Do not call an agency until you have done these 8 things.

MMost founders who reach out believe the agency handles everything from scratch. Sometimes we do, but it costs. If you arrive with tracking already working, we start optimizing day 1. If you arrive with nothing set up, the first 3 weeks go on configuration.

And if you are on retainer, you pay those 3 weeks without a single ad running. That is not fair. But it is the reality many will not tell you because they like billing dead time.

There are founders who pay EUR 3,000 a month for three months while the agency configures the pixel. Three months. A pixel takes 45 minutes with a YouTube tutorial. But if you do not know that and the agency does not tell you, you pay.

I am writing this so you know what you can do yourself in one day and what should already be working when you open the first conversation with any agency.

Here is what I want to see already in place when we open the onboarding call. It does not have to be perfect. It has to exist and fire. If something is missing, we handle it. But if everything is missing, we do not start with optimization. We start with plumbing.

Meta Pixel plus Conversions API

The Meta pixel is the foundation. Without it, the platform does not know who bought, who added to cart, who looked at a product. It is like opening a physical store and turning the lights off. People walk in, maybe buy, but you see nothing.

• Pixel installed on every page of the site. Through Google Tag Manager or directly in the theme. It does not matter how. What matters is that it sends data.
• Events wired with standard names: PageView, ViewContent, AddToCart, InitiateCheckout, Purchase. Do not reinvent names. If your pixel sends something other than Purchase, Meta does not connect anything.
• Conversions API running. Server-side or via Shopify/WooCommerce plugin. Without it you lose a good chunk of attribution on iOS. Since iOS 14.5, CAPI is not optional. It is mandatory.
• Test Events verified in Events Manager. Every event must show Received and dedup on event_id. If you do not see the events there, it is not working.
• Aggregated Event Measurement configured with 8 priority events. Not optional since iOS 14.5. Without it, Meta does not optimize correctly on conversions.

Five points. Each checked in Events Manager in 2 minutes. If you do not know what Events Manager is, search: Meta Events Manager tutorial. First result is official from Meta. Follow the steps. 30 minutes and done.

Google Analytics 4

GA4 is free. There is no reason not to have it configured correctly. And yet, a good share of the accounts I open for the first time have something broken on GA4.

• GA4 property opened with the correct timezone from day one. Changing it later breaks historical data. There are accounts set to Los Angeles timezone where all conversions appear to land at 3 AM Romania time.
• Ecommerce events wired: view_item, add_to_cart, begin_checkout, purchase. All with items and value. If purchase does not send value, you cannot calculate ROAS in GA4 and Google Ads cannot import anything useful.
• Transaction ID passed on purchase. Without it you cannot dedup if a customer refreshes twice after ordering. And your numbers inflate artificially.
• Enhanced Conversions active with user-provided data: email and phone hashed in SHA-256. Without this, Google Ads loses part of its attribution. It is free. Takes 20 minutes to configure.

Shopify has direct GA4 integration that configures most events automatically. WooCommerce has plugins. This is not about money. It is about 2 hours of work you do once and use for years.

Google Ads conversion tracking

Google Ads is where most e-commerce money gets spent. And it is where broken tracking costs you the most. A Performance Max campaign with broken tracking throws money away because the algorithm learns on false signals. It does not learn which product sells. It learns noise.

• Google Ads account in your name. Not the agency's. Never the agency's. A Google Ads account is an asset. If the agency opens it in their name, when you leave you have no history, no quality score, no data.
• Conversion tracking wired. GA4 import or direct Google Tag. Both work. Pick one. What matters is that you see conversions in the account when you place a test order.
• Enhanced Conversions active. Without them, Search and PMax campaigns perform noticeably worse. Not an exaggeration. It is what I see in the accounts where I activate them.
• Google Merchant Center connected with a clean product feed. Mandatory for Shopping and Performance Max. Feed needs titles, descriptions, prices, images. If anything is missing, Shopping campaigns either do not start or start with poor performance.

Picture a Google Ads account running Performance Max without Enhanced Conversions. You activate them and within a few weeks CPA drops noticeably. Same campaign, same budget, same audience. Only difference: the algorithm receives better attribution data. A CPA drop from clean tracking alone.

TikTok Pixel, if you are opening that channel

• TikTok Pixel installed and verified with TikTok Pixel Helper in Chrome
• Events API wired for dedup, same as on Meta
• Core events connected: Page View, Add to Cart, Complete Payment

TikTok is optional for most businesses. But if you want to test it, do it right from the start. Do not launch campaigns on an unverified pixel. You will burn money and conclude TikTok does not work. TikTok works. But only if you measure it correctly.

What the agency handles, not you

Not everything above has to come from you. A few pieces we cover in the first weeks without a separate invoice, if we work on commission. Not because we are generous. Because waiting does not work for us either. Every week the account sits idle is a week nobody makes money.

• Custom audiences in Meta. They need 30 days of pixel data before they are useful. No point building them before you have real traffic data.
• Initial test campaigns. We design them based on what we see in the account, in GA4, and in Merchant Center. You cannot structure them because you do not have experience with ad sets, bidding, and campaign objectives.
• Creative A/B testing. We build the plan after the first two weeks of data. Until then, we form hypotheses based on what we know about your market.
• Enhanced Conversions refinement. We tune iteratively in month one. The first weeks are about working, not about being perfect.

Real cost: you vs freelancer vs agency

If you do it yourself, following official Meta and Google docs, one weekend covers it. No need for EUR 500 courses. No need for EUR 1,000 freelancers. You need YouTube, patience, and 6 hours.

If you pay a tracking freelancer to do everything: EUR 500-1,500 one-time. Plus 1-2 weeks of launch delay, since your ads agency is waiting for it anyway. So you pay twice: once for setup, once for the weeks the accounts sit idle.

Picture a founder who pays EUR 2,200 to a freelancer to configure his tracking. When you open the account, the Meta pixel is installed wrong: not sending Purchase. GA4 has no ecommerce activated. Google Ads is importing conversions from a Universal Analytics account that has not existed for 8 months. He paid EUR 2,200 for zero. Not because the freelancer was malicious. Because the founder did not know how to verify. Now you do.

How to verify everything works in 10 minutes

After setting everything up, place a test order on your own site. Pay with card. Then check in order:

1. 01Meta Events Manager: search for Purchase in the last 60 minutes. The event must appear with value and Received status. If it does not show, the pixel is not firing correctly.
2. 02GA4 Realtime: check if purchase appears in live events. It must have transaction_id and value. If value is missing, ROAS reporting in GA4 will be zero.
3. 03Google Ads, Conversions: verify the conversion appeared in the account. Sometimes takes up to 3 hours. But if nothing shows after 24 hours, tracking is not connected.
4. 04TikTok Events Manager (if applicable): same check, look for Complete Payment in the last 60 minutes.

If all four show green, you are ready. If one does not work, search for the specific event on Google: Meta Purchase event not firing Shopify. Official forum results fix 90% of issues. The remaining 10% the agency handles in the first days.

A warning I give everyone

Your agency is not responsible for explaining everything to you. You are responsible for understanding what you pay for. If you do not know what a pixel is, learn. If you do not know what CAPI is, look it up. You do not need to become a technical expert. But you need to know enough not to be fooled.

There is a massive difference between I do not know and I am learning and I do not know and I am paying. Choose the first.

Every founder I have worked with who set up their own tracking understood ads better afterward. Not because tracking is complicated. Because when you see how data flows from the site to the ad platform and back, you understand what the agency measures. And when you understand what they measure, you can no longer be misled by pretty numbers.

One Saturday. 6 hours. Zero cost. And you walk into any conversation with any agency from a completely different position. Not as someone waiting to be told everything. As someone who knows what they have and knows what they need.