Most agency pitch meetings reward the wrong things. The right questions cut through the slide deck and tell you, in about thirty minutes, whether you’ll get an account that compounds or one that quietly lights money on fire.
Before hiring a Google Ads agency, get clear answers in seven areas: account ownership, conversion tracking, account structure, the people actually doing the work, reporting, pricing, and what happens if you leave. Push past generic answers — ask how they implement, not just whether they “follow best practices.” If an agency guarantees results, won’t give you admin access to your own account, or only reports clicks and impressions, walk away.
Hiring is mostly a screening problem. There are competent Google Ads agencies and there are agencies that look competent on a sales call. The difference rarely shows up in the pitch. It shows up four months in, when your conversion data is messy, your account structure is sprawling, and you can’t tell whether spend is producing pipeline or noise.
The questions below are designed to surface that gap early. Ask them in the discovery call, not after the contract is signed. If you’ve already worked through our companion piece on how to choose a Google Ads agency in Orlando, this checklist may look familiar.
The first thing to verify isn’t strategy. It’s who owns the asset.
The account must be created under your business and your billing. If an agency wants to run your campaigns inside their own MCC (manager) account that links to yours, that’s completely fine, but the underlying Google Ads account itself should be yours. If they push to create the account on their side and “transfer it later,” treat that as a red flag.
You should have admin (or at minimum email-only) access to your own account from day one. Confirm that if the relationship ends, the agency will unlink and remove its users. Agencies that stall on this question are protecting leverage, not your business.
Account history is one of the most undervalued assets in paid search. Conversion history feeds Smart Bidding. If an agency wants to start a fresh account “for a clean slate,” ask why. Sometimes it’s justified, often it’s because they don’t want to be measured against the previous agency’s baseline.
This is where most accounts quietly fall apart. If conversion tracking is wrong, every downstream decision — bidding, budget, optimization — is also wrong.
You want a specific answer, not “we’ll set up conversions.” A strong response describes the actual mechanism: GA4 events, Google Tag Manager, server-side tagging where applicable, and a verification step (test conversions, debug mode in GTM, or the Tag Assistant) before traffic is sent.
Enhanced conversions supplement standard tracking by sending hashed first-party data (email or phone, encrypted with SHA-256) to Google so it can match more conversions when cookies are restricted. Per Google’s own documentation, this is now the recommended baseline for accounts that collect lead data, and Google began upgrading accounts to enhanced conversions at the account level by default in late 2025. Any agency unfamiliar with the setup is operating two years behind the platform.
Ask how the agency plans to push qualified lead, opportunity, or revenue data back into Google Ads through offline conversion imports, CRM integrations, or the Google Ads API. If they do not have a clear answer, the account may optimize for cheap leads instead of profitable ones. (We wrote about this failure mode in 7 Signs Your Google Ads Account Is Wasting Budget.)
If the agency opts to optimize for cost per lead or lead volume, that’s not necessarily a red flag if they’re doing it for the right reasons. Offline conversion tracking only becomes practical once the account is generating enough downstream conversion volume for Google to learn from reliably. In most cases, the event being optimized for should occur at least 30 to 100 times per month. For example, if a kitchen remodeler closes three high-ticket jobs per month from Google Ads, feeding sales data back into the platform won’t provide enough signal to improve optimization meaningfully. But if an HVAC company is consistently closing 30+ jobs per month, offline conversion tracking can become a major advantage by helping Google optimize toward actual revenue instead of raw lead volume.
Most agencies charge extra to implement offline conversion tracking, so the potential performance gains should be weighed against the added cost.
Don’t ask whether they “follow best practices.” Ask how they implement them. Specifics will tell you everything.
Listen for concrete language: ad groups, match-types, negative lists, and a deliberate plan for Performance Max if it’s used.
Ask the cadence: how often do they review the search-terms report, and how do negatives get added — manually, with a script, or via shared lists across campaigns? In a healthy account this happens weekly. In a neglected one it happens never.
There’s no single right answer here, but there should be a reason. “We’re using Maximize Conversions because conversion volume is too low for ROAS” is a fine answer. “We use Smart Bidding” is not.
Performance Max can produce real results, but it can also vacuum up branded search and inflate reported conversions. Ask how they’ll prevent that, typically through campaign exclusions, separate brand campaigns, and asset group hygiene.
You’re hiring people, not a logo. Ask who actually does the work.
The salesperson who runs the discovery call is rarely the person who optimizes the account. Ask to meet the actual strategist or account manager before signing, and ask how many other accounts that person currently manages. Search Engine Land and other PPC industry sources flag overloaded account managers as one of the most common causes of underperforming accounts.
Per Google’s Partners program documentation, Partner status requires a 70% optimization score, a $10,000 90-day spend across managed accounts, and certified users. Premier Partner status is reserved for the top 3% of participating companies in a given country. Partner badges aren’t a guarantee of quality, but the absence of one in an agency that claims to specialize in Google Ads is worth a follow-up question.
Industry experience matters more in some verticals than others. A home-services advertiser has very different intent patterns than a SaaS company or e-commerce brand. Ask for two or three case studies in your category — and read them. (As a reference point, one of our own case studies walks through how a focused Google ad strategy hit a 20x return on ad spend for an online course creator.)
Reporting is where most agency relationships drift. Set the bar early.
Ask for a sample report from a current client (with sensitive data redacted). What you want to see: spend, conversions, conversion value, CPA, ROAS, and a written interpretation that connects the numbers to business decisions. Vanity-metric dashboards full of impressions and clicks without business context are a sign that the agency reports on fluff rather than reports honestly.
Monthly or bimonthly check-ins are common for accounts spending mid-five figures and up; monthly is common for smaller budgets. Ask who joins the call and what’s expected to come out of it.
A confident agency will agree to one or two leading indicators (CPL, ROAS, CPA) and tell you what action will be taken if those metrics drift. An evasive answer here usually means there is no plan.
The cheapest agency is rarely the least expensive one once you account for wasted spend.
The three common models are flat retainer, percent-of-spend, and hybrid. Each has trade-offs. In some cases, percent-of-spend can create incentives for bad actors to inflate your budget (more spend = more revenue for the agency); flat retainers are easier to budget but can disincentivize growth and lead to your large account getting as much attention as a small account. Pick the model that aligns the agency’s incentives with your goal.
Avoid 12-month lock-ins with no out clause. A reasonable contract has a 30-to-60-day notice period and clear definitions of what happens to assets (account, ad creative, audience lists, conversion configurations) when the relationship ends.
You should walk away with: full ownership of the Google Ads account, all conversion configurations intact, all audience lists, and any custom scripts running in the account. If any of those are “agency property,” that’s not an agency relationship, that’s a hostage situation.
Industry sources including Search Engine Land, JumpFly, and others consistently flag the same warning signs:
A few of these on their own may not be deal-breakers. Two or three together usually are.
Plan on 30 days for tracking and account hygiene work, 60 to 90 days for meaningful optimization signal, and 90 to 180 days before efficiency stabilizes. Run away from anyone promising “results in two weeks.”
Sometimes. The trade-offs (breadth of skillset, accountability, redundancy, tools, continuity) are spelled out in our Facebook Ads agency vs. freelancer comparison; the same logic applies to Google Ads. A good freelancer can outperform a bad agency. A good agency can outperform a stretched freelancer. Match the choice to the stakes.
Percent-of-spend pricing is the most common model in paid media. While some agencies may push higher budgets to increase their retainer, good agencies prioritize long-term results and client retention over short-term revenue. If increasing spend is likely to hurt campaign performance, a reputable agency won’t recommend it. Strong agencies also get clear budget approvals from you in writing before making changes and support recommendations with clear performance data.
Three quick checks: (1) Are leads converting downstream, not just clicking? (2) Has CPA improved or held steady at higher volume over the last 90 days? (3) Can the agency explain, without dashboards, what’s working and what isn’t? If any of those are no, ask why.
In many cases, yes. An agency retainer is a small price to pay when managing what could become one of your business’s most valuable growth assets. You want experienced people monitoring performance, making fast pivots when results change, and providing continuity so campaigns don’t stall when a freelancer or in-house employee is sick, overwhelmed, or on vacation.
If you’re shopping Google Ads agencies and want a second opinion on what you’re hearing, reach out to Power Couch Media. We’ll review your account or your shortlist of vendors and tell you what we’d ask, what we’d push back on, and where we think the real risk is — whether or not you end up working with us. You can also see how we approach the work on our Google Ads management page.
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