Every Google Ads agency pitch sounds the same. More leads, better ROI, a dedicated account manager who really understands your trade. If you have already been burned once, you know the pitch and the reality rarely match up.

Before you hire a Google Ads agency, whether for the first time or to replace one that is not working, there is a short list of questions that separates the ones who treat your account like an asset from the ones who treat it like a subscription you cannot leave.

I run these accounts for a living, and most of what goes wrong traces back to one of these questions never being asked at the start. Not personality, not effort, structure. Who owns the account. How the agency gets paid. What they actually track. Whether you are locked in. What the reports really show.

Below I go through each one, what a good answer sounds like, what a dodgy one sounds like, and what you can check in your own account before you even take a meeting.

What Questions Should You Ask Before Hiring a Google Ads Agency?

Ask who owns the Google Ads account, how the agency is paid, what they track beyond clicks and form fills, whether you are locked into a contract, and what a monthly report actually shows. If you get a vague answer to any of these, keep looking. The right agency answers all five without flinching.

Table of contents

• What Questions Should You Ask Before Hiring a Google Ads Agency?
• Who Owns Your Google Ads Account?
• How Is the Agency Actually Paid?
• Are They Tracking Clicks or Booked Jobs?
• Are You Locked Into a Contract?
• What Should a Decent Report Actually Show You?
• What You Can Check in Your Own Account First
• When to Walk Away From an Agency Pitch
• When Hiring an Agency Actually Makes Sense
• FAQs

Who Owns Your Google Ads Account?

This is the question that matters most, and the one that gets asked least.

Some agencies build your campaigns inside their own management login and hand you a dashboard to look at. That's fine, until the account lives under their login rather than yours. Then you own nothing once the relationship ends.

Walk away from that agency and you walk away from:

• Every conversion, negative keyword and bit of bidding history the algorithm has learned about your business
• The ability to simply leave. You start again from zero with whoever you hire next

Google's own guidance on granting and removing account access makes clear an account can be owned by your business, with an agency added as a user, rather than the other way around.

Ask for the account to be created under your own business's Google Ads manager account, with the agency added as a user. Access can then be removed in a few clicks, and the account, the history and the data stay with your business, the same as your ute, regardless of who you subcontract to.

How Is the Agency Actually Paid?

Agencies charge one of two ways: a flat monthly retainer, or a percentage of ad spend, commonly 10 to 20 per cent as an indicative, dated market range. Both are legitimate. Only one has an obvious conflict of interest built in.

A percentage fee gives the agency a direct incentive to recommend you spend more, whether or not that produces more booked jobs. It is usually structure, not dishonesty. Ask what the fee covers: campaign management only, or landing pages, call tracking and conversion setup too. Two agencies quoting different numbers might be quoting wildly different scope, and there is no way to compare them without asking.

I run a flat retainer for this reason, separate from ad spend that goes straight to Google on your own card. Whichever model an agency uses, know what you are paying for before you sign anything.

Are They Tracking Clicks or Booked Jobs?

This is where most reporting quietly falls apart. Plenty of accounts I look at have one conversion action tracking every button on the website: phone clicks, form submissions, even people scrolling to the bottom of a page. Every one counts as a conversion in the report, and none tell you whether the phone actually rang with a real job.

Ask whether the agency separates a form fill from a booked job, and whether job value ever makes it back into the ad account. The mechanism is an offline conversion import, where completed jobs from your own job management software, ServiceM8, ServiceTitan or simPRO are common ones for trades, get uploaded back into Google Ads so the algorithm learns which searches actually turned into paid work, not just which searches produced a click.

Without that, a report showing "40 conversions this month" could mean 40 tyre kickers who filled in a form and never answered the callback. Ask to see cost per booked job, not cost per click or cost per lead. If nobody can show you that number, nobody is measuring it.

If you are not sure whether your own account is tracking clicks or actual jobs, that is worth checking before you sign with anyone new. Here's how I run Google Ads for trade businesses.

Are You Locked Into a Contract?

Some agencies ask for six or twelve months upfront, arguing that Google Ads needs time to learn. That part is true, an account genuinely needs weeks of data before bidding decisions get reliable. What is not true is that a long lock-in contract is what buys you that time.

A competent agency does not need a contract to protect the learning phase. They protect it with the setup itself:

• Tightly themed ad groups, built around a handful of closely related search terms rather than one broad group covering the whole business
• A thorough negative keyword list, built in from Day 1, not bolted on three months later once the budget has already bled out

Get that structure right and an account wastes far less money while it learns, contract or no contract. A weak setup burns budget either way, a contract just delays you noticing.

A lock-in contract should make you more sceptical, not less. Month to month is proof the agency backs their own setup. If the negative keywords and ad groups are solid, the account performs whether or not you are stuck there. A long contract just protects a mediocre setup from ever being tested against the option to walk.

Ask what happens if you want to leave after month two, and what negative keywords and ad group structure they build in before spending your first dollar. Listen for hesitation as much as the actual policy.

What Should a Decent Report Actually Show You?

A report full of impressions, clicks and cost per click tells you the campaign ran, not whether it worked. Impressions and clicks are activity metrics, useful for diagnosing a problem, not for judging whether an account earned its fee.

A report worth reading should show:

• Cost per booked job, not just cost per lead or cost per click
• Which search terms produced real work, not just which campaigns spent the most
• What changed in the account that month, and why
• A comparison against the previous month, not a single snapshot

If a report cannot answer "what did this cost per job, and what changed", it is a summary, not an explanation. Ask to see one from a past month before you sign, not a template, an actual report from a real account.

What You Can Check in Your Own Account First

Before you take a meeting with an agency, if you already have an account running, spend twenty minutes in it yourself. None of this costs anything and it tells you more than most sales calls will.

• Search terms report, under Keywords then Search terms: shows what people actually typed, including irrelevant searches burning budget
• Negative keyword list: empty or under 20 entries usually means nobody is minding the account
• Conversion actions, under Tools then Conversions: if every website button counts as a conversion, the bidding is chasing noise
• Change history: shows whether anyone has touched the account in the last month, or whether it is running on autopilot

If your current agency's account fails two or more of these checks, you already have your answer on whether to keep them or start interviewing replacements.

When to Walk Away From an Agency Pitch

Some answers to the questions above are not a yellow flag, they are a full stop. Hear any of the following in a sales call and that is your answer before you see a proposal.

• "We keep the account under our agency login," with no clear path to change that
• A locked contract longer than three months with no performance-based exit clause
• Vague answers about what counts as a conversion, or reluctance to show a real report
• A promised number of leads or a guaranteed return: nobody can promise that under Australian consumer law, and the ACCC's guidance on misleading claims applies to agencies too
• Local Services Ads or the Google Guaranteed badge pitched as available now: that pay-per-lead format is not yet open to Australian trade businesses, so anyone selling it as current is stretching the truth

None of these automatically mean the agency is dishonest. Plenty simply default to whatever is easiest for them rather than best for you. Once you have heard one, you have the information you need.

When Hiring an Agency Actually Makes Sense

None of this means you have to run ads yourself, or that hiring anyone is automatically right. Whether an agency is worth the fee comes down to two things: capacity and job value, not how persuasive the pitch was.

Job value decides whether the maths even works.

• At a $200 job with tight margins, a management fee on top of $15 to $30 clicks has to work hard to earn its keep.
• At a $2,000 to $10,000 job, the value an HVAC install, roof replacement or full repipe can carry, the maths changes fast. One extra booked job a month can cover the fee several times over.

Capacity decides whether more leads even help.

More leads on top of a backlog do not help. They just drag down your response time, which then drags down your close rate on the leads you already had. Fix pricing or bring on staff before you buy more enquiries.

If you have been burned by an agency before, that caution makes sense, but it is a reason to ask these five questions upfront, not a reason to avoid trying again. Electrical and gas jobs still have to be carried out by a licensed tradesperson, whatever an ad account report says about the enquiry.

If the sticking point is whether your website and tracking are even set up to make an agency's job possible, that is worth checking first. I offer a short, free review of a site's speed, tracking and lead capture setup, separate to the ad account itself. More on how I build trade business websites.

The Short Version

The questions to ask before you hire a Google Ads agency are not complicated: who owns the account, how they get paid, what they track beyond clicks, whether you are locked in, and what a real report shows. An agency that answers all five without flinching is worth a conversation. One that dodges two or more is telling you something.

None of these questions require you to know Google Ads yourself, just to ask before you sign, not after six months of wondering where the money went. If your budget is small or the numbers do not stack up yet, local SEO is worth a look before ads at all.

If you want a second opinion before you commit to anyone, the free website and tracking review mentioned above is a good place to start. Get in touch here.

FAQs

The questions I get asked most often about hiring a Google Ads agency for a trade business.

Who should own my Google Ads account, me or the agency?

You should. Set the account up under your own business's Google Ads manager account and add the agency as a user with access, not the owner. That way you keep every bit of conversion history and Quality Score data if you ever change providers, and access can be removed in minutes rather than negotiated.

Is a flat fee or a percentage of ad spend better for a Google Ads agency?

A flat fee is generally cleaner because it removes the incentive to push your spend higher regardless of results. A percentage fee, commonly 10 to 20 per cent as an indicative market range, is not automatically dishonest, but it does mean the agency earns more when you spend more, whether or not that spend produces booked jobs.

What should I ask about conversion tracking before hiring an agency?

Ask whether they separate a form fill from a booked job, and whether completed job values ever get pushed back into the ad account through an offline conversion import. Without that, a report showing plenty of conversions could just mean people filled in a form and never became paying customers.

Should I sign a long contract with a Google Ads agency?

You do not need to. An account genuinely needs weeks of data to bid well, but that is a reason to give it time, not a reason to sign a twelve month lock-in. Month to month keeps an agency accountable to results, since leaving is always an option if the work stops being good.

How do I know if my current Google Ads agency is any good?

Check your own account. Look at the search terms report, the negative keyword list, and whether conversions are tracking booked jobs or just form fills. If the account looks untouched, the negative list is thin, and nobody can show you a cost per booked job, that tells you plenty without needing to ask anyone anything.