How to choose a Google Ads agency for your UK business

Choose a Google Ads agency by comparing a written scope, the people delivering it, measurement definitions and the full cost of the commitment. Keep suitable account access, examine relevant evidence and agree how performance will be reviewed. The best fit depends on your business, your internal support and the work required.

An agency proposal can look reassuring while leaving basic questions unanswered. You may know the monthly fee but have no clear account of who fixes the tracking, approves a landing page or investigates poor enquiries. Those gaps become harder to resolve once campaigns are running and several suppliers are involved.

This guide is for UK business owners and marketing teams choosing their first Google Ads partner or reviewing an existing arrangement. It follows the buying process from the brief to ongoing review, with practical ways to compare evidence and responsibilities. Use the sections that match your current decision, then return to the others when the proposal becomes more detailed. The worked costs are hypothetical, and the platform and regulatory references were checked on 29 September 2026 and rechecked on 10 October 2026.

The short version:

• Brief before you buy. Describe the customer, capacity, spending limit and current evidence so every agency prices the same work.
• Keep the account in your name. Your business should hold Admin access and the payments profile; the agency links through its manager account.
• Compare the full cost, not the monthly fee. Add setup, management, tracking, tools and the minimum term, then compare totals over the same period.
• Agree what counts as a conversion. A form fill, a phone click and a qualified enquiry are different events with different value.
• Treat badges as context. Google Partner status confirms programme thresholds, not that the person assigned to you suits your account.
• Walk away from guarantees. Promised positions, fixed lead numbers or refusal to share search term data are warning signs, not reassurance.

Write a Google Ads agency brief that can be priced

Choosing a Google Ads agency starts with a description of the work your business needs. A request for more leads leaves too much room for interpretation. An agency might price campaign management while you expect a new landing page, repaired tracking and help getting sales staff to update the CRM. Put those expectations on the page before comparing proposals.

Begin with the commercial reason for the appointment. Perhaps an existing account generates enquiries for services you no longer want to sell. Perhaps a new region needs customers, or the person managing advertising is leaving. Describe the problem with an example from your own records. Separate what you have observed from what you suspect caused it.

Define the customer and the work you want

Describe a suitable customer in language your sales team uses. Include the service they buy, where they need it and any conditions that make an enquiry unsuitable. A commercial maintenance company might accept planned contracts within a defined travel area but decline domestic emergencies. That distinction changes the searches, advert wording and landing pages an agency should consider.

Explain capacity as well as ambition. If your installation team can accept only a few additional projects, the brief should say so. If enquiries need a technical assessment before a quote, describe that step. An agency cannot judge the usefulness of additional demand without understanding the work required to serve it. Capacity constraints belong in the initial conversation.

Give each priority an order. A business offering several services may have different margins, availability and sales cycles for each. Ask the agency to explain which offer it would start with and why. A proposal that distributes a small budget across every service may leave too little evidence to learn anything about the individual opportunities.

Record the decisions you have already made. These could include a maximum test budget, locations you will serve, claims your professional body permits or dates when staff can answer enquiries. Avoid presenting assumptions as fixed requirements. If you believe a particular campaign format is necessary, state the business reason and invite the agency to challenge the choice.

Show the starting position without overstating certainty

List the systems involved: the advertising account, website platform, analytics, consent tool, CRM and any booking or call service. You do not need a technical diagram at this stage. A simple account list, an internal owner and a note about available access help bidders identify dependencies. Keep passwords and customer records out of the brief.

Include a reporting period and explain what its figures mean. A lead count might include repeat enquiries, recruitment requests or existing customers. Label those limitations. If sales records cannot reliably identify the original marketing source, say that too. Honest uncertainty gives an agency something useful to investigate and prevents a proposal from treating unreliable figures as a firm baseline.

For an existing account, offer suitable read access during an agreed assessment. Establish what the agency may inspect and what it may change. An assessment should not quietly become a live campaign rebuild. Ask for a written description of any proposed paid discovery work, including its output and whether you can use the findings with another supplier.

A new advertiser can provide a different starting pack. Useful material includes the current offer, service area, typical customer questions, sales process and available landing pages. Separate actual customer evidence from a founder's assumptions about demand. An agency can explain how it would test those assumptions, but a confident forecast does not turn them into known facts.

Set a decision window and a usable response format

Tell agencies when you expect to choose a supplier and when work could start. Those dates are different. Your team may need time to approve copy, arrange access or appoint someone to handle enquiries. A launch date that ignores those tasks can produce a contract full of commitments neither side is ready to fulfil.

Ask every bidder to answer the same core brief. Request an explanation of the proposed scope, who will deliver it, what you must provide, the full cost and the conditions for changing or ending the work. Allow space for a different recommendation. You want comparable answers without forcing experienced practitioners into an approach they would not recommend.

Keep the response proportionate. A contained account review does not need a lengthy procurement exercise. A business with several brands, regulated claims and a complicated sales process needs more detail. Match the evidence requested to the consequences of a poor decision. Excessive unpaid pitch work can distract both sides from the questions that determine whether the relationship will work.

Agree who decides internally. Finance may care about exposure and payment terms, sales about enquiry quality, and marketing about access to useful evidence. Put those people in the discussion early. Conflicting instructions after appointment can make an agency appear indecisive when the underlying problem is an unresolved disagreement inside the buying business.

Your completed brief should let a supplier say where it can help and where it needs more information. Keep a dated version and issue material clarifications to every bidder. That gives you a fair basis for comparison and a useful record when the eventual statement of work is written. The brief is the first working document of the relationship.

Choose a delivery model your team can support

An agency is one way to buy Google Ads expertise. A freelancer, an employee or a combination of internal and external support may suit the work better. Compare the tasks and coverage you need before deciding which label belongs on the supplier. Company size alone tells you little about the attention your account will receive.

The starting question is how much responsibility you want to delegate. Some businesses need a practitioner to manage an established account while an internal team handles copy, tracking and landing pages. Others need someone to coordinate those dependencies. The second arrangement involves more than campaign operation, even when both proposals are described as Google Ads management.

Compare the work behind each option

A specialist freelancer can be a practical choice when the scope is clear and your team can provide the surrounding support. Ask about availability, holiday cover and the limits of their remit. Establish how urgent issues will be handled when they are unavailable. The important point is to understand the arrangement you are buying before an interruption exposes its gaps.

An agency may offer several disciplines and shared cover. Verify which of those resources are included in your proposal. Access to a wider team does not automatically mean your retainer includes development, design or CRM work. Ask who will actually perform each task and whether specialist help is scheduled, available on request or priced separately.

An internal hire can bring close knowledge of your business and regular contact with sales. That person still needs tools, technical support and someone able to assess their work. Consider the continuity plan if they leave. A business should retain account access and documentation regardless of whether the practitioner is on payroll or supplied by an agency.

A mixed arrangement can work when the boundary is deliberate. For example, an internal marketing manager might own the offer and approvals while a specialist manages campaigns and an existing web partner maintains the site. Put the handovers in writing. Without a coordinator, three capable people can spend weeks waiting for one another to resolve a small dependency.

Make availability concrete

Ask what normal communication looks like. Find out how you submit requests, who prioritises them and how quickly different issues are acknowledged. A routine report query is different from an advert promoting an unavailable service. Define urgent situations using examples from your business, then check that the proposed support arrangement covers the hours when those situations matter.

Distinguish a response commitment from a resolution promise. An agency might acknowledge a tracking fault promptly but need your developer or a platform provider to fix it. A useful service agreement explains how the issue will be investigated, who receives updates and when it is escalated. A blanket promise to solve everything immediately deserves careful questioning.

Meet the person responsible for your account's decisions. Ask how work is reviewed and who can step in if that person is absent. This is not a demand for one individual to remain forever. It is a request for continuity. Staff changes are manageable when the account's reasoning, settings and outstanding questions are recorded properly.

Consider your own team's available time. If nobody can approve copy, supply customer insight or review lead quality, extra external expertise may not remove the bottleneck. Include the expected client workload in the proposal. A modest engagement that your team can support may be more useful than a broader programme whose essential inputs never arrive.

Decide how much coordination you need

Map a common change, such as advertising a new service. Someone must confirm the offer, write the advert, prepare its destination, approve claims and test the enquiry route. Ask each supplier to explain its part. This simple exercise shows whether the proposed delivery model covers the real work or leaves you managing several unpriced tasks.

Use another example involving failure. Suppose enquiries stop arriving in the CRM although advertising continues. Ask who checks the form, who can contact the web supplier and who decides whether to pause spend. The quality of this answer often reveals more about the working arrangement than a broad promise of regular optimisation.

For a business with several locations, ask how local knowledge reaches the campaign team. Availability, travel limits and branch capacity may change independently. Decide whether updates come through one internal owner or directly from each branch. The agency needs a dependable source of truth; it should not have to guess which of several conflicting messages is current.

Compare continuity costs alongside the visible fee. These include your management time, duplicated subscriptions and the effort needed to move work between suppliers. You do not need to assign a speculative cash value to every inconvenience. Identify the dependencies that could delay important work and decide who will manage them before selecting the delivery model.

Write a short explanation of why your preferred model fits. It should refer to the work, the people available and the support required. Keep alternative options on record if your needs change. The right arrangement for a contained test may differ from the one you need when several markets, products or sales teams become involved.

Build a shortlist using evidence you can examine

Create a manageable shortlist from agencies whose published services match your brief. Referrals, relevant case studies and professional directories can help you discover candidates. Treat them as starting points. You still need to understand what the agency did, who delivered the work and whether the experience applies to your business.

A useful shortlist contains enough variety to expose different approaches without creating a large pitch exercise. Give each candidate the same brief and a clear opportunity to ask questions. Record why you included them. That makes it easier to distinguish evidence of fit from familiarity, an impressive presentation or the enthusiasm of the person making the introduction.

Read case studies as records of a particular situation

Ask for the starting position behind a result. A large improvement may follow the repair of a broken form, a change in the product offer or a shift in what counted as a conversion. Those can be valuable achievements. Their relevance depends on whether your business faces a similar problem and whether the agency can explain its contribution.

Check the period, market and outcome definition. Revenue, booked appointments and form submissions describe different things. A case study should make clear which one improved and what evidence supports the statement. Ask whether figures include existing customers, branded searches or other channels. You are trying to understand the result's boundaries before using it in a buying decision.

Look for the work between the starting point and the outcome. Ask which decisions were made, what evidence informed them and what did not work. A supplier that can explain a discarded approach gives you a better view of its judgement. A chart alone cannot show whether the result came from repeatable practice or a favourable change outside the account.

Consider similarity in business model, not just industry name. A company selling one-off emergency work may face different advertising decisions from another in the same trade selling annual contracts. Comparable sales cycles, service areas and enquiry processes may be more useful than an exact sector match. Explain those features when requesting relevant examples.

Verify credentials within their limits

If an agency claims Google Partner status, ask for a current way to verify that status. Google's published Partner requirements cover performance, spend and certification categories. Those criteria provide context for the badge. They do not establish that a particular proposal fits your business or that the person assigned to you has the experience you need.

The thresholds are specific. At the time of checking, a Google Partner needs an optimisation score of at least 70%, $10,000 USD of ad spend across managed accounts over 90 days and at least half of its account strategists certified in Google Ads. Premier Partner status goes to the top 3% of participating companies in a country, assessed annually. Optimisation score measures how far accounts follow Google's recommendations, not whether those recommendations made a client money. Ask which recommendations the agency regularly declines and why.

Ask which relevant qualifications the delivery team holds and how they keep their knowledge current. Avoid turning the process into a collection of badges. An experienced practitioner should also be able to explain a recent decision in plain language. You are assessing the ability to apply knowledge to your situation, including when a platform recommendation should be questioned.

Check who produced the case study. An agency may have inherited an account, worked alongside an internal team or supplied one part of a wider project. Ask about the division of responsibility. Shared delivery is normal. Clear attribution helps you understand what expertise you would actually be buying and avoids giving one supplier credit for unrelated work.

If a claim cannot be supported because of confidentiality, ask for a redacted explanation or a reference the client has agreed to provide. Do not pressure the agency to disclose another company's private data. Respect for confidentiality is relevant to your own future relationship. You can assess reasoning and working practice without receiving an unfiltered export of somebody else's account.

Use references to understand daily working practice

Ask a consenting reference about communication, changes of plan and the quality of explanations when results were disappointing. Find out whether reports led to useful decisions and whether responsibilities stayed clear. These questions help assess the working relationship. A reference cannot guarantee your results, particularly when the budget, market and internal support are different.

Discuss an example of disagreement. Perhaps the client wanted to increase spend and the agency advised waiting, or a requested campaign needed changes to the offer. Ask how the decision was reached and recorded. You want a supplier that can challenge a weak assumption without losing sight of the client's authority over its own business.

Review sample reporting with the same care. Request a redacted report or a clearly labelled demonstration. Look for definitions, comparison periods, known gaps and decisions. A polished dashboard with no explanation of its conversion count is weak evidence. A simpler report may be more useful if you can follow the reasoning from observed activity to the next action.

Keep a note of unanswered questions for each candidate. Do not fill the gaps with favourable assumptions. An unanswered point can remain open while you request clarification; a material contradiction needs resolution before appointment. This gives smaller and less polished suppliers a fair chance to demonstrate competence through evidence rather than presentation style.

End the shortlist stage with an evidence pack for each contender. It should contain the relevant example, delivery contact, proposed approach and remaining questions. If none fits the brief, revise the search or the scope. Selecting the least unsuitable proposal can create a longer and more expensive problem than taking time to clarify what you need.

Turn the promised service into a clear scope

A scope should describe what will be delivered and how you will know it has been delivered. Broad phrases such as account management or ongoing optimisation leave room for different expectations. Ask the agency to connect those phrases to your account's needs. You should be able to identify the work included in the fee and the work that needs another agreement.

Separate initial work from continuing management. An inherited account may need an access review, measurement checks and an assessment of current campaigns before routine activity begins. A new account needs a build and launch process. Ask which tasks are included in setup, which belong to the monthly service and which depend on findings from an initial review.

Describe outputs and acceptance conditions

For a campaign plan, request the proposed services, locations, audiences and exclusions, with the assumptions behind them. For advert production, ask which formats and assets are covered and how approval works. For account management, establish the responsibilities for checking search relevance, spend and conversion signals. The detail should reflect your needs without prescribing activity that serves no useful purpose.

An acceptance condition makes an output reviewable. For example, an approved launch pack could contain the campaign structure, destination pages, conversion definitions and evidence that enquiry routes were tested. This is more useful than a promise that setup will be complete. Both sides can see what must exist before the business authorises live spending.

Avoid judging management by a fixed number of changes. Frequent edits can be busywork, while a decision to leave a setting alone may be justified. Ask for a record of material decisions and the evidence behind them. The service should make accountability visible without rewarding unnecessary intervention or implying that every week must produce a new experiment.

If the agency provides Google Ads management, check where that service ends. GRO's published service describes campaign planning, adverts, measurement definitions and performance decisions. Your own proposal still needs to identify the particular work commissioned. A service page explains the available help; the agreed scope governs the project you are buying.

Give website and tracking work an owner

Identify who will change destination pages. That includes copy, forms, page availability and any technical fixes discovered during setup. If your existing web supplier remains responsible, agree how requests reach them and who approves the cost. An agency can identify a problem without having the permission, skills or contracted time to implement its solution.

Clarify whether landing page work means advice, a design, a working page or continuing tests. These are different deliverables. Ask where the page will be hosted, who maintains it and what happens to it when the relationship ends. A temporary campaign page can be useful, provided the arrangement is understood and its enquiry route remains under proper control.

Tracking deserves its own definition of done. The agency should explain whether it will audit existing measurement, configure changes or only report the data already available. A complete implementation may require website access, consent decisions and cooperation from another supplier. Price those dependencies explicitly instead of treating them as small details that can be settled after launch.

Where a project needs analytics and conversion tracking, ask for a record of events and representative test results. The record should distinguish a successful enquiry from an attempted submission or a button click. This gives your team a basis for checking later website changes and understanding the reports it receives.

Expose exclusions before they become disputes

Read the exclusions as carefully as the deliverables. Common areas to clarify include product feeds, creative production, developer time, consent tooling, CRM changes and call tracking subscriptions. There is no universal package that must include all of them. The practical requirement is that everything necessary for your agreed plan has an owner and an understandable cost.

Ask how new work is approved. A change request should describe the need, cost, timing and effect on the existing plan. Decide who inside your business can authorise it. Without that rule, an informal conversation may become an unexpected invoice, or useful work may stall because nobody knows whether the request was a suggestion or an instruction.

Consider what happens when a dependency is late. If your team cannot approve a landing page on time, does management begin anyway, move to another task or wait? Agree the treatment of fees and dates. A fair arrangement recognises work already performed while keeping both sides clear about what can proceed and what remains blocked.

Specify the documentation you will receive. It should be enough for your business or a future supplier to understand the commissioned work. That may include account structure notes, conversion definitions, approved copy and outstanding issues. Agree the form and timing of the handover. Documentation produced only during a difficult exit can be incomplete and expensive to reconstruct.

Before accepting the scope, walk through a normal month and an unusual one. In the normal month, identify reporting, decision making and routine checks. In the unusual month, imagine a new offer, a broken form or a sudden capacity limit. The proposal should explain how those events are handled without needing to predict every possible incident.

Compare fees through the full cost of the decision

Separate advertising spend from the fee for managing it. Then identify setup, supporting work and subscriptions. You need to know what goes to Google, what goes to the agency and what goes to other providers. A single headline monthly amount can hide those distinctions, making two proposals appear comparable when they fund quite different services.

Google's third-party transparency requirements require management fees to be disclosed in writing before the first purchase and on invoices. When Google advertising costs are reported, they should exclude the third party's fees. Use that distinction in your own comparison sheet, then ask the agency to explain any additional charge you do not understand.

Understand what changes the fee

A fixed retainer can make planning easier, but its scope still needs boundaries. Ask whether the fee changes with additional campaigns, locations, products or support requirements. Find out what happens during quieter periods. A fixed price does not tell you how much work is included or whether the proposed resource is sufficient for your account.

A percentage of media spend makes the fee move with the advertising budget. Ask about minimum fees, tier boundaries and approval of spend increases. Consider whether extra media would create extra work in your situation. The arrangement can be assessed through its actual terms; the pricing model alone cannot establish whether the agency will make sensible recommendations.

A performance fee needs particularly clear definitions. Establish which outcomes count, who validates them and how duplicates, cancellations and existing customers are handled. Determine when the fee becomes payable and how disputes are resolved. An agency and client can both act in good faith yet reach different totals if the contract never defines the payable event.

For project or hourly work, ask what estimate is included and how overruns are approved. Agree what happens if the initial investigation reveals a larger problem. You may want a contained discovery stage followed by a separate implementation decision. This lets the agency investigate uncertainty without treating every possible remedy as an open-ended commitment from your business.

Published price guides can help you sense-check a quote, but treat them as indicative. One UK guide, Whito's UK PPC cost research, compiled from publicly listed prices rather than an audited survey, puts percentage fees at around 5 to 15% of spend, usually on budgets above £5,000 a month, with flat fees more common below that and £250 to £500 as a reasonable setup fee for a standard campaign. Use figures like these to ask better questions, not to set the right price for your account.

Put proposals on the same basis

Use a common comparison period that reflects the proposed minimum commitment. Include the setup fee, management, planned media and compulsory tools. Show optional work separately. Ask whether quoted amounts include VAT and let finance handle the relevant tax treatment. Do not assume two suppliers have used the same presentation simply because both quote in pounds.

The following arithmetic is an invented comparison, not a market price, GRO quote or forecast. Suppose proposal A includes a £600 setup fee and £900 monthly management. Proposal B includes a £300 setup fee and £700 monthly management but requires a separate £1,200 tracking project. Over three months, their service totals are £3,300 and £3,600 respectively.

If each hypothetical proposal also uses £3,000 of media per month, the combined three-month totals are £12,300 for A and £12,600 for B, before any tax treatment or unlisted costs. The lower monthly management fee has not produced the lower total. Whether either proposal offers better value depends on the work, evidence and support actually included.

Do not stop at the initial comparison. Calculate what happens if the engagement continues, if spend changes and if you leave at the earliest permitted date. A setup charge may matter less over a longer period, while a compulsory subscription or termination payment may matter more. Use the dates and rules in the proposals rather than assumptions about standard industry practice.

Control exposure during the test

Distinguish an internal spending authorisation from a campaign's average daily budget. Google's spending limit guidance explains that, for most campaigns, billed daily spend can reach twice the average daily budget and the monthly limit is based on 30.4 times that budget. Campaign types and budget changes need their own checks before applying this to an account.

Ask the agency how it will translate your agreed exposure into settings, monitoring and escalation. Identify who can authorise an increase and how that approval is recorded. A report delivered after the month ends is too late to serve as the only control. Your finance team should understand when charges occur and who receives billing notifications.

Set aside the cost of learning without disguising it as a guaranteed return. A test needs a question, a spending boundary and a decision date. The agency should explain what evidence the proposed budget could reasonably produce and what may remain uncertain. It should also describe what would make it stop early, such as a broken enquiry route or an unavailable service.

Discuss the effect of a pause. Management fees, tools and project work may continue even when media stops, depending on the agreement. Ask what service remains active and whether restarting carries a cost. This matters for seasonal businesses and for companies whose capacity can change quickly. A pause should be an understood operating decision, not a surprise contractual argument.

Price is useful when it is attached to a defined responsibility. Finish the comparison by asking what your business would still need to buy or do under each proposal. Record those gaps beside the total. A more expensive scope may remove a material dependency, while a cheaper focused scope may be right when your team already provides the missing support.

Keep account access and working assets under control

Your business needs continuing access to the accounts and records on which the work depends. Establish that before an agency begins. Ask who administers the Google Ads account, who pays the advertising bill and how the agency will connect. Then extend the same discussion to analytics, website tags, landing pages and any tools used to report or import outcomes.

Account control is practical, not merely contractual. Someone authorised inside your business should be able to sign in, identify the account and understand the available permissions. Test that access. A sentence saying you own the account is less useful if nobody in the business knows which login works or how to recover access when an employee leaves.

Distinguish platform permissions from the contract

Google's manager-account ownership guidance uses ownership as a specific administrative permission. An owner manager has additional powers, but the client account retains its data and can remove the manager relationship. Ask the agency to explain whether it needs that elevated role and why, rather than assuming every manager link has the same privileges.

Agree the least access needed for the commissioned work. Read access may suit an initial assessment; implementation needs different permissions. Keep a record of who approved each change. Ask how subcontractors are given access and removed when their work ends. A supplier should be able to explain the people and systems that can act on your behalf.

Google Ads offers five access levels. Knowing what each allows makes the access conversation concrete:

Keep the payments profile in your business name so advertising charges come straight from Google to you. If an agency proposes billing media through its own account, ask why, how you will see the underlying Google costs and what happens to the account and its history if you leave.

Avoid sharing one person's password to make onboarding faster. Use the platform's supported invitation or linking process. The NCSC's guidance on two-step verification recommends protecting important accounts with an additional verification step. Include the relevant business accounts in your organisation's security process and keep recovery arrangements under authorised internal control.

Maintain a simple access register containing account identifiers, owners and the purpose of each connection. It should not contain passwords, recovery codes or exported customer lists. Store sensitive credentials through your approved process. The register exists to make responsibility understandable, including when a supplier changes or an internal owner is away.

Check the assets around the advertising account

List the items a replacement practitioner would need. These may include approved advert copy, image source files, product feeds, landing page code, reporting definitions and integration notes. Ask which are commissioned deliverables, which are licensed and which remain the supplier's tools. Commercial rights should be clear enough that neither side is surprised at the end of the engagement.

A dashboard deserves special attention. Find out whether your business receives access to underlying accounts or only to a supplier's reporting view. Ask what can be exported and what disappears when a subscription ends. A useful dashboard can still be a temporary service. You need to understand its limits before relying on it as the only record of past performance.

Call tracking and landing page subscriptions can create similar dependencies. Establish who holds the contract, which numbers or domains are used and what happens on cancellation. If a supplier-owned asset cannot be transferred, plan a replacement before it is switched off. Do not assume the continuity of enquiry routes follows automatically from retaining the advertising account.

For integrations, identify the connection owner and the person responsible for monitoring failures. A workflow connected through a departing employee's account may need attention even though the agency relationship continues. Include renewal dates and known dependencies in the handover notes. The aim is to avoid losing a functioning process because its administration was never documented.

Treat a change of agency as a controlled handover

Before replacing an existing supplier, preserve the information needed to understand current work. Request campaign notes, outstanding issues, approved assets and relevant reporting definitions. Agree a changeover date and decide who may edit the account during the transition. Two suppliers making overlapping changes can make later performance difficult to interpret and faults harder to investigate.

Ask the incoming agency to identify urgent risks separately from proposed improvements. A broken destination or incorrect offer may need immediate action. A wider restructure should have a reason and a record of what it replaces. Keeping useful history does not mean preserving every setting indefinitely; it means changing the account with an understanding of what already exists.

Confirm that replacement reporting and enquiry routes work before removing old access or subscriptions. Test the path a customer uses and the record your team expects to receive. Then revoke permissions that are no longer needed through the appropriate account owner. Make the change visible to relevant staff so they know where to report problems.

Keep the exit requirements in the original agreement. They should cover deliverables, access removal, outstanding fees and the handling of data held by the supplier. Ask your adviser to review contractual points that need legal interpretation. Operational clarity at the start makes a later handover easier whether the relationship ends amicably, urgently or simply because your needs have changed.

Agree what counts as success before buying management

Before accepting a performance target, agree what the target counts. A conversion can represent several different actions, depending on the account's configuration. A recorded phone click is not necessarily a completed call. A submitted form may be a duplicate or an unsuitable enquiry. Your agency should be able to explain the distinction without requiring you to become a tracking specialist.

Start with the decision your business needs to make. You may want to know whether a service attracts suitable enquiries at a cost you can support. That requires more than a total of website interactions. Work backwards from the commercial question to the records needed to answer it, including the information your sales team must provide.

Request an event definition you can test

For each proposed conversion, ask what triggers it, where it is recorded and what it means. Identify how repeated submissions are handled and whether the event can occur when the customer receives an error. Ask for representative tests with expected results. A useful test record shows the journey and the observed output, not just a screenshot saying a tag is active.

Keep supporting actions distinct from the main outcome. A brochure download may help explain interest without carrying the same meaning as a booked assessment. The appropriate arrangement depends on the business and the evidence available. Ask why each event is included in reporting and whether it influences campaign bidding, rather than accepting a single combined conversion total.

Google distinguishes primary and secondary conversion actions. Primary actions normally inform bidding when their standard goal is used; secondary actions are generally observational. A custom goal is an exception because its included actions can inform bidding regardless of that label. Ask the practitioner to show the goals used by your actual campaigns, not just the labels beside individual events.

Write down the starting configuration and date any later changes. If a report begins counting a different event, its totals may change without any improvement in customer acquisition. Ask the agency to explain comparisons across that boundary. The same principle applies when duplicate tracking is removed or a previously unmeasured enquiry route becomes visible.

Connect advertising to sales without claiming perfect visibility

Agree how your team will identify a suitable enquiry. Use a definition that staff can apply consistently, with a way to record uncertainty. A simple lead scoring model can make that judgement repeatable. Explain disqualification reasons that affect advertising decisions, such as location, service mismatch or unavailable capacity. Keep personal commentary out of shared reports. The agency needs useful categories and evidence, not unrestricted access to every sales conversation.

Define the timing of feedback. If an enquiry normally takes several weeks to become a customer, the latest month's sales count may be incomplete. Ask for reporting that makes the delay visible. You can review recent lead quality while allowing older enquiries time to progress. Avoid treating an unfinished cohort as though every eventual outcome is already known.

If the proposal includes Google offline conversions, ask for a separate implementation and validation plan. It should identify the source event, permitted data, exclusions and error handling. Confirm when the imported information will be used for observation and when any bidding change could be considered. A successful connection alone does not prove that the business meaning is correct.

Ask how the agency will reconcile differences between the advertising platform, analytics and your CRM. These systems may use different attribution rules, dates and visibility. You should receive a clear explanation of material differences, including known limitations. Our marketing attribution guide explains why those totals rarely agree. Requiring every total to match can encourage poor definitions; accepting every mismatch without investigation can conceal a fault.

Make privacy responsibility part of the scope

The ICO's guidance on online advertising says storage and access technologies used for online advertising require consent, including associated tracking and profiling. It explains that advertising measurement forms part of that purpose. Your proposal should identify who decides the applicable requirements and who tests the agreed technical behaviour, with specialist advice where needed.

Ask what happens when a visitor refuses or later changes a choice. The agency should describe the intended behaviour and the evidence used to check it. Do not accept a product name as a complete answer to a privacy question. A consent tool, server-side implementation or hashing process still needs a defined purpose and appropriate handling rules.

Limit data access to what the agreed work requires. Discuss who can see lead details, how reports are shared and how customer information is removed when it is no longer needed under your policy. These are working questions for the responsible people in your organisation. The buying decision should expose unresolved responsibilities before an integration starts moving information between systems.

Set targets with assumptions attached

Ask the agency to separate a target from a forecast and a commitment. A target states the outcome you want to work towards. A forecast estimates what might happen under stated assumptions. A contractual commitment describes an obligation. Mixing these categories creates avoidable disagreement when actual demand, conversion behaviour or sales capacity differs from the plan.

Check the arithmetic behind a proposed target using your own business economics. Include the costs that your decision actually needs to cover and the delay before revenue is received. Ask finance to verify the assumptions. An agency can help structure the calculation, but it should not invent your margin, close rate or customer value to make the proposal attractive.

Leave the meeting with a short measurement agreement. It should state the main outcome, supporting measures, data owners, known gaps and review timing. Link it to the agency's reporting scope. This gives both sides a reference when a promising headline number conflicts with the sales team's experience or when a change in measurement affects the apparent result.

Use the strategy discussion to test judgement

A pitch should help you understand how the agency makes decisions. Ask it to explain a proposed starting point using your brief and the evidence available. You do not need a complete unpaid campaign build. You do need enough reasoning to see whether the supplier understands your offer, recognises uncertainty and can connect its recommendations to a commercial question.

Invite the practitioner to identify the largest unknown. It might be demand in a new area, the reliability of existing conversion data or the quality of the destination page. Ask how they would investigate it and what the result would change. This is more revealing than a long list of tactics that could be applied to almost any account.

Ask for choices and their consequences

Request the reason for the proposed campaign approach. If the agency suggests concentrating on one service, ask what it would defer and why. If it recommends several campaign types, ask what each contributes and how their performance will be interpreted. A credible plan should explain its boundaries, including the opportunities it cannot test within the proposed budget.

Discuss search intent through examples from your business. A phrase can look relevant while describing a need you cannot serve. Ask how the agency will identify such mismatches and how sales feedback will inform exclusions or messaging. You are assessing whether it can translate your commercial distinctions into practical advertising decisions, not whether it can recite keyword terminology.

Ask how geography will be handled and checked. A business may sell nationally but deliver only in certain areas, or accept enquiries from headquarters for work at another location. Explain those complications. The agency should be able to describe the intended audience and how it will review the traffic actually received without pretending a location setting answers every business question.

Discuss branded demand separately from reaching new customers. Someone already searching for your company may behave differently from someone comparing suppliers for the first time. Ask how the proposal will make those differences visible where the available reporting supports it. A blended result can be useful for some decisions while obscuring the answer to others.

Examine the connection between the advert and the page

Show the agency a real destination page and ask it to follow the intended customer action. Listen for observations about the offer, eligibility and enquiry route. A useful assessment identifies concrete obstacles and their likely consequences. General comments about making the page more modern do not establish that a proposed redesign will solve the problem in your brief.

Ask which changes are essential before launch and which are later hypotheses. This helps prevent a contained advertising engagement becoming a loosely defined website project. Some issues, such as an unavailable offer or failed form, need correction before spending. Other changes may be worth testing once you can observe the current journey reliably. Slow pages are a common essential fix; see our website speed guide for what to check.

Check how the agency would evaluate a landing page design project if one is proposed. Request the intended customer, message and action, then identify who will supply evidence and approve claims. Design work should respond to the offer and the visitor's needs. It should not depend on an invented conversion uplift to justify its inclusion.

Use the sales process as another test of the plan. If customers need a consultation, ask what happens after the form arrives. The agency need not take over your sales team, but it should recognise where delayed responses or missing records limit what advertising can achieve. The responsibilities should return to the relevant people rather than disappear into a vague promise of more leads.

Challenge certainty without demanding impossible guarantees

Ask what evidence would cause the agency to change its recommendation. This tests whether the plan can adapt. A supplier may reasonably defend an approach while explaining the conditions under which it would reconsider. Be cautious if every possible outcome is presented as support for spending more or extending the same work indefinitely.

When automation or AI features are proposed, ask what decision the feature will make and what controls remain. Find out how the team will inspect outputs, approve customer-facing claims and respond to unsuitable activity. The latest feature may be relevant, but its availability is not a business case. Request an explanation tied to the problem you are trying to solve.

Ask the practitioner to distinguish platform guidance from their own recommendation. Both can be useful. You should know when a setting follows a documented product requirement and when it reflects professional judgement about your account. That distinction makes disagreements easier to discuss and helps your team understand which assumptions a future test is intended to examine.

Agree how a test becomes a decision

A proposed experiment should begin with a specific question. For example, your business may want to compare two messages for the same service while keeping the enquiry definition stable. Ask which conditions must remain comparable and what could distort the result. A before-and-after chart can reflect changes in demand or sales handling as well as the advertising change itself.

Discuss the available evidence before agreeing a fixed timetable. Some accounts may produce useful observations quickly; others may have low volumes or long sales cycles. Ask what can reasonably be reviewed at each stage and what will remain tentative. There is no single number of weeks that makes every account's results conclusive.

Finish by asking the agency to explain the recommendation to a colleague who does not work in marketing. Clear language exposes gaps that jargon can conceal. Your colleague should understand the proposed choice, its cost, the evidence needed and the decision that follows. If those points remain unclear, request a revised explanation before signing.

Questions to ask every Google Ads agency

Put the same questions to each shortlisted agency and note the answers beside one another. Strong answers are specific to your account; weak ones could be pasted into any proposal.

Compare proposals without letting a score hide a problem

Put the shortlisted proposals into one comparison document. Use your brief as the structure and record the evidence behind each assessment. A score can help organise a discussion, but it cannot resolve an unanswered question about access, cost or responsibility. Keep material conditions separate from preferences so an attractive total does not conceal a requirement the supplier cannot meet.

First identify the conditions your business must satisfy before appointment. These might include approved expenditure, a workable access arrangement and a clear owner for measurement. Make them specific to your circumstances. If a condition is unresolved, mark it as unresolved and request clarification. Do not quietly award partial credit for something the business considers necessary.

Evaluate comparable evidence

Use the same categories for each agency: fit with the brief, delivery capability, measurement approach, commercial terms and continuity. Define what good evidence looks like in each category before scoring. Otherwise, a persuasive meeting can change the criteria halfway through the process. The comparison should help your team explain a decision to someone who did not attend the pitches.

Write a short evidence note beside every judgement. For example, record that the named practitioner explained a relevant handover and supplied a redacted sample report. That is more useful than describing the agency as impressive. Another reviewer can examine the note, question its relevance and see what information would change the assessment.

Keep absence of evidence separate from evidence of a problem. A missing answer may be resolved in a follow-up conversation. A proposal that contradicts a confirmed requirement needs a different discussion. This distinction prevents both unfair rejection and optimistic assumptions. Give the agency a reasonable opportunity to correct misunderstandings before treating an issue as final.

If you use numerical weights, choose them to reflect your business priorities and label them as your decision method. They are not a scientific prediction of future performance. Test whether a small change in a weight reverses the result. If it does, discuss the underlying trade-off directly instead of presenting the final score as an objective winner.

Reconcile the proposal with what was said

Compare written terms with the sales conversation. If the pitch included landing page changes but the proposal covers advice only, ask for the difference to be resolved. If a particular practitioner was promised, check how staffing is described. The purpose is to create one shared account of the work, rather than leaving important commitments in people's memories.

Ask for a final schedule of fees and dependencies. Include any clarification that changed the original price or timing. Confirm which proposal version forms the basis of acceptance. A clear document trail is helpful when your finance team processes invoices or when another colleague takes over the relationship several months later.

Read the minimum term, renewal and notice provisions together. Work out the earliest date you could leave and the actions required to do so. Ask what payments would remain due. Avoid assuming that a monthly invoice means a monthly commitment. If the wording is unclear or commercially significant, have your adviser review it before signing.

Check how the agreement deals with changes to scope, delayed client inputs and unavailable third-party systems. The aim is not to shift every possible risk to the agency. It is to identify who decides what happens next and how costs are approved. Clear responsibilities give both sides a more practical way to resolve problems.

Pause the decision when you see these warning signs

Some answers justify stopping until the point is resolved, however strong the rest of the proposal looks:

• Guaranteed positions or lead numbers. Google runs an auction. Nobody controls where an advert appears or how many people will enquire.
• The account stays with the agency. Refusing you Admin access, or building campaigns in an account you cannot keep, makes leaving expensive and erases your history.
• Hidden media costs. Google requires third parties to disclose management fees; you should be able to see what was paid to Google separately from the fee.
• No access to search term data. Without it you cannot see what your money was spent on.
• Launch before tracking is tested. Spending without a working conversion record makes the first months hard to interpret.
• Long lock-ins without break points. A minimum term can be reasonable during setup; a long contract with no review or exit point is a risk you carry alone.
• A strategy before any questions. A detailed plan presented before the agency understands your offer, margins or capacity is a template, not a recommendation.

One warning sign may have an innocent explanation, so ask. Two or more, or an evasive answer to a direct question, usually tells you enough.

Hold one focused clarification meeting

Send the remaining questions in advance and invite the people who can answer them. Keep the meeting centred on unresolved points rather than asking for another general pitch. If the issue is tracking implementation, include the relevant specialist. If it is a contract provision, obtain an answer from someone authorised to agree the commercial position.

Use a hypothetical disruption to check the final proposal. Suppose your highest-priority service becomes unavailable for a fortnight. Ask how you notify the agency, who changes advertising, what reporting notes are kept and whether fees change. The answer should be consistent with the scope and support arrangement already discussed.

Use a second scenario involving weak results. Ask how the agency would investigate if enquiries increased but sales did not. A useful response separates possible causes and identifies evidence to examine. It should avoid automatically blaming either the campaign or your sales team. You are looking for a method of investigation and a willingness to work with incomplete information.

Record the decision and its remaining conditions

Document why you selected the supplier, including any accepted limitations. Perhaps the agency has strong campaign experience but your existing developer must handle all website work. That can be a sound decision when the dependency is acknowledged and resourced. The record helps prevent a later expectation that the agency included work it never agreed to deliver.

If appointment depends on a final access check or revised scope, keep that condition explicit. Do not allow administrative momentum to turn a provisional choice into an unconditional start. The agency also benefits from knowing exactly what remains before work can begin and which internal person is responsible for closing each point.

Tell unsuccessful bidders the process is complete when you are ready to do so. Keep their confidential proposals within the evaluation group. You may find a different model useful in future, but there is no need to circulate one supplier's detailed approach to another. Treat the procurement process with the same care you expect for your own business information.

Your final approval should authorise a defined engagement: named parties, agreed scope, cost, timing and decision responsibilities. It should not simply endorse an agency in general. That distinction gives the delivery team a usable starting point and makes the first review about progress against an agreement everyone can find and understand.

Use onboarding to prove the arrangement works

Onboarding turns the proposal into a working service. Begin with a meeting that confirms the scope, the immediate priorities and the people responsible for decisions. Bring the agreed brief and measurement definitions. The agency should not need to rediscover essential information because the sales conversation was never passed to the delivery team.

Make the initial plan visible to everyone who supplies a dependency. Your web partner needs to know when changes are required; sales needs to know how enquiries will be identified and reviewed. Finance needs the approved spending arrangement. A launch timetable becomes credible when the people expected to contribute have confirmed their responsibilities and availability.

Establish access and a baseline first

Verify the agreed account permissions using the actual accounts. Record missing access and give each request an owner. Keep the access process separate from approval to make live changes. An agency may need to inspect the current setup before it can recommend a safe transition. Make clear which actions require your approval and which fall within continuing management authority.

Capture the starting position in a form your team can understand. Include active campaigns, budgets, conversion definitions and known issues. For an existing account, retain relevant comparison periods and notes about unusual events. This record will help explain later changes. It also prevents a newly appointed supplier from unintentionally presenting an inherited result as evidence of its own work.

Review the proposed first actions against the assessment. Some work may be urgent, such as correcting an inaccurate advert or repairing a failed enquiry route. Other work may need a planned test. Ask the agency to state the reason for each priority and the consequence of waiting. That gives you a basis for approving the order of work.

If the plan changes materially after access is granted, update the scope before proceeding with additional work. Discovery can reveal legitimate surprises. The response should be a clear explanation of what was found, what it affects and what options are available. Neither side benefits from pretending the original estimate covered a problem that was not reasonably understood.

Make launch approval a specific decision

Review the actual advert copy and destinations, not only a summary of the campaign idea. Confirm prices, service areas, availability and any claims that require evidence. Decide which future changes the agency may make without separate approval. A practical approval policy protects important business statements while allowing routine management to proceed without unnecessary delays.

Test the customer journey on the devices your customers use. Submit a permitted test enquiry, check the confirmation and verify that the expected team receives it. Confirm what appears in measurement and how the test is excluded from ordinary sales reporting where appropriate. A form that looks correct is insufficient evidence that the whole handover works.

Check the response arrangements before generating new demand. The person receiving enquiries should know what the campaign offers and what information the customer has already supplied. Agree how absence and out-of-hours requests are handled. Your lead generation funnel extends beyond the advert, so the buying decision should account for what happens after someone makes contact.

Record the launch authorisation with the approved scope and spending boundary. Include any unresolved issue that the business has consciously accepted. If an issue prevents the agreed measurement or customer journey from working, decide whether to delay the affected activity. Launching on the planned date is useful only if the business can handle and interpret the resulting enquiries.

Use early reviews to check implementation

The first review should confirm that the intended activity is running and that the records make sense. Check the offer, locations, destinations and enquiry delivery. Review any unexpected traffic or customer feedback. Early operational checks can identify mistakes even when there is not yet enough evidence to assess the wider commercial outcome.

Keep implementation defects separate from performance questions. An incorrect destination needs correction; uncertain enquiry economics need investigation over an appropriate period. Calling every issue a learning period obscures the difference. Ask the agency to identify what is functioning as intended, what requires repair and what cannot yet be judged confidently.

Make sales feedback easy to provide. A short shared definition and a small set of useful outcome categories may work better than a lengthy form nobody completes. Decide who reviews missing information and how disagreements about qualification are resolved. The agency needs dependable feedback, while sales needs a process that fits the way the team actually works.

If staff report poor enquiries, request examples through the approved data-handling process. Look for patterns such as location mismatch, mistaken service expectations or duplicate contact. Avoid treating a single memorable enquiry as proof that the whole campaign is wrong. Equally, do not dismiss consistent feedback simply because the advertising platform reports a healthy conversion total.

Plan reviews around evidence and responsibilities

A first-month review can examine the setup, early enquiry quality and whether the agreed working process is functioning. A later review can consider more mature sales outcomes where the cycle allows. Treat these as review purposes, not guaranteed result dates. The relevant timing depends on demand, volume and how long your customers take to buy.

At each review, record the decision, the evidence and the next owner. If more information is needed, specify how it will be obtained. This avoids meetings that end with a general promise to monitor performance. It also gives a replacement colleague enough context to understand why the current approach was chosen.

Close onboarding with an accepted record of what is live, how it is measured and what remains open. Confirm where routine reports and requests will go. The agency should now be operating against a shared agreement rather than a succession of informal setup conversations. That makes continuing management easier to evaluate and reduces the chance that unfinished tasks quietly disappear.

Review the relationship and prepare for change

Ongoing review should tell you what happened, what the agency thinks it means and what decision is needed. A dashboard can supply figures, but the explanation matters. Ask for a report that relates to your agreed outcome and makes uncertainty visible. The purpose is to support decisions about the work and spending you have authorised.

Separate routine operating updates from commercial reviews. A short update may cover launch status, a fault or an approval request. A commercial review needs enough time to examine enquiry quality, mature outcomes and the implications for the plan. Combining everything into a hurried discussion can leave the business informed about activity but unclear about whether the engagement is useful.

Read the report in the right order

Start with definitions and the reporting period. Check whether conversion settings, campaign coverage or source systems changed. Then look at delivery and customer outcomes. A percentage improvement may be misleading if it compares unlike periods or counts different events. Ask for the comparison to be restated when the basis has changed materially.

Review counts alongside rates and costs. A high percentage based on very few enquiries carries different weight from a stable pattern across many observations. Ask the agency to state when evidence is thin. It can still recommend a practical next step, provided the reasoning acknowledges the uncertainty rather than presenting a small fluctuation as a dependable trend.

Connect results to material changes in the business. Availability, prices, response times and the offer may affect outcomes during the same period as campaign changes. Record those events. This does not excuse weak management; it makes the interpretation more accurate and helps the agency identify which parts of the result it can influence directly.

Ask about unsuccessful work as well as progress. A useful report can explain a test that did not support its hypothesis and what the team learned. The reporting process should not depend on finding a positive story every month. You need an honest basis for deciding whether to continue, revise or stop an approach.

Agree what a weak period requires

If results fall below the agreed target, begin with the measurement and customer journey. Check whether the reported change reflects reality and whether enquiries still reach the right people. Then review demand, relevance, offer and sales handling. A structured investigation is more useful than immediately increasing spend or rebuilding the whole account.

Ask for a written recovery plan when a material problem persists. It should identify the working explanation, the proposed action and the evidence that will be reviewed. Give each action an owner. Where the agency needs something from your team, record that dependency too. An improvement plan is only useful if the people responsible can carry it out.

Set a review point that matches the issue. A broken form can be tested after repair; the commercial effect of a different offer may take longer to assess. Agree what would justify continuing the test and what would make you stop. This prevents an indefinite sequence of extensions without a clear decision about the engagement.

Distinguish a supplier problem from a channel problem. An agency may carry out the agreed work competently while the proposed acquisition approach proves unsuitable for your economics. Another supplier will not necessarily change that fact. Equally, uncertain market conditions should not excuse missing reports, unapproved spend or repeated failures to carry out agreed tasks.

Review value when the work changes

As the account develops, revisit whether the scope still fits. You may need less setup support and more analysis, or a new service may add demands that were absent from the original brief. Ask for changes to be explained and priced. Keep the original purpose in view so a growing list of activities does not become a substitute for a useful outcome.

Consider the total effort your business contributes. If your team spends substantial time correcting reports or chasing unclear requests, discuss the cause. It may be a process that can be repaired. Record the improvement expected and review whether it happens. Value includes the quality of the working relationship as well as the visible management fee.

Revisit the assumptions behind growth recommendations. A campaign that works at one spending level does not prove that every additional pound will produce the same return. Ask what evidence supports the next increase, how exposure will be controlled and what would trigger a review. Keep the approval tied to a defined step rather than an unlimited ambition to grow.

Keep an exit plan usable

Maintain the handover record during the relationship. It should identify current accounts, commissioned assets, conversion definitions and outstanding issues. Check that an authorised person inside the business can still access the essential systems. These habits support continuity even when you have no intention of changing supplier and make staff absences easier to manage.

When leaving, follow the agreed notice process and confirm the end date in writing. Decide which campaigns continue, who monitors them and when editing responsibility changes. Arrange the transfer or replacement of supplier-dependent services before they end. A rushed cancellation can interrupt enquiries even when the decision to appoint a different agency is sound.

Review the final invoice and handover against the contract. Confirm which access should be removed and how data held by the outgoing supplier will be treated under the agreement and your policies. Ask the responsible internal owners to verify completion. The incoming agency should receive enough context to distinguish inherited issues from new ones.

Your relationship review should end with a clear decision: continue the agreed work, approve a defined change, run a bounded investigation or leave. Record the reason and the next review point. This keeps the agency accountable while giving it a fair understanding of what the business expects and which decisions remain in the client's hands.

Questions buyers ask before appointing an agency

How much should a UK business pay a Google Ads agency?

Compare written quotes for the same scope instead of treating a published average as the right price for your account. Separate media spend, management, setup and compulsory tools. Include website or tracking work that another supplier must provide, then calculate the cost across the actual minimum commitment.

Ask how the fee changes when spend, workload or service coverage changes. A lower monthly retainer may exclude work your business needs. A larger package may include support you already have. The useful comparison is the total cost of a defined arrangement, with your remaining responsibilities made clear.

Does a Google Partner badge mean an agency will get better results?

A current badge provides evidence that the organisation meets the programme's requirements. It does not establish that its proposed team, scope or strategy will suit your business. Verify the claimed status and ask how the assigned practitioner's experience relates to the work you need.

Review the proposal, relevant examples and working process alongside credentials. Ask the agency to explain an actual decision, including its assumptions and limitations. Premier Partner status adds a ranking against other agencies in the same country, which says more about scale and programme performance than about fit for a smaller account. Your appointment should be based on the complete evidence available. No badge removes the need to define outcomes, retain suitable account access and review the work after appointment.

Is a Google Ads agency worth it for a small business?

It can be when the management fee is small relative to the value of the work it wins, and when your team has no time or expertise to run campaigns well. A specialist can avoid common waste, such as broad searches you cannot serve, untested tracking and adverts that point to weak pages. That value depends on having enough budget for the account to produce useful evidence.

If your budget is very small, compare a freelancer, a one-off setup with training, or a short paid audit. Ask any agency what it would expect to learn from your proposed spend within the first few months. If the honest answer is very little, a cheaper arrangement or a larger test may serve you better.

Should the agency own our Google Ads account?

No. Your business should own the Google Ads account, hold Admin access and keep the payments profile in its own name. The agency can link its manager account and work with Standard access. That arrangement lets the agency do its job while keeping your campaign history, conversion data and billing records with you.

If an agency builds campaigns inside an account it controls, ask what happens to that account when you leave. Losing years of data and having to rebuild from scratch is a real cost. Put ownership and handover terms in the agreement before work starts, and test that a named person in your business can sign in.

How do we give an agency access to Google Ads?

There are two usual routes. An Admin in your account can invite a person by email under Admin, then Access and security, choosing the access level. Alternatively, the agency sends a link request from its manager account, which an Admin in your account accepts. Either way, choose the lowest level the work needs: Read only for an initial review, Standard for day-to-day management.

Never share a staff member's login. Review the user and manager lists after appointment and when the relationship ends, and remove access that is no longer needed.

Can a new agency use our existing Google Ads account?

Discuss access to the existing account before agreeing to create another one. Its history may contain useful evidence about campaigns, conversion definitions and previous tests. Ask the incoming agency what it wants to retain, what needs investigation and why any proposed replacement is necessary.

Coordinate the handover with the current account owner and supplier. Agree who may make changes, preserve relevant notes and check connected reporting or enquiry tools. A new agency relationship does not automatically require a complete rebuild. The appropriate approach should follow an assessment of the actual account and the business requirements.

How long should we allow before judging the agency?

Judge implementation and working practice from the start. You can check whether access, approvals, reporting and enquiry delivery work before enough sales have matured to assess commercial performance. Ask for review dates linked to those different questions, with clear responsibilities for any missing evidence.

The timing of a commercial judgement depends on enquiry volume, sales delay and the reliability of measurement. Avoid accepting a universal deadline as a guarantee of conclusive results. Agree the budget for investigation and the evidence needed to continue. A long sales cycle should not prevent prompt correction of a broken customer journey.

Should we choose a local agency or one elsewhere in the UK?

Location may matter when your team needs regular in-person work or detailed knowledge of a local service area. Decide what that requirement means in practice. Ask how the agency will learn about availability, travel boundaries and the customer questions that affect your advertising.

A remote supplier can still provide suitable expertise and dependable communication. A nearby office does not prove that the assigned team understands your business. Compare relevant experience, delivery arrangements and access to the people doing the work. Choose the location arrangement that supports the engagement you have defined, and include any necessary travel or meeting costs.

Make the next conversation specific

Take your brief, current account information and unresolved questions into the next agency conversation. Ask for a proposal that makes the work, cost and responsibilities understandable. Keep the decision tied to evidence you can examine and an arrangement your team can support.

GRO's Google Ads management connects campaign planning with the page, enquiry and sales outcomes that shape the next advertising decision. If that is the help your business needs, book a strategy call to discuss the starting point and the scope. Bring what you know and label what remains uncertain. You should leave with a clearer view of the next practical step, the information needed and who would be responsible for delivering it.