Choosing a PPC agency comes down to twelve questions, and most of them are about who does the work, how often, and how you will know. Ask them in the first call, write the answers down, and then check the answers against the agency's own case studies and, once you are a client, against the change history in your account. An agency that answers all twelve clearly, without hedging, is rare. That is the point of asking.
Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder of Live PPC Ads. We have audited hundreds of accounts that arrived from other agencies, so most of these questions come from having seen what happens when they were not asked.
Who will actually work on my account, and how many accounts do they handle?
This is the first question because it decides everything after it. Agencies sell with their most senior people and deliver with their most junior. Ask for the name of the person who will log into your account, their experience, and how many other accounts they manage. A strategist handling thirty accounts can give each one a couple of hours a month. That is not management; it is maintenance. We explain the arithmetic in Why Your PPC Agency Only Gives You 2 Hours a Month.
A good answer names a person and a number. A bad answer is "our team" or "it depends on the tier."
How often is the account actually optimized?
Not reported on. Optimized. Search terms reviewed, negatives added, bids and targets adjusted, ads tested, budgets paced. Ask for the cadence as a specific frequency: daily, weekly, monthly. Then ask what happens between those touches if something breaks, because a disapproved ad or a broken conversion tag on day two of a monthly cadence costs you four weeks.
Our answer is every business day, through a system we built for it, Ad Campaign Concierge™. Whatever the agency's answer is, get it in writing, because it will be the easiest promise to verify later.
Can I see the change history from an account you manage?
Google Ads logs every change with a timestamp and a user. An agency that manages accounts daily has change histories that prove it. Ask to see one, anonymized if necessary. The volume, the variety, and the timing of the changes tell you more than any deck.
If the agency has never been asked this, the reaction will tell you something too.
Will I own my accounts, data, and everything you build?
The only acceptable answer is yes. Your Google Ads account, Meta Business Manager, Merchant Center, Tag Manager container, and landing pages should be in your name, with the agency working inside them through manager or user access. When the relationship ends, nothing should change on your side except that you remove their access.
Agencies that run your campaigns inside their own accounts are building an asset you cannot take with you. That is leverage, and it is aimed at you. If you are already in that situation, our guide on removing an old agency from your Google Ads account explains how to get out cleanly.
How do you set up and verify conversion tracking?
The answer should be specific and should come before any talk of campaigns. Which events, tracked how, verified how. Whether calls are tracked and with what duration threshold. Whether purchases carry revenue. Whether offline conversion import is part of the plan for a business where the sale closes after the click. Whether Meta's Conversions API is included.
Most accounts we inherit have broken or incomplete tracking, and it is the reason most of them underperformed. An agency that treats tracking as a checkbox or someone else's problem will optimize your account toward the wrong numbers with great confidence. Our conversion tracking service page describes what a complete setup looks like.
What is your keyword and match type strategy?
You are not testing their vocabulary; you are testing whether they have a point of view. A practitioner has opinions about exact versus broad match, about when Performance Max is appropriate and when it is not, about negative keyword management, and about how to handle brand traffic. A salesperson has slides.
Listen for whether the answer depends on your business. A default of exact match with daily search term review, phrase match for discovery, and broad match only with brand exclusions and mature negatives is a defensible position. "We use broad match with Smart Bidding, Google recommends it" is a position too, but ask how they control what it matches.
How do you handle Performance Max?
This deserves its own question because PMax is where the most budget is wasted in the accounts we audit. Ask whether they use brand exclusions, search themes, asset group structure by product line or service, URL expansion controls, and how they read the channel and search term data. Ask whether PMax replaces standard Shopping and Search or runs alongside them.
An agency that describes PMax as "set it and let Google optimize" is telling you it will not be looking. We wrote about why that fails in Performance Max Needs Human Oversight, and our Performance Max service page lists the controls we consider mandatory.
What does your pricing model make you optimize for?
Every pricing model creates an incentive. Percentage of spend rewards spending. Flat fees reward doing less. Performance fees reward whatever definition of performance is in the contract. Ask the agency to describe its own incentive honestly and how it counteracts it. The full breakdown of models and red flags is in How Much Does PPC Management Cost?.
Also ask what happens to the fee if the agency recommends spending less. The best advice we give some clients is to cut budget until a problem is fixed. An agency whose fee drops when it gives that advice needs a reason to give it anyway.
What is the contract term, and what happens when I leave?
Month-to-month after an initial build period is the honest structure. An initial commitment of a few months is fair because rebuilds take time to show results. Twelve months with early termination penalties protects the agency from its own performance.
When you leave, you should keep the accounts, the data, the negative keyword lists, the audiences, the tracking, and the landing pages. Ask that question directly and get the answer in the contract.
Can you show results in my industry, with real numbers?
Case studies with named clients, actual spend, and the metrics as the platform reported them are worth reading. Case studies with percentages and no base ("increased conversions by 300 percent") are not. Ask for the industry closest to yours and for results that are recent. Then ask what did not work in that account, because every real account has something that did not work, and an agency that cannot name one is editing.
Our case studies list spend, revenue, leads, and ROAS as the accounts report them, sorted by industry on the industry hubs, with the aggregate figures for each industry computed from the published studies.
What will reporting look like, and can I verify it?
A report is a claim. Ask what it will contain, how often it arrives, and whether every number in it can be checked in the platform. Ask whether the report shows cost per qualified lead or cost per customer where that data exists, not just cost per form fill. Ask whether declines are reported or only gains.
The best reporting is the one you would actually read. Weekly dashboards nobody opens are theater. A short monthly summary with the numbers, what changed, what is next, and a standing offer to look at the account together beats a forty-page PDF.
What is your process for the first 30 days?
The answer reveals whether the agency has a method or improvises. A good first month includes an audit of the existing account, a tracking review and fixes, agreement on the conversion definitions and targets, a structural plan, and a build or rebuild with clear milestones. It should also include what the agency will not do yet, because launching everything at once and then discovering the tracking was wrong is how a quarter gets wasted.
Ask what you will be asked to provide and when. An agency that needs nothing from you is planning to work from templates.
What would make you turn down my account?
This is the question that separates practitioners from sales organizations. An agency that takes every client cannot give any of them enough attention, and an agency that has never turned down a client has no standard. Good answers include accounts with no conversion tracking and no willingness to fix it, budgets too small for the sales cycle, businesses with unresolved policy problems, and clients who want daily calls about hourly fluctuations.
We work by application and keep a limited roster for exactly this reason. Our comparison page sets out what that model looks like against the alternatives, and if you are deciding between agency, in-house, and freelance, PPC Agency vs In-House vs Freelancer covers the trade-offs. If you are comparing agencies by size, read Boutique PPC Agency vs Large Agency.
How should you use these questions?
Ask all twelve on the first call, in roughly this order, and take notes. Then do three things before signing. Read the case studies closest to your industry and check the numbers are real, not percentages without a base. Ask for a sample change history. And re-read the contract for account ownership, term, and what happens at exit.
If you are already with an agency and want to know whether these questions were answered by the work, 10 Signs Your PPC Agency Is Not Performing is the diagnostic version of this article.
Frequently asked questions
How many PPC agencies should I talk to before choosing? Three is usually enough if you ask the same questions of each. More than that and the answers blur. The point of the questions is to make the comparison structured, so the third call is often the one where the differences become obvious.
Should I choose a PPC agency that specializes in my industry? Relevant experience matters, especially in regulated or unusual categories like alcohol, healthcare, or firearms accessories, where policy knowledge is the difference between running and being suspended. But process matters more than vertical. An agency with a rigorous method and one relevant case study will usually beat a vertical specialist with a weak process.
Is a Google Partner or Premier Partner badge a reliable signal? It is a signal that the agency manages enough spend and passes Google's certifications. It is not a signal of quality, and it creates an incentive to follow Google's recommendations, which are optimized for Google's revenue. Treat it as neutral.
What is a reasonable amount of time to give a new PPC agency? Ninety days is a fair window for a rebuild to show a clear trend, provided tracking was fixed first and you can see the work happening in the change history. If nothing has visibly changed in the account after thirty days, ninety will not help.
Can I run a trial with a PPC agency before committing? A paid audit is the closest thing to a trial. It shows you how the agency thinks, what it finds in your account, and how it communicates, with no long-term commitment. Our Google Ads audit is structured for exactly that purpose.