Ask whose name is on the ad account before anything else
Before you look at any proposal, ask one question: whose name is on the ad account? A good agency runs ads inside your Meta Business Manager, on your ad account, with your pixel and your store admin. They take partner access, you stay the owner. If the answer is that everything sits in their Business Manager and you will get a report every month, walk out. That is not a service, that is your data held hostage. The day you leave you lose every custom audience and every retargeting list you paid to build. Rebuilding it costs you three months and a fresh learning phase.
Second question: name two online stores in Kuwait you have run ads for, and tell me their average order value. Not two brands, two stores. Agencies that live on restaurant and clinic accounts are good at cheap leads and lost on basket economics. Ask what the margin per order was, and what happened to cost per purchase in Ramadan and again in July when half of Kuwait travels. If they cannot answer from memory, they were posting, not selling. You want someone who has watched a Snapchat ad set die at 4 KD cost per purchase and knows exactly why it died.
Ready to start your Shopify store?
Start a free trial and try the platform for yourself.
A guaranteed ROAS ends the meeting
If anyone guarantees a ROAS, the meeting is over. Nobody controls Meta's auction, your competitor's budget, or whether your product is worth 24 KD. A guarantee means one of two things: they will pad the number with branded search and retargeting your existing customers, or they wrote an exit clause you have not read yet. Ask for a realistic band instead, and how they get there. On a Kuwait store with a 15 to 30 KD basket, most honest answers land between 2 and 4 blended in the first month and improve from there. A guaranteed 8 is a sales tactic, not a plan.
The second thing that ends a meeting is a report that only shows platform revenue. Meta will claim 8,000 KD, TikTok will claim 3,000, Snapchat another 2,000, and your store dashboard will show 6,500 KD in total. All three are counting the same buyer twice. The only number that cannot lie is blended: total store revenue divided by total ad spend, for the month, against last month. Ask to see that line in the reporting template before you sign anything. If the agency has never built that line, it has never been held to a real result.
Then ask what they do in a bad month. A weak agency sends a slide about algorithm changes and asks for more budget. A serious one arrives knowing exactly what broke: creative fatigue after nine days on the same Reel, KNET failing at checkout, delivery slipping to four days, a competitor cutting price. In Kuwait the pattern is predictable. Performance dips in the last ten days of Ramadan, through July and August, and again once Eid payday spending is done. If they cannot name those windows before you do, they have not run a store here.
Hold us to the same standard you hold them
Now turn it around and hold us to the same standard. In a first meeting a good agency asks about your margin per order, not your follower count. What does the product cost landed, what does delivery to Jahra cost you, what percentage of cash on delivery orders get refused at the door, and how much of your revenue is KNET versus COD. If nobody asks any of that, nobody can tell you whether a 6 KD cost per purchase is a win or slow bankruptcy. Marketing on top of a 2 KD margin is a hobby, and an honest agency will say so.
The same applies to your checkout. If orders still come through Instagram DMs and a WhatsApp number, no agency can fix your numbers, because there is no clean data to fix them with. Get the store onto Shopify with KNET and Tabby at checkout first, then hire. On price, most competent Kuwait agencies charge 300 to 900 KD a month for a store, sometimes plus 10 to 15 percent of ad spend. Ask for a three month term, a 30 day exit, and written confirmation that every account, file and creative stays yours.