still learning.”
At the same time, avoid treating a calendar deadline as proof that a sound test failed. Judge the work against the starting point, available data, and agreed decision rules.
What to agree on before you sign
Ask for the onboarding steps, scope, deliverables, reporting cadence, approval responsibilities, and approach to budget changes. Best Practice Media’s paid social services span strategy, creative, tracking, testing, and campaign management; the proposal should identify the work included in your engagement.
Still comparing partners? Our guide to choosing a paid social agency for e-commerce covers the questions to ask about margins, measurement, creative, and accountability.