Google Ads Agency: How to Choose One and the 7 Technical Questions to Ask Before You Sign

Google Ads Guide, 10 min read. By Sefa Aydın. Last updated: September 25, 2026

Most business owners looking for a Google Ads agency start in the same place: they look at agency websites, count the badges and pick the most persuasive pitch. The problem is that Google Ads is managed in the account, not in a pitch deck, and most of the mistakes made in the account stay invisible for the first few months. In this article we answer the question of how to choose a Google Ads agency not with general agency criteria, but with technical questions that come straight from inside the account.

We covered the general framework for choosing an agency, such as cultural fit, communication and team structure, in our how to choose a digital marketing agency guide. Here we focus only on Google Ads: the seven questions to put on the table before you sign, the red flags and what to expect in the first 90 days.

How to Choose a Google Ads Agency: Seven Technical Questions

The questions below are in order. If you cannot get a clear answer to the first three, there is no need to move on, because without account ownership, measurement and reporting everything else rests on guesswork.

1. In whose name will the account be opened, and who will keep it?

This is the first question, and the answer should be one sentence: the account is opened in your name with your billing details, and the agency accesses it through its manager account (MCC). Google's own help page defines this relationship clearly. Even if the manager account gets ownership access, the client still owns the account data and can remove the link at any time. A client account can have only one owner manager account at a time.

Google's third-party policy also requires agencies to use a separate account for each advertiser, to give clients the Customer ID of their accounts and, if they charge a separate management fee, to disclose it in writing to new clients before the first purchase and show it on invoices. In practice, these are the questions to ask:

• Will I have admin access to the account? Your own email address should hold admin rights.
• Will ad spend be paid directly to Google? If the payments profile is in your name, you see the spend exactly as it appears on the invoice.
• If we part ways, will the account, historical data and conversion tags stay with me? If the answer is not yes, years of accumulated learning data leave with the agency.

If the account is not yours, you are not building a partnership with the agency, you are building a dependency. When the day comes to part ways, you are the one starting from zero.

2. What does a Google Partner or Premier Partner badge prove?

Badges are valuable, but you need to know what they measure. To become a Google Partner, a company must maintain an optimization score of at least 70% in its manager account, reach 10,000 US dollars in total ad spend across its managed accounts in the last 90 days and have at least half of its account strategists certified in Google Ads. Premier Partner status is awarded through an annual review to the companies among those meeting these requirements that rank in the top 3% in their own country. The review looks at spend growth from existing clients, new client acquisition, client retention rate, adoption of products beyond Search and annual spend under management.

The criteria are summarized from the Google Partners program requirements and may be updated by Google.

The point to watch is the optimization score. It shows how closely the account follows Google's recommendations, not how profitable it is. An agency that blindly applies every recommendation can earn a high score while opening your budget up to broad match, irrelevant searches. Ask a badge-holding agency: "Which Google recommendation have you rejected recently, and why?" A team that cannot give an example is not managing recommendations, it is just applying them. You can verify Partner status yourself in the Google Partners directory.

3. How will conversion tracking be set up, and what will you count as a conversion?

Google Ads smart bidding strategies run on the conversion data you teach them. Teach them the wrong thing and they scale the wrong thing. According to Google's help documentation, it can take about 50 conversion events or three conversion cycles for a bidding strategy to calibrate to a new target. If during that time the algorithm is fed weak signals such as page views or button clicks, the campaign learns to find easy conversions cheaply and real sales drop.

Ask these questions in the first meeting:

• What will the primary conversion be? In e-commerce it should be the order and its value, in a service business a qualified form or call. "Staying on the page for 30 seconds" is not a primary conversion.
• Will enhanced conversions be set up? Matching conversions lost to cookie restrictions with first-party data is now part of the basic setup.
• If the sale closes in the CRM, will that data flow back to Google? Without offline conversion imports, Google also counts leads that are later canceled or never turn into sales as successes.
• Will conversion value be sent with or without VAT? Value sent including VAT makes ROAS look higher than it is. We cover this in detail in our break-even ROAS guide.

Also ask how the attribution model, that is, which ad gets credit for the sale, is decided. We explain how different models change your decisions in our ad attribution models and measurement article.

4. How often will negative keywords and the search terms report be reviewed?

The search terms report is where the budget quietly melts away. Broad match and automated campaigns can also show ads on searches only loosely related to your product. You want to see that a good agency reviews this report regularly, keeps negative keyword lists by category and reports branded searches separately from performance figures.

Ask the agency: "How often do you review search terms, and how are your shared negative keyword lists structured?" If the answer is "the algorithm takes care of that", you can walk away. Separating brand traffic matters especially, because capturing with an ad someone who is already searching for you by name looks like success but often creates no new demand.

Question the match type choice too. Broad match can work well together with strong conversion data and tight negative keyword management. Combined with weak measurement, it is the setting that spreads the budget fastest. The agency should be able to explain, with reasons, when it uses broad match and when it uses phrase or exact match. If the sentence "we switched everything to broad match" has no test plan and comparison data behind it, it is not a strategy, it is a habit.

5. How do you approach Performance Max?

Performance Max is the automated campaign type that runs across all of Google's inventory with a single campaign. It was long criticized as a "black box", but its controls expanded significantly throughout 2025. In March 2025 Google raised the negative keyword limit per PMax campaign to 10,000. During the year it also rolled out a search terms report for PMax and a channel report that breaks down performance by channels such as Search, Shopping, YouTube and Display.

So the question to ask the agency is no longer "do you use PMax?" but this: "How do you audit PMax?" The answer you are looking for should include:

• Excluding branded searches from PMax or measuring them separately
• Reading the channel report regularly and tracking which inventory the budget flows to
• Splitting asset groups by product or audience logic
• Managing overlap with Search campaigns

The full setup logic is in our Performance Max guide.

6. Which metrics will the report include, and who will read it?

If clicks, impressions and click-through rate top the report, it was prepared not for you but for the agency to talk about itself. The metrics that let you make decisions are cost per conversion, conversion value, ROAS and what they mean against your margin. There are three things you should ask for:

1. A live dashboard: Instead of a monthly PDF, a performance dashboard connected to your account that you can open any time.
2. A decision note: A section in every report covering "what we changed this month, why, and what the result was".
3. A link to profit: A clear statement of whether ROAS is above or below your break-even threshold. You can find how to interpret ROAS in our ROAS guide.

7. What are the contract term and the exit clause?

A long commitment is not bad in itself, because meaningful testing in Google Ads takes time. The problem is when the exit is penalized or unclear. The contract should state in writing: the notice period, the handover of account access on exit, who owns the assets produced such as ad copy, visuals and landing pages, and delivery of a final report before parting ways. The management fee model should also be clear in the proposal. We explain the logic of different fee models in our Google Ads management fee article.

Red Flags: Stop If You Hear These

Even one of the signs below is reason enough to postpone signing.

• "We will open the account and send you reports." If the account is opened in the agency's name, the data and history belong to the agency too.
• A guaranteed ROAS or ranking in the first meeting. Nobody controls competitors' bids in an auction. The conversation should be about a test plan, not a guarantee.
• Campaigns going live before conversion tracking is set up. A campaign that is not measured cannot be optimized.
• Ad spend shown as a lump sum on the agency invoice. If the amount going to Google and the management fee are not shown separately, you cannot know the real spend.
• The search terms report not being shared. Seeing which searches your budget goes to is your right.
• The same template report every month. If there are no changes and no reasons, the account is being watched, not managed.
• An agency that ignores the landing page. The ad brings the click, the page makes the sale. We unpacked this distinction in our conversion rate optimization article.

The First 90 Days: What Is a Realistic Expectation?

In Google Ads the first three months are not a scaling period, they are a setup and learning period. Smart bidding strategies need data to calibrate. In a newly opened or rebuilt account, that data is still limited. That is why it makes sense to assess the first 90 days in three phases.

1. First 30 days, audit and measurement: Auditing the existing account, fixing conversion definitions, setting up enhanced conversions, rebuilding the campaign structure around intent and a first negative keyword cleanup. The output to expect in this period is not a jump in numbers but an account that is measured correctly.
2. Days 31 to 60, testing: Ad copy and landing page tests, choosing the bidding strategy based on data and clarifying the roles of PMax and Search campaigns. Fluctuating cost per conversion is normal in this phase.
3. Days 61 to 90, direction: Budget is shifted to the winning campaign and the losing one is switched off. At this point you can discuss with data where the account stands against your break-even threshold and whether scaling is possible.

Also remember that every major change can push the bidding strategy back into a learning phase. An agency that rebuilds the structure every week keeps the account permanently in learning mode. The mark of good management is changes that are planned and justified.

An Agency or Your Own Team?

For some businesses the right answer may be an in-house specialist rather than an agency. When deciding, do not only weigh salary against the management fee, also account for adjacent skills such as measurement setup, creative production and landing page development. The full comparison is in our agency vs in-house team article.

At Rebel Co. Group we have worked with more than 300 brands across 15 industries for 7 years. Our founder Sefa Aydın has been working in digital marketing for 12 years. We position ourselves as a business partner, not a vendor. The account is opened in your name, the report is read in terms of impact on profit rather than clicks, and the management fee model is written into the proposal. We describe how we work in detail on our Google Ads agency page.

Data sources: Google Ads Help Center (Google Partners program requirements, manager account ownership, bidding strategy learning period), Google Advertising Policies Help Center (third-party policy), official Google Ads blog (Performance Max channel reporting), Search Engine Land (news on the Performance Max negative keyword limit and search terms report).

Related articles

• How to choose a digital marketing agency
• Google Ads management fee models
• Performance Max guide
• Agency vs in-house team?
• What is break-even ROAS?

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