7 Questions to Ask a Google Ads Agency Before You Hire Them
- Jesse Heslinga
- 23 hours ago
- 9 min read
Most service businesses hire a Google Ads agency the same way they hire a plumber: get a few quotes, check if they seem competent, pick the one that felt most confident in the call. It works for plumbers. It is a poor method for selecting an agency that will manage thousands of pounds of your advertising budget.
The problem is that competence in a Google Ads agency is hard to see from the outside. A slick sales presentation, a list of client logos, and a confident answer about strategy tells you almost nothing about what it will be like once the invoices are going and the campaigns are live.
These seven questions are designed to surface the things a well-prepared agency will answer well and a mediocre one will deflect, waffle, or answer in a way that should make you pause.
The Short Answer
Ask who specifically will manage your account, not what team or what process.
Ask how they measure lead quality, not just lead volume. The answer reveals whether they think like a business or like an ad platform.
Ask for a sample report. The format tells you what they pay attention to.
Ask what happens to your campaigns and data if you leave.
Ask what they will not do. Good agencies have genuine limits; agencies trying to win the business rarely do.
1. Who will actually manage my account?
This is the single most important question, and it is the one most often avoided in agency sales processes.
The person who presents the pitch, demos the dashboard, and talks through the strategy is often not the person who logs into your account each week. At many agencies, senior people win the business and junior account managers deliver it. That is not inherently wrong, but you should know which situation you are in.
What a good answer sounds like: "Your account will be managed by [name]. They handle [X] accounts, all in lead-gen. You can speak to them before we sign if you'd like."
What a deflecting answer sounds like: "Our whole team works on every account," or "you'll have a dedicated account manager assigned after onboarding."
The follow-up question worth asking: how many accounts does that person manage? A Google Ads manager handling 30+ accounts is in maintenance mode. One handling 10 to 15 can do real work.
2. How do you measure lead quality, not just lead volume?
Any agency can reduce your cost per lead by broadening targeting, lowering bid thresholds, and accepting lower-quality enquiries. The number goes down, the report looks good, and the leads that come through are worse. This is one of the most common ways a lead-gen Google Ads account quietly fails.
The question you want answered: does this agency think about what happens after the lead arrives?
What a good answer sounds like: "We ask every new client about their sales process: what makes a good lead, what the typical conversion rate from enquiry to customer is, and whether we can get any signal about which leads became customers. We try to optimise toward qualified leads, not just form fills."
A stronger answer involves offline conversion tracking: importing closed deals or qualified calls back into Google Ads so Smart Bidding learns from the leads that actually converted, not just the ones that clicked a button. Ask whether they have done this for other clients and how.
What a weak answer sounds like: "We track all conversions in Google Ads and optimize to bring the cost per lead down."
3. Can I see a sample monthly report?
A sample report is more revealing than a case study. Case studies are edited highlights. A report is what the working relationship actually produces.
Look at the report and ask yourself: does this tell me about the business outcomes, or does it tell me about the Google Ads platform metrics?
A report heavy on impressions, CTR, Quality Score, and average CPC is a report written around what is easy to pull from Google Ads. A report built around cost per lead by campaign, lead volume trends, what was tested, and what changed is a report from an agency that thinks about your business.
Also look at the commentary. Does each section have a one or two line explanation of what the number means and what should happen next? Or is it a dashboard export with no narrative?
What you want to see: CPL trends, campaign-level performance, a change log, and plain-language conclusions. What you do not want: 12 pages of graphs with no interpretation.
Pro Tip: Ask specifically whether the report includes a section on what was optimised that month and what the result was. If the answer is no, the reporting is a summary, not an account of work done.
4. What does month one actually look like?
Month one of a new Google Ads engagement is almost never a month of results. It is a month of setup: campaign architecture, tracking implementation, keyword structure, ad copy, and landing page review. Campaigns that go live in week one are either rebuilds of existing work or shortcuts.
A good answer to this question names the specific deliverables you can expect in the first 30 days and is honest that meaningful optimisation data takes 4 to 6 weeks of conversion history to accumulate.
What a good answer sounds like: "Month one is audit, tracking setup, campaign build, and go-live. We won't have enough conversion data to make meaningful bid strategy adjustments until mid-month two. We'll share a draft campaign structure before we launch so you can see what we're building."
What a concerning answer sounds like: "We'll get you results from day one" or "we can have campaigns live within 48 hours."
Speed to launch is not a virtue in Google Ads if it comes at the cost of a proper build. An agency that races to get campaigns live is either cutting corners or trying to show early activity to justify the fee before the account has real traction.
5. What happens to my campaigns and data if we stop working together?
The answer to this question is one of the clearest signals of how an agency sees the relationship.
Your Google Ads account, its campaign history, its conversion data, its Quality Score history, and its audience lists have real value. An account with 18 months of conversion data is meaningfully easier to optimise than a fresh one. That history belongs to your business.
Some agencies operate through a Google Ads Manager Account that they control. If you leave, they can restrict or remove your access to your own campaigns. This is not universal, but it happens.
What the right answer sounds like: "The account belongs to you. It's in your own Google Ads account and you have full owner access at all times. If we part ways, you keep everything."
What to watch for: agencies that say "we set up campaigns in our manager account for efficiency" without clarifying that you still have access. Ask directly: do I have admin access to the Google Ads account at all times, or is access managed through your agency account?
6. What will you not do, and what is outside your scope?
This question is underused and underrated. Good agencies have genuine limits. An agency that claims to do everything with equal expertise is telling you something: they prioritise winning the business over giving you an accurate picture of where they are strong.
Legitimate limits might look like: "We focus on Google Ads. We don't do Meta, we don't do SEO, we don't build landing pages in-house, but we can work with your web team." That is a clear, honest answer.
An agency without limits is either unusually capable or not thinking carefully about where they are genuinely strong. The former exists. The latter is more common.
The related question worth asking: have you worked with businesses like mine before, and what specifically is different about lead-gen compared to e-commerce accounts you've managed? The answer tells you whether the person in the room has actually built lead-gen campaigns, or whether they are pitching based on general Google Ads experience.
7. What do you need from me to make this work?
This question flips the frame. Most agency conversations are about what the agency will do. This one asks what they need from you, and the answer reveals how much they understand about what actually makes Google Ads work for a lead-gen business.
A good agency needs several things they should be willing to name: access to your CRM or lead data (at least informally), clear information about what a good lead looks like, a way to track what happens after the form is submitted, and a client-side contact who can respond when questions come up.
What a good answer sounds like: "We'll need your tracking set up correctly before we launch, we'll want to understand your sales process and what a qualified lead looks like for you, and ideally we'd get some signal from you each month on lead quality, even if it's just a rough sense of how many leads turned into conversations."
What a weak answer sounds like: "We just need access to your Google Ads account and a budget."
An agency that only asks for account access and a budget is telling you they will manage the platform, not your business outcomes. That is the distinction that separates an average engagement from a useful one.
Keep in Mind: The best agency relationship runs in both directions. If you are not willing to share information about your sales process, lead quality, or downstream outcomes, it becomes very hard for any agency to optimise toward what your business actually needs.
How I handle this When a service business comes to me about Google Ads management, these are more or less the questions I expect them to ask, and I try to answer them directly. The questions I find most useful to be asked, because they force an honest conversation: who will manage the account, and what happens to the campaigns if we part ways. The businesses that get the best results from agencies, including from Groove Media, tend to be ones that engage actively with their own lead quality data, share feedback on which leads are converting, and treat the agency relationship as a partnership rather than a vendor arrangement. If you are starting that evaluation and want to see how a working engagement would actually operate, an account review is the right starting point.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most important question to ask a Google Ads agency?
Who will manage my account day to day, and how many accounts do they handle. Everything else, strategy, reporting, pricing, follows from whether the person doing the actual work has the capacity and expertise to do it well. This question gets deflected more often than any other.
How do I know if a Google Ads agency is good?
Ask for a sample report and look at whether it covers business outcomes (CPL, lead volume, what changed and why) or platform metrics (impressions, CTR, Quality Score). Ask how they measure lead quality. Ask what month one deliverables look like. Good agencies answer these questions specifically. Average ones give broad answers about their process and their team.
Should I ask for references before hiring a Google Ads agency?
References are useful but limited because agencies only provide positive ones. A sample report, a conversation with the actual account manager, and specific answers to the questions above tell you more. If you do ask for references, speak to clients in a similar business to yours (same vertical, similar lead-gen model) and ask specifically whether lead quality improved, not just whether the CPL went down.
How long should I commit to a Google Ads agency?
A minimum of 3 months is standard and reasonable. Real optimisation data takes 4 to 6 weeks to accumulate, so you need at least two full cycles to see meaningful trends. Commitments longer than 6 months for a brand new agency relationship favour the agency. After 3 months you should have enough data to decide whether the relationship is working.
What should I send to a Google Ads agency before the first call?
A brief overview of your business, your current ad spend (if any), what your typical lead looks like and what makes a good one, and what results you have had so far. The better the picture you give upfront, the more useful the first conversation will be. Agencies that do not ask about your sales process or lead quality before proposing a strategy are not thinking carefully about your specific situation.
What are the red flags to look out for when hiring a Google Ads agency?
Guaranteed results, vague answers about who manages the account, no interest in your sales process or lead quality, long lock-in contracts on first engagements, and retaining ownership of the Google Ads account as a contractual clause. Any of these warrant a follow-up question at minimum.
About the author
Jesse Heslinga | Google Partner | 7+ Years Google Ads | Lead-Gen Expert
I run Google Ads for lead-gen service businesses at Groove Media across clinics, home services, and professional services, working with clients directly, no account-manager layer. I build every account around one question: is this spend turning into real customers, not just cheap form fills?
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