How to Choose a PPC Agency: 7 Questions That Reveal Everything

Most people vet PPC agencies on the wrong signals. Awards are bought. Client logos prove someone once paid an invoice, not that the work succeeded. Case studies are selected from the top of the distribution, and almost never show the accounts that failed.

These seven questions are harder to fake, because they describe how the agency operates rather than what it has achieved.

1. Who owns the Google Ads account?

This is the question that matters most, and the one almost nobody asks.

Some agencies build your campaigns inside their own Google Ads account. When you leave, everything stays with them: conversion history, keyword performance data, quality scores, audience lists, and every optimization learned over your engagement. You start over from zero.

That is materially worse than it sounds. Google's automated bidding strategies rely on accumulated conversion history to predict which auctions are worth entering. A brand-new account has none, so it genuinely performs worse for weeks or months while it relearns what your old account already knew. Account ownership is leverage, and agencies that hold it understand precisely what it is worth.

“The correct answer is: you own the account, we work in it through manager-level access, and if you leave we revoke our access and everything stays with you.”

2. How is your fee calculated — in dollars?

Insist on a dollar figure. A percentage-of-spend quote is not comparable to a flat retainer until you convert it, and the conversion often surprises people.

Percentage pricing also means the agency's income rises with your budget, which quietly compromises every future recommendation to spend more. See our breakdown of how much PPC agencies charge for what each model costs in practice.

3. What is the contract length?

Twelve-month lock-ins protect the agency, not you. Some justification exists — PPC takes two to three months to stabilize, and an agency that inherits a broken account does not want to be judged on month one. A three-month initial term is reasonable for that reason.

Beyond that, ask what the cancellation notice is and whether you can exit for non-performance. An agency confident in its work does not need a year of contractual insurance.

4. Who is actually running my account, day to day?

You will be sold by a senior strategist. Ask, by name, who logs into the account each week, how many other accounts that person handles, and whether any of the work is outsourced.

The common pattern is a senior name on the pitch and a junior or offshore team on the execution. That is not automatically disqualifying — plenty of junior managers do good work under real supervision — but you should know before you sign, not after performance stalls.

There is a workable benchmark here. Writing in Practical Ecommerce, PPC practitioner Matthew Umbro suggests no account manager should carry more than five clients — and for accounts spending over $100,000 a month, no more than two. If the answer you get is fifteen, you are buying a place in a queue.

5. How do you attribute a phone call back to a keyword?

For most San Diego service businesses, the majority of leads arrive as phone calls. If an agency cannot explain how a call is traced back to the campaign and keyword that produced it, they cannot measure their own work — and every optimization they make afterward is guesswork dressed up as analysis.

A competent answer involves dynamic number insertion, call tracking software, a minimum call duration threshold to filter out wrong numbers, and ideally a connection into your CRM so a call can be followed all the way to a booked job. If the answer is that they track form fills only, understand that they are measuring the minority of your leads.

6. What does your monthly report actually show?

Ask to see a real report — redacted is fine — before you sign. Then check what it leads with.

Impressions and clicks describe activity. Leads, cost per lead, and revenue describe results. A report that never mentions your management fee is hiding the true cost of every customer you acquired.

7. What specifically happens in month one?

The revealing answer here is whether the first month involves auditing before launching.

A serious agency starts by auditing your existing account and rebuilding conversion tracking, because most inherited accounts measure the wrong things — double-counted leads, conversions firing on page load, phone calls untracked entirely. Optimizing against broken data just moves budget toward whatever is being mis-counted.

"We'll have campaigns live in 48 hours" sounds responsive and is usually a warning sign. Speed to launch is not the constraint. Measuring correctly is.

Red flags worth walking away from

• Guaranteed results — no one controls the Google Ads auction. A guaranteed cost per lead offered before seeing your data is a sales tactic, not a forecast.
• Refusing you admin access to your own advertising account, for any reason.
• Ad spend paid to the agency rather than directly to the platform, which removes your ability to verify what was actually spent.
• No named point of contact, or a contact who changes every few months.
• Reporting that omits the management fee, making your true cost per customer invisible.
• Pressure to sign before an audit — any agency that will not look at your account first is selling a template.

What to expect once you hire someone

Reasonable expectations, so you can tell trouble from normal:

1. 1Weeks 1–2: account audit, conversion tracking rebuild, keyword and competitor research. Little visible activity — this is normal and correct.
2. 2Weeks 2–3: campaigns live. Early data is noisy and cost per lead will look bad. Also normal.
3. 3Weeks 4–6: first meaningful optimization round. Search term mining, negative keywords, budget shifts.
4. 4Months 2–3: cost per acquisition should stabilize and become predictable. This is the first point at which judging performance is fair.
5. 5Month 4 onward: scale what converts. If cost per lead is still erratic and unexplained by month four, ask direct questions.

If you would like an outside read on an account you already have, our San Diego PPC agency team runs a free audit covering wasted spend, tracking accuracy, and structure — and you get the findings whether or not you hire us.