By Steve Merrill, Founder of WRKNG Digital | July 28, 2026
The most important questions to ask before hiring a Shopify ads and email agency are who owns your data, how they report ROAS, and how they coordinate paid and email together. Get clear answers to those three and the rest falls into place. Here are the 9 questions I would ask if I were vetting an agency for my own store.
I ran a clothing brand to $10 million a year and spent over $5 million of my own money on Facebook ads. I hired agencies. Some were great. Most were not. The bad ones all had one thing in common. They gave me vague answers to the questions below.
1. How do you actually calculate and report ROAS?
This is the first thing I ask. A weak agency shows you the ROAS number inside Meta Business Suite and calls it a day. That number over-counts, because it takes credit for sales you would have made anyway. A good answer sounds like this: "We report blended ROAS across all channels, tied to your real Shopify revenue." That's the number that pays your bills.
2. Who owns the ad account and the customer data?
You should own everything. The Meta for Business ad account, the Google Ads account, the pixel history, and the email list. Some agencies build all of this inside their own accounts, so when you leave you walk away with nothing. If they own your data, they own you. A good agency gives you admin access to your own assets on day one.
3. How do you coordinate paid ads with email and Klaviyo?
Ads and email should not run in two separate rooms. The customer someone paid to acquire is the same customer your Klaviyo flows need to keep. A good answer explains how they feed purchase and abandonment data between the two, so cold traffic from ads gets warmed by email and repeat buyers get pulled out of your paid audiences. That coordination is where the margin lives.
4. What are the contract terms and the minimum commitment?
Ask how long you are locked in. Testing ads and email flows honestly takes about three months to read clean data, so a short runway is fair. A year-long lock is not. The best answer is a 3-month start, then month-to-month. If they need a long contract to keep you, the work isn't holding you.
5. How are you getting my store ready for AI and AEO?
This is the question almost nobody asks yet, which is exactly why you should. Shoppers are asking ChatGPT and Google's AI results what to buy, and those answers pull from structured product data and content, not ad spend. A good agency talks about Shopify structured data, schema, and getting your store cited in AI answers. If they give you a blank stare, they're selling you 2021.
6. How often will I get reports, and what is in them?
You want to know the cadence and the substance. A monthly PDF full of platform screenshots is not reporting. A good answer is a live dashboard plus a monthly call where they walk you through blended ROAS, email revenue, and what they're testing next. Data does not lie, and it tells a specific story about where your business is stuck.
7. Who on your team is actually working on my account?
The senior person who sold you the deal is rarely the person building your campaigns. Ask to meet the media buyer and the email strategist by name. A good answer tells you exactly who touches your account and how many other stores they manage. If one junior hire is running 40 accounts, yours gets the leftovers.
8. What is your creative process for ads and email?
Creative is where paid social is won or lost right now. Ask how many new ad concepts they ship per month and where the ideas come from. A good answer includes a real testing system, not one designer guessing. The same goes for email design, because a pretty flow that nobody built to sell is just decoration.
9. What happens when I want to leave?
Ask this before you sign, not after you're frustrated. A good agency has a clean offboarding process. You keep the accounts, the audiences, the flows, and the creative you paid for. If leaving is painful by design, that tells you everything. The exit terms reveal how the agency really thinks about you.
How We Chose These Questions
These 9 come from years of hiring, firing, and being an agency. Each one exposes a gap that costs Shopify owners real money, and each one has a clear right answer that a good agency gives without flinching. For a ranked breakdown of firms, see our roundup of the 8 best Shopify agencies for ads and email marketing in 2026.
FAQ
What is the most important question to ask a Shopify agency?
Ask who owns the ad account and customer data. If the agency owns it, you can lose your pixel history, audiences, and email list when you leave. You should own all of it from day one.
Should a Shopify agency handle both ads and email?
Yes. One team running both usually beats two vendors. Ads and email pull from the same customer data, so coordinating them in one place raises retention and lowers your blended cost per order.
What is a good ROAS to expect from a Shopify agency?
There is no single number. A good agency reports blended ROAS across ads and email, not just the platform-reported ROAS inside Meta, because platform numbers over-count sales you would have gotten anyway.
How long should a Shopify agency contract be?
Look for a 3-month runway with month-to-month terms after that. Testing ads and email flows takes a few months to read cleanly, but you should never be locked in for a year.
Want an agency that answers all 9 of these without blinking, and gets your store ready for AI shopping at the same time? See how we do it at WRKNG Digital's agentic commerce program.
