How to evaluate a PPC agency before you hire them

Agency presentations are designed to impress. The glossy case studies, the confident delivery, the award credentials - all of these tell you the agency is good at selling themselves. None of them reliably tell you whether they will manage your campaigns well. Here is what to look for and ask instead.

Ask them to audit your existing account

If you have an active Google Ads account, ask any prospective agency to do a basic audit. A competent agency should be able to identify genuine issues within an hour or two of account access. What they find - and how they explain it - tells you about their technical depth and their communication style. If the audit consists of vague observations and no specific recommendations, that is a red flag. If they identify specific structural, tracking, or optimisation issues with clear reasoning, that is a signal of genuine expertise.

Ask who will actually work on your account

Many agencies sell with their senior team and service with their juniors. Ask specifically which person will manage your account day-to-day, what their experience level is, and how many other accounts they manage simultaneously. A single manager running 30 accounts is not going to give any single account meaningful attention. Understand the team structure and the individual who will actually be doing the work.

Ask how they measure success

Agencies that measure success through vanity metrics - impressions, CTR, Quality Score - without connecting those to business outcomes are optimising for the wrong things. You want an agency that talks about cost per acquisition, revenue, return on ad spend, and business growth. The metrics they volunteer when asked this question reveal what they actually care about.

Ask about their approach to transparency

You should own your Google Ads account and have access to it at all times - not via the agency's MCC but direct access to your own account. Ask whether you will have this. You should receive detailed reporting that shows actual spend and performance, not a dashboard that obscures the underlying data. Ask what the reporting format looks like. If an agency is hesitant about either of these things, ask yourself why.

Check their client tenure

How long do their clients typically stay? A high churn agency may win clients well but not retain them. Ask for references you can speak to - not the reference list they provide but references you identify independently if possible. Ask those references specifically about problems they encountered and how the agency handled them. Problems are inevitable. How an agency responds to them is what matters.