How to Choose a Google Ads Agency: 9 Questions

Most businesses pick a Google Ads agency the same way. Three calls, three decks, three case studies with impressive percentages next to them, and then a gut decision about who seemed sharpest. Six months later the spend is up, the lead count is flat, and nobody can explain exactly what changed. I have inherited enough of those accounts to know that the problem almost never started with the campaigns. It started in the sales meeting, with the questions nobody asked.

I run Killerspots, and paid search is one of the lanes we manage for clients across the country. The uncomfortable truth about this category is that the pitch quality and the work quality are close to unrelated. Building a slick deck takes a day. Building a paid search account that survives contact with a real budget takes a discipline that does not photograph well. So the job of a buyer is to ask questions that a good deck cannot answer. Here are the nine I would ask if I were sitting on your side of the table.

What does a Google Ads agency actually do for you?

The work splits into two halves that get sold as one. The first half is inside the ad platform: structure, keywords, negatives, bidding, budget pacing, ad copy testing. The second half is everything the click lands on. A campaign can be built perfectly and still fail because the landing page asks for too much, the phone rings at a desk nobody staffs at lunch, or the form dumps into an inbox that gets read twice a week.

Agencies that only do the first half will report a healthy account while your cost per booked job climbs. That is the single most common shape of a disappointing engagement, and it is why our own Google Ads agency work starts with tracking and lead handling before we touch a bid. When you are comparing proposals, notice which half each one is actually promising.

1. Who will actually be working on my account?

This is the question with the highest hit rate, and it is uncomfortable enough that most buyers skip it. The pitch is a sales function. The build is a production function. In plenty of shops those are entirely different people with entirely different skill levels, and nothing in the proposal tells you that.

There is nothing wrong with a junior analyst doing the daily work if a senior person reviews it and the structure is sound. There is a lot wrong with finding out in month four that the person you were impressed by has not opened your account since onboarding. Ask who builds it, who reviews it, how often, and whether you can talk to them directly. An agency confident in its bench will answer immediately.

2. Do I own the ad account and the conversion data?

This one is not a detail. Your account history is an asset. Years of conversion data are what the bidding algorithm learns from, and starting over in a fresh account means starting the learning curve over too. An agency that owns your account owns your switching cost, and some of them know exactly what that is worth.

The right setup is simple: the Google Ads account lives under your business, the agency has manager access, and the same is true of your analytics, tag manager, and call tracking. Ask what happens to all of it if you part ways. The answer should take about ten seconds and require no negotiation. If it requires negotiation, you have learned something important before signing anything.

3. How is your fee structured, and would it ever work against me?

No model is dishonest by itself. What matters is whether the agency can name its own conflict without flinching. I would rather work with a shop that says “our fee scales with spend, so hold us to a cost per lead target and cut us off if it drifts” than one that pretends the incentive does not exist.

The specific scenario to raise is the one where your account is doing well and the honest advice is to stop expanding. A partner will tell you where the ceiling is in your market. A vendor will find a new campaign type to fill the budget. You cannot detect the difference from a rate card, but you can usually detect it from how someone answers this question.

4. What will you do about conversion tracking before you touch a bid?

I have seen accounts where a thank-you page counted a conversion every time someone refreshed it, and the algorithm dutifully chased the traffic that refreshed the most. The reporting looked wonderful. The client’s calendar was empty. Nothing in the campaign settings was wrong; the account was simply being told to want the wrong thing.

This is also the fastest way to judge an agency’s seriousness during a sales conversation. Ask what they would check in week one. If the answer is about keywords and ad copy, they are starting in the middle. If the answer is about call tracking, form tracking, duplicate conversion actions, and where the sale actually closes, they have done this before. Our PPC agency guide to what working campaigns look like walks through the same sequence in more depth.

5. Which metrics will you report, and which will you ignore?

Ask to see a real client report with the names removed. You will learn more from one page of an actual monthly report than from the entire proposal. What sits at the top? Is there a line connecting spend to booked work, or does the story stop at the click?

The other half of this question is what happens when the numbers are bad. Every account has bad months. What you want to hear is a description of how they surface it, because the agencies worth keeping tell you before you ask. The ones worth leaving reformat the dashboard. This is the same failure pattern I described in our piece on pitfalls to avoid in paid media campaigns, and it repeats across every channel, not just search.

6. How do you handle Local Service Ads and lead disputes?

This question is a quick specialist filter. LSA behaves differently from search: you are charged for a lead, not a click, and Google provides a process to dispute leads that were not legitimate. Filing those disputes is tedious, unglamorous work that has to happen every week to be worth anything.

Ask directly whether they file disputes, how often, and what share of leads typically get credited back. An agency that runs Google Ads and Local Service Ads together will have a number ready because they track it. An agency that has never touched LSA will talk about it in general terms. Neither answer is disqualifying on its own, but if LSA is where your category’s high-intent volume lives, you want the first one.

7. What happens in the first ninety days?

The reason to ask is not to hold anyone to a schedule. It is to hear whether the plan is generic. A real ninety-day plan references your business: which services carry margin, where your crews or your attorneys actually work, what seasonality does to your demand. A generic plan references Google’s feature list.

There is also a pace question hiding in here. Rebuilding an account resets some of the learning the bidding algorithm has accumulated, so a good partner sequences changes rather than detonating everything in week one. If someone proposes tearing the whole account down immediately, ask what they expect that to do to performance in the meantime. The answer should be honest about a dip.

8. Who writes the ads and builds the landing pages?

This is the seam where a lot of engagements come apart. The agency optimizes the account, the account sends traffic to a page the client’s web person built two years ago, conversion rate stays flat, and both sides can point at each other with a straight face. Nobody is lying. Nobody owns the outcome either.

Get it explicit before you sign: who writes ad variants, who builds and tests landing pages, and who pays for that work. If the answer is “you do,” that is workable as long as you know it going in and have someone to do it. What you cannot afford is discovering the gap in month three. If you are still weighing whether to build that capacity internally at all, our comparison of in-house marketing versus an agency covers the trade-off.

9. What does leaving look like?

I ask this in every vendor conversation I am on the buying side of, and the reaction is more informative than the answer. Confident shops treat it as reasonable diligence. The ones that get cagey are telling you that retention is a contract problem for them rather than a performance one.

The specifics worth pinning down are the notice period, whether campaigns and creative built during the engagement stay with you, and how quickly access transfers. Long lock-ins with automatic renewals and vague handover language are the combination to avoid. A good partner will happily commit to a clean exit, because they do not plan on you using it. If you are consolidating several vendors under one roof, the same diligence applies at a bigger scale, which is what our post on what an agency of record is gets into.

What are the warning signs in a Google Ads agency pitch?

The badge one deserves its own note. Partner status is a threshold an agency clears by meeting spend and certification requirements. It is a floor, not a differentiator, and an agency leaning on it as the headline of its credibility is telling you what else it does not have to show.

The other pattern to watch is the case study with no denominator. A percentage improvement with no starting point, no time frame, and no industry attached can describe almost anything. Ask what the account looked like before, how long the change took, and whether it held. Real operators enjoy that conversation because the details are the interesting part.

How should you make the final call?

If two agencies feel close, the tiebreaker I would use is which one told you something you did not want to hear during the sales process. The willingness to say “your tracking is broken and that has to be fixed before any of this matters” is a decent proxy for how they will behave when a month goes sideways.

We manage paid search for clients nationwide, and for businesses in our home market we keep a dedicated Cincinnati PPC practice alongside it. If you want a second read on an existing account before you commit to anyone, including us, get in touch and we will tell you what we see in it. An account audit is a cheap way to find out whether your current problem is the agency, the tracking, or the offer.