A tool that works beautifully for one business can be unusable across fifteen, and the reasons are structural rather than about features. If you run advertising for clients — as an agency, a freelancer, or a marketing person inside a group with several brands — these are the questions that decide whether a product survives contact with your actual workload.
1. Are client accounts genuinely separated?
The first question, and it is architectural rather than a settings toggle.
Ask what stops one client's audiences, creative, budget or performance data appearing in another client's campaign. If the answer involves being careful, that is not separation — that is a convention. You want a structure where client campaigns cannot reach each other, because eventually somebody on your team will be tired at six on a Friday.
💡 The failure mode is not dramatic, which is why it goes unnoticed. It is a client's business description subtly influencing another client's ad copy, or an audience built for one brand being reused for a competitor. Both are the kind of thing that ends a relationship if the client ever sees it.
2. Whose ad accounts do campaigns run in?
This matters more for you than for a single business, because you are making the decision on someone else's behalf.
If the tool runs ads from accounts it controls, then your client's pixel history, custom audiences and conversion data belong to a vendor neither of you chose together. When the relationship ends — and relationships end — the client cannot take their data, and that becomes your problem rather than the vendor's.
Campaigns running in the client's own Business Manager with you granted access is the arrangement that survives a parting. It also makes the pitch easier: you are improving something they own rather than renting them access to something they do not.
3. How does pricing scale with your client list?
Per connected ad account
Scales linearly with your client count. Fine at high margins, brutal if you serve many small clients.
Per seat
Scales with your team rather than your list. Usually better for an agency with many small accounts and a lean team.
Percentage of ad spend
Compounds with client growth and creates the same misalignment you are probably already navigating with your own fee structure.
Flat tier with an account limit
Predictable until you cross the limit, then a step change. Check where the steps are before you grow into one.
Work out the cost at your current client count and at double it. Products that look cheap at five clients are frequently the expensive option at fifteen.
4. Can you onboard a client without a meeting?
An underrated operational question. The time cost of adding a client is the thing that limits how many you can profitably serve.
If setting up each new account takes a two-hour session, a strategy document and three rounds of creative approval, your ceiling is low regardless of how good the tool is. If a client can be added from a website URL and a short description, with campaigns built for review in minutes, the economics change completely.
The same applies to the currency and country question. A tool that assumes one market will fight you on every foreign client — and it should handle each client's own currency end to end rather than converting for display, so the numbers you show a client match the numbers in their ad account.
5. What does the client see?
- 1White labelling — can reports and any client-facing view carry your brand rather than the vendor's? This is table stakes for some agencies and irrelevant to others; decide which you are before paying for it.
- 2Can a client be given read-only access to their own campaigns? Useful for the ones who want to look, and a strong retention feature.
- 3Do reports export in a form you can put in front of a client without rebuilding them in a spreadsheet?
6. The quality questions that apply regardless
Everything that matters for a single business still matters here, multiplied by your client count. Two are worth re-stating because the failure is silent and would affect every account you manage:
Is targeting read from the platform at build time, or shipped inside the product? A hardcoded shortlist silently discards everything outside it. We found this in our own product — a hand-maintained list of fifteen behaviours was throwing away 161 of 177 selections, and because the list had been written for one market, only that market's campaigns were unaffected. Across a client list spanning several countries, that is most of your accounts running degraded.
And do keywords come from real search volumes or from a language model guessing? Take five suggested keywords into Keyword Planner and check. If several show no volume, every search campaign you build on that tool will underdeliver for reasons no report will explain.
7. What happens when a client leaves?
Ask it before the first client signs, not after the first one goes. Can their campaigns keep running? Can they take their data? Do you lose access cleanly, or does removing them break something?
A clean exit is worth more than it sounds. Clients talk to each other, and "they made it easy to leave" is a surprisingly effective thing for a departing client to say about you.
Many clients, strictly separated, in their own accounts
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