How to choose a Meta ads agency for a D2C brand in India.

01 · The job

What a good Meta ads agency actually does.

Running Facebook and Instagram ads is not just setting up campaigns and adjusting budgets. For a D2C brand, a good agency takes responsibility for five things:

1. Strategy: which products to push, to whom, at what offer, and what a profitable result looks like for your margins.
2. Tracking: making sure purchases are recorded correctly, through the Meta Pixel and Conversions API, including when you use a third-party checkout.
3. Creative: a steady supply of new ads to test. On Meta, creative does most of the targeting work now, and ads wear out.
4. Account management: structure, budgets, testing and cutting what does not work, week after week.
5. Reporting on sales: numbers that match your Shopify orders and bank account, not just clicks and reach.

A good agency will also tell you when the problem is not the ads. If the product page is slow, the price is wrong or the checkout breaks on mobile, more ad spend will not fix it.

02 · Ten questions

Ten questions to ask before you hire.

1. Who will run my account day to day? Meet that person, not just the founder or the sales lead.
2. Whose name will the ad account be in? The right answer is yours.
3. What will you measure success on? Look for sales, revenue against spend, and cost per order. Be cautious if the answer is reach, engagement or CTR.
4. How will you check tracking? Ask how they make sure Meta sees your purchases, including orders through checkouts like GoKwik and cash-on-delivery orders.
5. How much new creative will I get each month, and who makes it? Get a number. "As needed" is not a number.
6. How often will you report, and what will the report contain? Ask to see a sample report with the client's name hidden.
7. How do you count sales that do not happen on the website? If you sell on WhatsApp or by phone, those sales matter, and an agency that ignores them will misjudge your ads.
8. What is the fee, what does it include, and what is the minimum term? Clarify whether creative, landing pages and reporting are extra.
9. How do you plan for sale seasons? Diwali, Durga Puja and end-of-season sales change costs and competition. Ask how they prepare.
10. Can you show me a real result, with the numbers and how they were calculated? Named clients with permission are best. Vague claims are not evidence.

03 · Red flags

Red flags.

• Guaranteed ROAS or guaranteed sales. Nobody controls your product, price, competition and the auction.
• The ad account in the agency's name. You lose your history and data if you leave.
• Reports full of reach, impressions and likes, with little about orders and revenue.
• No access for you. You should be able to log in and see the account whenever you want.
• Scaling spend before fixing tracking. If purchases are not recorded properly, the algorithm optimises on bad data.
• Long lock-ins with no exit clause tied to performance or communication.
• The same package for every brand, regardless of category, price point or margins.
• Only screenshots of platform ROAS as proof, with no link to actual sales.

04 · Realistic ROAS

What ROAS should you expect?

ROAS (return on ad spend) is revenue divided by ad spend. It is the number everyone asks about and the one most often misread. Three things to understand before you set a target:

1. Know your break-even ROAS

Start from your margins, not from someone else's results. Take what you keep from each sale after product cost, shipping, payment fees, packaging and returns. If that is 40% of the selling price, your break-even ROAS is 1 ÷ 0.40, or 2.5x. Below that, every sale from ads loses money before you even pay your team. In India, cash-on-delivery returns (RTO) can cut deep into this, so count them.

2. Platform ROAS and blended ROAS are different numbers

Meta's dashboard shows the sales Meta attributes to its ads. Blended ROAS divides all your sales in a period by your ad spend. Neither is the whole truth: platform numbers can over- or under-count, and blended numbers include repeat buyers, organic traffic and word of mouth. Watch both, and judge the trend over months, not days.

3. Category and price point change everything

A low-priced impulse product, a high-ticket considered purchase and a subscription product behave very differently on Meta. A high-ticket product may need several touches and a conversation before the sale. That is normal, and it is why tracking every sales channel matters.

Start from your margins, not from someone else’s results.

05 · Real example

A real example: Luxury lighting brand.

This luxury D2C lighting brand sells premium designer lighting in India, on Shopify with GoKwik checkout. We took over its marketing on 14 July 2026 and run its Meta ads, a WhatsApp sales flow and the Shopify store together.

From July to October 2026, the brand did ₹1.23 Cr net sales, about 30x ROAS on Meta spend, with sales coming through both the Shopify store and WhatsApp.

Two things are worth noticing. First, this is a blended figure: total net sales divided by Meta spend. We say so openly, because it is the honest way to report it. Second, a big share of the sales closed on WhatsApp. If we had only counted website orders, the ads would have looked far less effective than they were, and the natural reaction would have been to cut spend that was working.

It is also not a number you should expect from any agency for any brand. It reflects one product category, one price point and one sales setup. The lesson that does carry over is the method: count all your sales, keep tracking clean, and judge ads on the money in the bank.

Read the full Luxury Lighting Brand case study →

Static ads we made for the lighting brand’s Meta campaigns.

06 · Fees

How agencies charge in India.

• Fixed monthly retainer: predictable, and the agency is not rewarded simply for spending more of your money.
• Percentage of ad spend: common, but it gives the agency a reason to push spend up.
• Hybrid: a base retainer plus a percentage above a spend level.
• Performance-based: rare, and only workable when tracking and attribution are agreed in writing.

Whatever the model, ad spend is paid separately to Meta. As one example, our performance marketing retainers are fixed:

See our performance marketing agency service →

Creative is often the bottleneck. If you need more video than a retainer covers, AI video ad packs start from ₹25K. See our AI video ads service →

07 · Decide

A simple way to decide.

Shortlist two or three agencies. Give each the same brief: your products, margins, current spend, current results and what you sell outside the website. Ask the ten questions above. Then pick the one that asks you the hardest questions about your business, explains its reporting clearly, and puts the ad account in your name. Start with a defined trial period and clear targets based on your break-even ROAS.

08 · FAQ

Questions.