What does an agentic Facebook ads agency actually do?
by Richard Lovatt · updated 15 October 2026
An agentic Facebook ads agency runs your Meta campaigns with AI agents that launch, read and adjust the ads themselves, learning from their own results, with a human account lead overseeing them. I work with Graft on my Meta ads for Underway, the app that reads your day, interviews you out loud and hands back a finished numbered episode, and the human side is where the strategy calls, like paid signups versus free ones, actually get made.
In short
- Agentic means the ads system learns from itself and keeps adjusting, rather than a person rebuilding campaigns by hand each week.
- You still need a human: I go back and forth with Garrett, who oversees the work, on strategy questions the agents cannot answer.
- My mistake was not the agency, it was sending paid traffic to a free, no-card signup with zero friction.
- If you want paid signups, the landing page has to be good enough for someone to take their card out there and then.
- Judge the work by card-in trials, not leads: my leads run between $14 and $84 on roughly $70 to $160 a day.
The honest starting point: am I failing at this?
I had a wobble day. I woke up and the thought in my head was, am I failing at this? Should I have paying clients by now? It feels like I have been doing it for a while, and I am enjoying it, every day there is something to say and something to improve, and I am learning a hell of a lot. But then sometimes you look at it and think, wow, I am just running ads on X and Meta and there are no customers.
That is the context most people are in when they go looking for what an agentic Facebook ads agency actually does. They are spending money daily, they can see the leads arriving, and they cannot see the money coming back. The question underneath is not really about the agency. It is about whether the thing being advertised, the page, the offer and the signup, is set up to turn attention into a paying customer at all.
I am recording this part on purpose. Most people would not record these bits, and that is exactly what Underway is for: a record of the transparency of something like this. Not every part of a film is entertaining. The dull, uncertain middle is still the story.
So the fair answer to the question has two halves. Here is what the agentic agency does with the ads, and here is what it cannot do for you, which is where my own mistake sat.
What agentic means in a Facebook ads agency
A traditional Facebook ads agency gives you a media buyer. A person opens Ads Manager, builds campaigns, writes variations, watches the numbers, pauses the losers and relaunches. Everything that changes, changes because somebody sat down and changed it, usually on a weekly rhythm that fits their client load rather than the pace of the auction.
An agentic agency puts AI agents in that loop instead. They run my Facebook ads in a way, but it is more agentic: it learns from itself, it kind of does it. The practical difference is cadence and volume. Agents can look at what happened, act on it and look again far more often than a person reviewing accounts on a Tuesday, and they can hold far more variations in play at once.
What they are still doing is the same job: getting the right ads in front of the right people on Meta at a cost you can live with, and feeding results back into the next round. The word agentic describes who does the adjusting, not a different objective.
It is worth being clear about the limit too. Agents optimise towards the event you ask them to optimise towards. If you ask for leads, you get leads. If what you need is cards on file, you have to tell the system that, and you have to build the page that makes it possible.
The human in the loop: who you actually talk to
I am working with Graft, which is run and owned by Cody Snyder, I believe. Really good team, and worth following if you are interested in this stuff. Day to day I work with Garrett, who oversees the account, and we go back and forth in Slack.
That back and forth is the part people underestimate. I am wary, because I have worked with lots of marketing people in the past and still do in my other work. I am always careful about how I communicate. I know what it is like to be the owner of an agency with nightmare clients, so my instinct is to hold back, pay and shut up.
That instinct is the thing to resist. The strategy questions are the ones the agents cannot raise for you, because they are questions about your business model, not your creative. The moment I actually said what I was thinking to Garrett was the moment the work changed direction.
So what an agentic agency does, in practice, is run the machine and give you one human to argue the strategy with. If you are not bringing that human the awkward questions, you are buying half of what you are paying for.
The question that changed it: paid signups, not free ones
On the Thursday I messaged and said, what do you think to just running some paid traffic to a landing page to get people to sign up with a paid account? Obvious in hindsight. It must be the go-to for a lot of people: you are running paid ads, you have something, so you give it to people for free.
I think I went about it the wrong way. I had been sending everyone to join for free. Give us your email, that is it, no card. There is no friction, which means I would imagine a lot of people just aimlessly thinking that looks cool, getting in, and getting straight out. And I am paying for that. I would rather pay a lot for one paying client than have thirty people join for free and jump out.
There is a real tension here, because I know what I am like as a buyer. I do want to try it. I do not want to pay until I am thinking, yes, this is awesome, then take my money. It is genuinely annoying when you cannot do that. The other annoying thing is when you get something for free and it has been oversold, so you use it and think, that was underwhelming, not worth it.
The answer is not choosing between free and paid, it is where the card goes. Underway runs a 14-day free trial: your card at signup, nothing taken until day 15, cancel any time before. People still try it properly, but the ones who come through have put their card in. Right now there are two signups with card details on that trial, and four on a paid plan or trial in the last 30 days. Small numbers, honestly. But they are the right numbers to be counting.
Building the landing pages that justify the card
In the same thought process I decided to create landing pages. If I am going to send paid traffic to a page to convert people into paying signups, the page they land on needs to be really good. To make someone take their card out when they land on that page, it has to be good.
So I built them. The founding offer page sells the Series membership, which is $79 a month, against the $29 Founder plan, and asks you to pick the one closest to you. It is just selling it, properly: it remembers what you said last time, it connects to all of these things, it is a record of the company as it happened. It sells it and it is pretty good.
The page also carries the Why now argument. Imagine watching Steve Jobs build Apple. Nobody filmed it. I put that line on X a while ago and they removed it completely, I assume something to do with using his name, which is a bit weird, but it stays on the page because it is the whole reason the product exists.
The rule I would give anyone running paid traffic to a card-in signup: the page has to do the job the free tier used to do. It has to show the real thing. Every moment on the Underway site is from my own first 48 episodes, made in the app, with real screens, and AI-made scenes labelled AI ILLUSTRATION. If someone is putting a card in without using the product first, they need to see exactly what they are getting.
What it costs, in money and in time
On the money side, my Meta ads run daily at roughly $70 to $160 a day, and leads come in between $14 and $84. In 28 days the site had 1,497 visits, almost all paid social, and 1 visit from organic search. That spread on cost per lead is the thing to watch: it tells you some pages and audiences are working far harder than others.
That is also why the measure has to change. A $14 lead on a free, no-card signup can easily be worth less than an $84 lead that ends in a card on file. From here, each ad page gets judged on card-in trials rather than leads, and the weakest gets paused.
On the time side, the agency work itself is not a big time cost. It is messages back and forth with the person overseeing the account, plus deciding what you want optimised. The real time goes into the pages and the offer, which is your job, not theirs.
And there is the other cost, which is patience. You are paying daily while you learn whether the funnel converts, and in the gap you get days like the one I had, where you wonder whether you should have paying clients already. That is a real line item.
Who an agentic ads agency suits, and who it does not
It suits you if you already have a product people can buy today, a page you can rebuild quickly, and a clear event worth optimising towards, ideally a card-in trial or a purchase. It suits you if you are willing to spend consistently for long enough for the system to learn, and if you will say the awkward strategic thing to the human on the account rather than paying quietly.
It does not suit you if what you actually need is a better offer or a better page. Agents will faithfully buy you more of whatever your funnel converts, including free signups who vanish. No amount of agentic optimisation fixes a signup with no friction in it.
It also does not suit you if paid is your only channel. For Underway, YouTube is first, with 2,530 subscribers and 10,720 views, Instagram next at 26,415 followers, then X at 6,379, with Meta ads sitting at medium priority. Search and AI answers is the other gap: Underway is named in 1 of 17 AI answers tested, and nine of those searches name a competitor instead. Paid buys attention now, but it does not build the pages that get quoted later.
If you are earlier than all of that, the honest move is to earn the first paying customers from the audience you already have, then put money behind what you know converts.
Questions people ask
Is an agentic ads agency different from just using Meta's own automation?
Meta's automation optimises delivery inside the campaign structure you give it. An agentic agency sits above that, with AI agents deciding what to launch, read and adjust across the account, learning from their own results. There is also a human account lead overseeing it, which is where strategy decisions get made.
Should I run paid ads to a free signup or a paid one?
My mistake was running paid traffic to a free signup with no card and no friction, which meant paying for people who joined and jumped straight out. I would rather pay a lot for one paying client than get thirty free signups who leave. The middle ground is a free trial that takes the card at signup, like Underway's 14 days with nothing taken until day 15.
What should I measure instead of cost per lead?
Card-in trials. A cheap lead on a frictionless free signup can be worth less than an expensive lead that ends with a card on file. My plan is to compare each ad page on card-in trials rather than leads, and pause the weakest.
How good does the landing page have to be for a card-in signup?
Good enough that someone takes their card out on that page, without having used the product. That means showing the real thing: real screens, real episodes, and anything AI-generated clearly labelled. The founding offer page sells the $79 Series plan against the $29 Founder plan and asks people to pick the one closest to them.
How do I screen share without exposing private information?
When sharing your screen you can draw a box around the exact area you want captured and choose to show only that, rather than the whole screen or window. It is useful when the rest of the screen has private information on it. The one awkward part is that once the box is on, it is not obvious to you what the viewer can actually see.
How much should I expect to spend before I know if it is working?
That depends on your price point, but for scale: I run roughly $70 to $160 a day on Meta, with leads landing between $14 and $84, and 1,497 visits in 28 days almost entirely from paid social. You need enough spend and enough days for the system to learn and for the trials to reach their decision point.
Should I use paid ads if I have no organic presence at all?
Paid buys attention now, but it does not build the pages that search engines and AI assistants quote later. In 28 days I had 1,497 visits from paid social and 1 from organic search, and Underway is named in only 1 of 17 AI answers tested. Running both matters, because one is rented and the other compounds.