How to Choose a Google Ads Agency: 8 Things to Check (2026 Checklist)

When you decide to work with a Google Ads agency, you are trusting it with two things: your advertising budget and your customer data. Both can disappear quickly in the wrong hands. On top of that, agency meetings tend to be full of polished presentations, screenshots from other clients and promises of "results from month one". You often only realise what you forgot to ask a few months after leaving the table.

This article is a practical checklist you can take into an agency meeting as a business owner or marketing manager. We explain technical terms only as far as needed; the aim is not to turn you into a Google Ads specialist but to help you ask the right questions. If you want to understand how campaigns are built first, reading our step-by-step guide to advertising on Google Ads will make things easier.

The list has 8 points. At the end you will also find 10 questions to ask the agency and the warning signs that should make you walk away.

1. Who owns the ad account and the data?

This comes first because it is the hardest thing to fix later. Some agencies open the Google Ads account under their own manager account, using their own email address. When you want to leave, you either cannot take the account with you or you start again from an empty one. Years of search term data, conversion history, remarketing audiences and Quality Score history stay with the agency.

The right setup looks like this:

• The Google Ads account is opened with an email address owned by your company and with your billing details.
• The agency links to your account from its own manager (MCC) account, and you keep admin rights.
• You are also the primary owner of your Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager and Merchant Center accounts.
• Ad spend is paid to Google directly from your card or on your invoice, separate from the agency's invoice.

2. Verify the Google Partner badge, but do not overrate it

"We are a Google Partner agency" appears in almost every pitch. The badge shows that the agency meets thresholds set by Google, such as ad spend, staff certifications and the optimisation level of the accounts it manages. So it is not meaningless: it confirms that the agency manages Google Ads regularly and has certified people on the team.

Verifying it is easy. When you click the badge on the agency's website, it should lead to Google's official Partner profile. You can also search for the agency's name in the Google Partners directory. If the badge is just an image file that links nowhere, ask about it.

At the same time, know what the badge is not:

• It is not a guarantee of ROAS (return on ad spend).
• It does not show that the agency understands your sector.
• It does not tell you who will manage your account; the certified person may attend the sales meeting and then hand your account to a junior.

The optimisation score is a similar trap. Some of Google's recommendations are steps that increase spend, such as raising budgets or switching to broad match. A good agency does not apply these blindly; it picks the ones that suit your business.

3. Conversion tracking: GA4, Consent Mode and server-side tracking

Advertising is only as successful as its measurement is accurate. With badly configured conversion tracking, even the smartest campaign optimises towards the wrong goal. For example, if "contact page viewed" counts as a conversion, Google learns to bring you people who look at the page and leave, not people who fill in the form.

Ask these questions in the meeting:

• Which actions will count as conversions? Form submissions, phone calls, WhatsApp clicks, orders. Primary and secondary conversions should be separated.
• How will GA4 and Google Ads be connected? Will tags be managed through Google Tag Manager, and who will have access?
• Will enhanced conversions be used? Matching data such as email addresses or phone numbers in hashed form reduces measurement loss.
• Will Consent Mode be set up? Google's ability to model conversions for visitors who decline cookies depends on this setting.
• Is server-side tracking needed? Server-side tagging can reduce data lost to browser restrictions and ad blockers. It is not essential for every business; it makes more sense for e-commerce and high-budget accounts.

Tracking lives on your website. If forms do not work, pages load slowly or there is no thank-you page, the tags the agency installs will also collect incomplete data.

4. A transparent fee model: fixed fee or percentage of spend?

Agency fees are usually based on one of three models. None is good or bad on its own; what matters is knowing what you are paying for.

Whichever model is used, the proposal should clearly state: how many campaigns and accounts will be managed, whether there is a setup fee, whether ad creatives and copy are included, whether landing page changes are charged separately and whether there is a monthly meeting. For price ranges and what drives them, see our article on PPC management pricing.

5. Reporting that measures sales, not clicks

Impressions, clicks and click-through rate make nice charts, but they do not put money in the till. The report should focus on metrics that mean something for your business:

• Number of conversions and cost per conversion
• For e-commerce: revenue, ROAS and, where possible, profitability
• For service businesses: number of enquiries and how many of them became real customers
• Performance of brand searches and non-brand searches, reported separately

The last point is often skipped. Someone searching for your company name was going to find you anyway; sales from these searches make the report look better than it really is. A good agency separates branded and non-branded campaigns.

If you sell by phone or via WhatsApp, the agency cannot know on its own whether an enquiry from an ad turned into a sale. This needs your input too: marking which enquiries converted to sales in a CRM or even a simple spreadsheet, and feeding this back to Google as offline conversions. If the report does not end with a section on "what we did this month, why we did it and what we will test next month", what you have is not a report but a screenshot.

6. Keeping AI Max and Performance Max in check

In recent years Google has put automation increasingly at the centre. Performance Max runs across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Gmail, the Display Network and Maps from a single campaign. AI Max goes beyond keywords in search campaigns, using AI to expand matching and ad copy. Fed with the right data, these tools are powerful; left unsupervised, they can spread your budget across irrelevant placements.

To understand how the agency manages these tools, ask:

• Are brand searches excluded in Performance Max, or does the campaign present cheap brand traffic as its own success?
• Are search terms and channel-level performance reports reviewed regularly?
• How are negative keywords and excluded placements managed?
• If AI Max is switched on, are auto-generated texts and expanded matches being checked?
• How often is the product feed (for Shopping) cleaned up and improved?

If you run an online shop, we explain in detail how much Shopping ads depend on feed quality in our Google Shopping ads guide. "We put everything into PMax, Google will handle it" is easy management, not good management.

7. Sector experience: does the agency speak your language?

A furniture manufacturer's sales cycle looks nothing like a hotel's booking cycle. In furniture, customers research for weeks, visit the showroom and may negotiate by phone. For hotels, seasonality, early bookings and competition with OTAs are decisive. An agency that does not know your sector spends its first months learning these differences, in other words with your budget.

When asking about sector experience, ask for concrete examples rather than general statements: What campaign structure did you build for a similar business? Which conversions did you track? What did you try that did not work? An agency that can talk honestly about failed experiments is usually more trustworthy than one that only tells success stories. For example, a team with experience in digital marketing for the furniture sector will plan language and market separation from the start for a manufacturer in İnegöl, Türkiye's furniture hub, that exports abroad.

The right agency does not claim to know your business better than you do; but it does know better than you how Google behaves in your sector.

8. Contract length and exit terms

Before signing, focus above all on the question "what happens if I want to leave?" Asking for an initial period of a few months so campaigns can settle is reasonable. The problem is long mandatory commitments and heavy termination fees.

Look for these in the contract:

• Minimum term and the notice period after it (e.g. one month's written notice)
• A commitment that the account, tag setup and audiences will be handed over in full when you part ways
• Usage rights for ad copy, images and videos produced by the agency
• Clauses on confidentiality and the processing of personal data
• Scope of service and how out-of-scope work will be priced

Contract terms may touch on commercial and consumer law, which differ by country, so if a significant commitment is involved it is worth showing the contract to your lawyer.

10 questions to ask a Google Ads agency

Print this list and take it to the meeting. Note down the answers and put the proposals side by side.

1. In whose name will the Google Ads, GA4 and Tag Manager accounts be opened?
2. Can you share the link to your Partner profile?
3. Who will manage my account day to day, and can I contact that person directly?
4. Which actions will you track as conversions, and will you set up Consent Mode and enhanced conversions?
5. What is your fee based on, and which items, including setup, cost extra?
6. Which metrics will the monthly report include, and can I see a sample report?
7. Do you report brand and non-brand searches separately?
8. What controls do you use to manage Performance Max and AI Max?
9. Can you walk me through an account you run in a similar sector and what you learned?
10. How do the contract term, notice period and account handover on exit work?

Red flags: stop if you hear these

• "We will double your sales in the first month." Nobody can guarantee results without seeing your data.
• "Let us keep the account, you don't need to worry about it." You don't need to manage it, but you should own it.
• "You don't need reports, just look at the results." A polite way of avoiding transparency.
• The proposal has no scope, just a single number. Do not pay without knowing what you will get.
• A campaign plan is presented without anyone looking at your website. Ads bring traffic; the website makes the sale.
• Long lock-in and high termination fees. An agency confident in its results does not try to hold you with a contract.

One final note: choosing an ad agency is not a decision that stands on its own. If the website your ads lead to is slow, forms break on mobile or product pages are weak, even the best agency will get limited results. Checking your site once with our free Site X-Ray website audit before agency meetings also makes it easier to evaluate the agency's recommendations. At Fietto Creative, a Bursa-based studio, we take this same first step in our digital continuity service, where we handle SEO and ad management together, because advertising that cannot be measured and does not land on a good page burns budget no matter how well it is managed.

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