Should I own my Google Ads account or should the agency?

You should own it. Set up the account under your own email and grant the agency access, rather than letting them create it on their own. That way your campaign history, data, and conversion tracking stay with you if the relationship ends, instead of walking out the door with the agency.

What is a fair contract length for a PPC agency?

Paid search needs some room to gather data and improve, so a defined term of a few months is reasonable. What matters more than the length is what happens at the end: you should keep your account, your data, and your tracking, with no penalty for leaving beyond finishing the agreed term.

How should a good agency measure success?

By revenue and cost per acquired customer, not by clicks, impressions, or raw lead count. The best answer to hear is that they tie your ad spend back to real outcomes in your CRM or booking system, so the campaigns optimize toward money rather than vanity metrics.

What is a red flag when hiring a PPC agency?

Refusing to give you ownership of your account, reporting only on clicks and impressions, being vague about who actually works on your account, guaranteeing specific results, and locking you into a long term with no exit are all warning signs. Clear answers to plain questions are the green flag.

Questions to ask before you hire a PPC agency

Every PPC agency sounds good in the sales call. They all promise growth, they all show a case study, and they all talk about being data-driven. The trouble is that the sales call is designed to make the choice feel easy, and the differences that actually matter do not come up unless you raise them. We are an agency ourselves, and we would rather you hire a good one, even if it is not us, than get burned and decide the whole channel is a scam. So here are the questions we would ask, and the answers worth listening for.

Who owns the ad account?

This is the first question, because the answer tells you a lot about everything else. You should own your Google Ads account, set up under your own email, with the agency granted access to manage it. Some agencies create the account under their own umbrella and keep it, which means when you leave, your entire campaign history, your data, and your conversion tracking leave with them. A good agency will insist you own it. If they resist, that is the whole answer to the question of whose interests come first.

How do you define success?

Listen closely to the metrics they reach for. If the pitch is about clicks, impressions, and how many leads they can generate, be careful, because all three are easy to inflate and none of them pay your bills. The answer you want is about revenue and cost per acquired customer, and ideally about tying spend back to what actually happened in your CRM or booking system. An agency that measures the sale instead of the click is optimizing for your business rather than for a good-looking report. We wrote about why that distinction matters in closed-loop attribution.

Who is actually going to work on my account?

The person who charms you in the pitch is often not the person who touches your campaigns. In a lot of shops, the account gets handed to a junior running a checklist across dozens of clients. Ask directly who will manage your account day to day, how many other accounts they carry, and whether you can talk to them before you sign. You are hiring skill and attention, and you deserve to know whose you are getting.

How, and how often, will you report?

Ask to see a real example report, not a description of one. A good report is short, honest, and centered on the numbers that matter to you: spend, leads, customers, cost per customer, and revenue where it can be tracked. A bad one is a dashboard dump padded with impressions and click-through rates that exist to look busy. Ask how often you will get it and whether you will have a real conversation about it, or just an email you are left to interpret alone.

The pattern to watch for

Good agencies answer plain questions plainly. Vague answers, deflection, and a hurry to get back to the growth promises are the warning sign, not any single wrong answer. If you cannot get a straight response about who owns the account, who runs it, and how success is measured, you have learned what you needed to before signing anything.

What is the contract, and what happens if I leave?

Paid search needs a little room to gather data and improve, so a defined term of a few months is reasonable and not a red flag on its own. What matters is the exit. When the term ends, you should keep your account, your data, and your tracking, with no penalty beyond finishing what you agreed to. Read for auto-renewal traps and long lock-ins with no off-ramp. A confident agency keeps you by getting results, not by making leaving painful.

How do you connect a lead to actual revenue?

This is the question most agencies cannot answer well, which is exactly why it is worth asking. Anyone can report that they generated leads. Far fewer can tell you which of those leads became paying customers and what they were worth, and fewer still feed that back into the platforms so the bidding chases revenue instead of volume. If an agency has a real answer here, they are in a small group. If they look uncomfortable, you have found the ceiling on how much they can actually improve your results.

What will you do that I will never see?

A lot of the real work in a good account is invisible: reading search term reports and adding negatives, cleaning up tracking, testing ads, cutting what loses money. Ask what the ongoing work looks like week to week. If the answer is thin, or amounts to "we let the algorithm handle it," the account will drift, because automation without a human reading the results is how budgets quietly leak. You can get a feel for the kind of upkeep that matters from our guide on auditing a Google Ads account.

How we answer these

For what it is worth, here is where we land on our own test. You own your account, always. We measure success by real customers and revenue, and we close the loop so the platforms optimize toward money. You work with people who know your numbers, not a rotating junior. Reports are short and honest. And the unglamorous week-to-week work is the job, not an afterthought. If that is the kind of agency you are looking for, let's talk, and if it is not us you choose, take these questions to whoever you do. A good agency will be glad you asked them.