Most business owners hire a Google Ads agency the same way: a good sales call, a confident proposal, a start date. The trouble shows up three months later, when the invoices arrive on schedule, the reports look polished, and nobody can say for sure which leads the ads actually produced.
Knowing how to choose a Google Ads agency has little to do with finding the slickest pitch. It comes down to asking questions a sales deck can't answer for them, then checking the answers. This guide is for service business owners and early-stage founders who are hiring their first agency or replacing one that didn't work out. It covers what to prepare before the first call, the 12 questions worth asking, the answers that should end the conversation, and what a realistic first 90 days looks like.
The short version
A good Google Ads agency is specific about four things: who owns the account, what counts as a conversion, how often someone reads your search terms, and how you leave. A vague answer on any of those tells you what you need to know.
The best way to judge an agency is to walk in with the numbers it should be asking you for. If an agency never asks for them, that tells you something too.
Twenty minutes with these numbers changes the whole conversation. Instead of listening to a pitch, you're checking whether the agency's plan fits your economics.
Ask this first, because the answer is hard to fix later. The right answer: the account is created in your business's name (or already is), your payment method pays Google directly, and you hold admin access. The agency works inside the account through its own manager account and its own logins.
Be wary of agencies that run your ads inside an account they own. When the relationship ends, the campaigns, the conversion history, and everything your bidding has learned stay with them. A Google Ads account's performance history can't be copied into a new account. You can rebuild the campaigns, but you start the learning over from zero.
The same goes for everything around the ads: Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, call tracking numbers, and any landing pages the agency builds. Ask where each one lives and whose name is on it.
Check it yourself in two minutes
Sign in to Google Ads, open Admin, then Access and security. You'll see every user and their access level, plus a separate tab for linked manager accounts. At least one person from your business should have Admin access. Agencies usually work through a manager account link or with Standard access. If you can't sign in at all, you already have your answer.
Plenty of agencies are sold by a senior strategist and run by whoever has capacity that month. That isn't automatically bad, but you should know who it is. Ask for the name of the person who will log in to your account, how often they'll do it, and who you'll talk to when something breaks.
Then ask what a typical week looks like. Specific answers sound like “review search terms, confirm conversions are still firing, move budget toward the campaigns producing qualified leads.” Vague answers sound like “ongoing optimization.”
Google Ads counts whatever you tell it to count. An agency that counts page views, button clicks, or every visit to a thank-you page can report great numbers while your phone stays quiet. The right answer is short: one or two actions that map to money, such as a submitted quote request, a booked appointment, or a phone call that lasts long enough to be a real conversation.
Ask which actions they would set as primary conversions in your account, the ones automated bidding optimizes toward. Everything else can be recorded as secondary, so it shows up in reports without steering your budget.
For most service businesses the best leads call instead of filling in a form, and the sale closes days later on the phone or in person. If calls aren't tracked, Google's bidding sees clicks that “didn't convert” and steers budget away from the people most likely to pick up the phone.
A strong answer covers calls from the ads themselves, calls from your website, and a way to send closed jobs back into Google Ads, whether that's an offline conversion import from your CRM or a simple regular upload. We go deeper on each of these in our pre-scale conversion tracking checklist.
Tracking rarely fails loudly. A website update removes a tag, a new form tool stops sending events, a consent banner blocks a script, and the dashboard keeps showing numbers, just the wrong ones. Ask how the agency checks that conversions are still firing, how often, and whether it compares reported conversions with the leads you actually received.
If the answer is “we set it up at launch,” keep asking. Setup happens once. Maintenance decides whether next month's report is true. Our breakdown of why Google Ads conversions don't match your sales covers where those gaps usually come from.
You don't need to be a Google Ads expert to judge this answer. Listen for a structure built around your business rather than the platform's defaults:
An agency that proposes one campaign for everything, or can't explain why it structures accounts the way it does, will be hard to hold accountable later.
The search terms report shows the actual searches your ads appeared for, which is often a different list from the keywords you chose. It's where most wasted spend shows up: job seekers, DIY researchers, services you don't offer, people outside your area.
A good answer names a cadence (weekly is common while an account is new) and describes what happens next: irrelevant searches become negative keywords, and searches that convert get their own keywords and ads. Ask what kinds of negatives they'd add for a business like yours. If they can list categories without thinking, they've done this before. Our Google Ads waste audit shows what that review looks like in practice.
Paid clicks sent to a generic homepage make the visitor do the sorting, and most won't bother. Ask where each campaign will send people, whether the agency builds or recommends landing pages, and what happens when the ads work but the page doesn't.
This is where a lot of setups fall apart. The ad agency blames the website, the web designer blames the traffic, and you're left in the middle. It's one reason we keep web design and SEO and paid ads with the same team, and why we wrote a full guide to websites that get traffic but no leads.
A report should answer business questions, not restate the dashboard. Ask to see a sample (a template or an anonymized example is fine) and check whether it tells you:
If the sample is mostly impressions, clicks, and click-through rate, the report describes activity, not outcomes.
Every account has bad weeks. What matters is whether you hear about it from the agency or notice it on your own bank statement. Ask how they'd tell you a campaign is underperforming, how soon, and what they'd propose. The answer you want sounds like “as soon as we see it, with a plan attached,” not “we'll cover it on the monthly call.”
There's no single right pricing model, but every model rewards something, and you should know what yours rewards before you sign. Whatever the fee structure, your ad spend should be billed by Google to your own payment method, separate from the agency's fee, so you can see exactly what reached the platform.
| Pricing model | How it works | What it rewards | Ask them |
|---|---|---|---|
| Percentage of ad spend | The fee rises and falls with your monthly budget. | Effort that scales with account size, but also bigger budgets. | “What would make you recommend I spend less?” |
| Flat monthly fee | A fixed fee for a defined scope of work. | Predictable costs, with no built-in reason to inflate the budget. | “What exactly is in scope, and what costs extra?” |
| Pay per lead | You pay for each lead the agency delivers. | Lead volume, which isn't always the same as lead quality. | “Who defines a lead, and who controls the tracking that counts them?” |
| Base fee plus bonus | A monthly fee plus a bonus tied to agreed targets. | Shared goals, as long as the targets measure real outcomes. | “Which numbers trigger the bonus, and who verifies them?” |
Also ask what the fee covers. Landing pages, ad creative, call tracking software, and reporting tools are sometimes billed separately, and a low management fee can grow quickly once they're added.
Ask about contract length, the notice period, and what happens on the way out: who removes access, what you keep, and whether anything stops working when you leave. Call tracking numbers are the easy one to miss. If your website and listings use numbers the agency owns, leaving can mean losing calls.
Then read any guarantee closely. No one can promise the top ad position, because where your ad shows depends on your bid, your ad quality, and what competitors do in every single auction. Be skeptical of guaranteed rankings or a guaranteed return on ad spend promised before anyone has seen your numbers. A guarantee worth having is specific and fair to both sides: an agreed target, a clear definition of what counts, a time frame, and a stated remedy if the target is missed.
The agency that asks the best questions about your business usually understands the job best. Pay attention to what they ask you, not just what they tell you.
After two or three calls, the conversations start to blur. A simple scorecard keeps the decision honest. Score each agency 0, 1, or 2 on every question above: 0 for a vague or evasive answer, 1 for a reasonable answer without detail, and 2 for a specific answer they could show you. Then apply a few rules:
An agency's onboarding plan tells you a lot about how it will run your account. Timelines vary with budget, competition, and how much conversion data you already have, but a sensible first 90 days usually looks something like this:
If the account moves to automated bidding, expect a learning period on top of that. Google says a Smart Bidding strategy can take up to about 50 conversion events or three conversion cycles to calibrate, and accounts with fewer conversions take longer. An agency promising final results in week one is either guessing or counting the wrong things.
You don't need to be shopping to use these questions. If you already have an agency, run the same checks on your current setup:
If the answers come back quickly and specifically, you probably have a good partner. If they don't, you'll have learned more in an afternoon than the last few monthly reports told you.
You'd ask us all of this anyway, so here are our answers. You own every account. Google Ads, GA4, and Meta are created in or transferred to your business, and you keep the history if we ever part ways. Conversion tracking is set up before launch and maintained every month by the same team that runs the campaigns. Search terms are reviewed weekly. And you get a written monthly report in plain English that ties spend to outcomes: what worked, what didn't, and what changes next.
We also put a target in writing. Before a campaign launches, we agree on a qualified lead or booked opportunity target. If we don't hit it within the first 90 days, we keep managing the campaign without charging our management fee until we do. The details, including what the guarantee covers and what it asks of you, are on our guarantee page. You can read more about how we run Google and Meta ads, who we are, and the work we've shipped.
Want a second opinion before you sign?
Book a Growth Audit and bring the proposal you're weighing, or your current account. We'll work through the ownership, tracking, and structure questions with you and tell you plainly what we see. Prefer to talk first? Email arthurfceo@gmail.com or call 603-661-8972.
It depends on the pricing model and the scope. Agencies commonly charge a percentage of ad spend, a flat monthly fee, a fee per lead, or a base fee with a performance bonus, and what's included varies widely. Compare the total cost (including landing pages, tracking tools, and creative) against the scope of work. Your ad spend itself should be billed by Google directly to your payment method, separate from the agency's fee.
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