Paid ads agencies, reviewed and ranked

Google, Meta, LinkedIn and programmatic. Scored on attribution that survives 2026 measurement, creative capability, and whether they are deep or merely broad.

35 evaluated, of which we would put 30 in front of a client and cut 5.

Creative is the lever now, not bidding

Platform algorithms have absorbed most of what used to be manual optimisation, which means the difference between accounts is increasingly what gets uploaded rather than how it is bid. Ask how much creative an agency ships per month and who makes it. An agency that hands creative back to you or recycles stock templates is competing on a lever that stopped moving.

Platform-reported ROAS is not measurement

In-platform numbers are self-reported by the party selling the media and have degraded badly with privacy changes. Agencies relying on them as the primary measure score near the bottom of this rubric. What earns a high score is server-side tracking, incrementality testing, media-mix modelling, or a warehouse-backed view — anything that answers what the spend actually caused rather than what the platform claimed.

Depth beats breadth, and breadth is the tell

An agency claiming Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, programmatic, CTV and Reddit is describing a sales page, not a capability. The best operators are deep on two or three named channels. If their deep channels are not your channels, that is a mismatch no amount of enthusiasm fixes.

Evaluated

And the ones we cut, so you can judge the rest

Named, with the reason and the sources.