In shortTen questions that separate a good Google Ads agency from a poor one: account ownership, fees, who does the work, how sales are counted and exit terms.
Choose a Google Ads agency by asking ten questions before you sign: who owns the account, who pays Google, how the fee is set, who does the work, how conversions are counted, which calls count, how often search terms are reviewed, what the report leads with, the notice period, and what happens if you leave.
A good agency answers all ten plainly, in writing, before you pay anything. A weak one answers with reassurance. This checklist is written from the buyer's side of the table, and it applies to any Google Ads management provider you are comparing, including me.
Key Takeaways - The Google Ads account should be in your name, with you as admin, paying Google on your own card. - A flat management fee keeps the agency's income separate from how much it tells you to spend. - Ask for the name of the person who will actually change your campaigns, and how often. - A conversion should mean a real enquiry or, better, a real sale, not a button click or a two-second call. - A report that leads with clicks is hiding the number that matters: what an enquiry or a sale cost.
1. Who owns the Google Ads account?
You should. The account should be in your business's name, with your own Google login holding admin access, and the agency invited in as a user or linked through its manager account. Google's page on managing access to your account explains the access levels. The one that matters is that someone at your business holds admin.
The account holds your history: every search term, every conversion, everything the bidding has learned. If the agency built the account inside its own set-up and holds the only admin login, leaving can mean starting again from an empty account. Ask directly: "If we part ways, do I keep the account and all of its history?" The only acceptable answer is yes.
2. Who pays Google?
You should pay Google directly, on your own card, with the spend visible in the billing section of your own account. Some agencies pay Google themselves and invoice you one combined figure. That is not always dishonest, but it blurs what went to Google and what went to the agency, and it hands the agency control of the account's payment.
The test is simple. Can you log in today and see exactly what Google charged you last month? If not, ask why.
3. Is the fee a percentage of spend or a flat fee?
Ask how the fee is calculated and what happens to it if your budget goes up. The two common models are a percentage of ad spend and a flat monthly fee.
A percentage fee is not a scam, but it creates an awkward incentive: the agency earns more every time you spend more, so the person advising you on budget benefits from the bigger number. A flat fee separates the advice from the income. If the right answer is "spend less" or "do not spend yet", the agency loses nothing by saying so.
Also ask about set-up fees, minimum terms and whether reporting or landing pages cost extra. For the other half of the bill, the clicks themselves, see how much Google Ads cost in the UK.
4. Who actually does the work?
Ask for the name of the person who will log into your account and make changes, and how often they will do it. At many agencies the person who sells to you is not the person who runs your campaigns, and the person who runs them may be looking after a long list of other accounts.
Neither is automatically bad. What matters is that you know who is responsible, that they have time for your account and that you can speak to them. "Our experts look after it" is not an answer. A name and a weekly routine are.
5. How are conversions measured?
This question separates good agencies from poor ones more clearly than any other. Ask: "What exactly counts as a conversion in my account?"
Weak answers are a button click, a page view, a visit to the contact page, or "Google tracks that automatically". A better answer is a completed enquiry that actually reached you. The best answers go a step further and connect enquiries to sales. Google's enhanced conversions for leads helps match leads who became paying customers back to the ad click that brought them in, so the account learns from sales rather than form fills. Google's overview of conversion measurement covers the wider options.
Then ask the harder follow-up: "How would you notice if tracking broke?" Conversion tags fail quietly, often when a website is changed or rebuilt. An agency that checks the account against your own sales or enquiry records will notice. One that only reads the Google Ads dashboard may not.
6. Which phone calls count?
If customers ring you, ask how calls are tracked and what length of call counts as a conversion. Counting every tap on a phone number flatters the results, because a mis-tap, a wrong number and a hang-up all look like leads.
Google forwarding numbers let the account record calls from ads and count only calls over a minimum length you choose. That threshold should reflect how long a genuine enquiry takes in your trade. Ask what they would set and why, and ask when call tracking will go live. The right answer is at launch, not a few months in.
7. How often are search terms reviewed?
Ask how often they read your search terms report, the list of what people actually typed before your ad appeared. For most small service accounts the answer should be weekly, certainly in the early months.
This is where wasted spend hides. Loose keyword settings will show your ads for searches you never wanted: services you do not offer, towns you do not cover, people looking for jobs rather than tradespeople. Negative keywords block those searches, but only if somebody reads the report and adds them. Ask to see an example of negative keyword work from a recent week.
8. What will the monthly report show?
Ask for a sample report before you sign, and look at what it leads with.
A useful report opens with the numbers you run the business on: enquiries, cost per enquiry, how many became jobs where that is known, and revenue where it can be tracked. It then says what changed that month and why, such as search terms excluded, bids adjusted, ads rewritten or pages fixed. Clicks, impressions and click-through rate belong further down as supporting detail.
9. What is the notice period?
Ask how long the minimum term is and how much notice you need to give. Long lock-in contracts protect the agency, not you, and an agency doing good work rarely needs one to keep a client. Check what handover includes, and whether any landing pages, tracking set-up or call numbers belong to you or to the agency.
10. What happens to the account if I leave?
This is question one asked from the exit. "On the day I leave, what do I keep, and what do you switch off?" You should keep the account, its history, its conversion set-up and its audiences. The agency should remove its own access and hand over any logins it created for you. If call numbers or landing pages sit in the agency's own tools, find out now what happens to them, because a phone number printed on a van is hard to change.
Red flags to walk away from
- Guaranteed results. No one can guarantee a position, a number of leads or a return. Competitors, demand, your website and your follow-up all move the outcome. A promise of results is a sales line, not a plan.
- A Google badge as the only proof. A badge describes an agency's standing in Google's own programme. It does not tell you whether accounts like yours make money. Ask for a case study with real figures and an explanation of how they were measured.
- Reports that lead with clicks. If page one is clicks, impressions and click-through rate, ask what an enquiry cost, then notice how long the answer takes.
- The agency owns the account. Covered above, and the most expensive one to discover late.
- No questions about your website. Ads land on your pages. An agency that never asks whether the site converts is planning to spend before checking where the money lands. The landing page checklist covers what to look at.
- Pressure to start before any audit. An agency that has not looked at your account, site and numbers cannot tell you whether paid search is worth it for you yet.
What do good answers look like in a real account?
Here is how one account is run, as a reference point rather than a promise. Procon 24/7 is a concrete supplier in Yorkshire and the North West whose Google Ads I have run since 2022. Revenue is reported from Procon's own revenue records, not from the ad platform. The quote forms use enhanced conversions for leads, so won customers can be matched back to the ad click. Calls come through Google forwarding numbers, and only calls of 60 seconds or more count. Search terms and negative keywords are worked weekly, and each campaign town has its own paid-only landing page.
From 2022 to September 2026, Procon's own reports show £1,337,693 of tracked revenue on £150,443 of ad spend, an 8.9x return, and 2,055 new customers. That is one client's result in one trade. It is not a forecast for anyone else.
The account also carries two mistakes worth owning, because they show why the measurement questions above matter. Call tracking should have gone live in month one, and it did not. And a website rebuild once stopped the conversion tags firing without any visible error, until it was caught. Reporting against the client's own records is what kept the numbers trustworthy while that was fixed.
How I answer these ten questions
I run every account myself. There are no account managers and no juniors, so the person on the audit call is the person working in your campaigns each week. Accounts stay in the client's name, the client pays Google directly on their own card, and the management fee is flat, never a percentage of spend. I give the fee on the audit call. Search is the core, with Shopping, Display or YouTube added only where they suit the business.
It starts with a free Google Ads audit, and the audit can conclude that you should not spend yet. The Google Ads management page sets out how the ongoing work is structured, and if a one-person specialist suits you better than a larger agency, the page on working with a Google Ads consultant explains the difference.
Whoever you choose, put these ten questions in an email to each agency and compare the replies side by side. The written answers will tell you more than any pitch.
