Never asked who owned the ad account, which was my first $1,200

Junk numbers on Meta lead forms are usually the form itself. Prefilled fields mean people submit without reading, and the phone that autofills is whatever they typed in 2019. Turning on a manual phone entry step, or adding one qualifying question before the contact fields, cuts volume hard and raises the share of people who actually answer. Your agency should have told you that before month two. Whether they knew is a different question.

I paid rent on somebody else's asset for a whole year before I noticed the same thing, so you got off light!

The part I would want to understand is what you were going to do with a good lead if you got one. 41 rows in eight weeks is roughly one a day, and if there was no process waiting for them then the ownership question is secondary. When I finally wrote out my own follow up steps before spending anything, the spend got smaller and the results got better, mostly because I stopped buying volume I could not answer.

Genuine question for the room, since I am at the same stage. Is a CRM at this size just a spreadsheet with reminders, or is there a real reason to pay for one? I keep hearing you need one and I do not yet see what it does that a shared sheet and a calendar do not, when the volume is one lead a day.

@marlow the sheet works fine at one a day until you have three conversations going and you cannot remember which one you promised to call Tuesday. What the tool buys you is the timestamp and the source tag attached to every contact automatically. Without those two fields you can never answer the question sable is now stuck on, which is whether the money bought anything. I ran land inquiries out of a sheet for two years and the thing that finally broke it was not volume, it was that I could not tell which campaign a closed conversation came from six months later.

Ownership of the account matters more the longer you run. The conversion history is what the platform uses to find more people like the ones who already responded, so a year of it inside someone else's account is a year you cannot take with you. Ask for it in writing at the start, most small shops will agree because it costs them nothing on day one.