Most businesses choose a PPC agency the way they choose a contractor: a few referrals, a couple of proposals, a gut call on who seemed sharpest in the pitch. That process selects for salesmanship. It does not select for the things that determine whether your ad spend turns into customers: measurement discipline, account structure, and whether the agency's incentives line up with yours.
This guide is the process we would use to choose a PPC agency if we were on the buying side. It covers the questions that make a weak agency visible in the first conversation, what the first 30 days should look like, why account ownership is not negotiable, and how the fee model shapes the work you get.
Why most PPC agency evaluations go wrong.
Pitches are optimized for the pitch. Every agency will show a return on ad spend chart going up and to the right, talk about data-driven optimization, and promise a dedicated account manager. None of that is verifiable and none of it predicts performance. What predicts performance is how the agency behaves once it has access to your account, and you can learn a great deal about that by asking questions whose answers require method rather than adjectives.
The second failure is evaluating on price before evaluating on scope. Two proposals with the same monthly fee can describe very different amounts of work, and the cheaper-looking one is often the one that skips measurement entirely and reports platform numbers as if they were business results.
Questions that expose a bad PPC agency.
Ask these in the first or second meeting. We have noted what a strong answer sounds like, because the questions are only useful if you know what you are listening for.
- What will you change in the first two weeks, before you touch a single bid? Strong answer: conversion tracking, a GA4 and Google Tag Manager audit, agreed conversion definitions, and a baseline report. Weak answer: keyword research and new ad copy.
- How do you decide which conversion the campaigns optimize toward? Strong answer: a conversation about lead quality, sales cycle, and which action actually predicts revenue, with offline conversion import on the table. Weak answer: form submissions and calls.
- Show me an account you restructured and explain why the old structure was wrong. Strong answer: a concrete story about match types, campaign consolidation, or budget fragmentation. Weak answer: a case study slide with a percentage on it.
- What is your position on Performance Max and broad match for an account like ours? Strong answer: conditions under which each helps or hurts, and how they would test it. Weak answer: blanket enthusiasm or blanket refusal.
- Who on your team will log into our account, and how often? Strong answer: names, roles, and a cadence. Weak answer: our team.
- How will we know if it is not working, and what happens then? Strong answer: a defined review point with criteria and a willingness to pause or reduce spend. Weak answer: reassurance.
- What does your reporting look like in a bad month? Ask to see one. An agency that has never had a bad month is either new or editing.
What the first 30 days should look like.
The most reliable signal of a good PPC agency is that it spends the first month on measurement before it spends your money on new campaigns. Here is the sequence we consider standard.
Account ownership is not negotiable.
Every ad account, every analytics property, every tag container, and every pixel must be created under your business's login and your billing, with the agency added as a manager. This is not a courtesy. It determines who keeps the conversion history, the audience lists, the quality signals, and the learning the platform's algorithms have accumulated if you ever change agencies.
For Google Ads specifically, the agency should link your account to its manager account (MCC) rather than creating your account inside its MCC. For Meta, your business should own the ad account and pixel in your own Business Manager, with the agency granted partner access. The same logic applies to Microsoft Ads and to your Shopify or Amazon advertising consoles.
Fee models and what they reward.
Fee structure shapes behavior more than any contract clause. Understand what each model rewards before you accept one.
| Fee model | How it works | What it rewards | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Percentage of spend | Fee scales with your media budget | Growing the budget, which may or may not be right for you | Recommendations to increase spend without a matching case for returns |
| Flat monthly retainer | Fixed fee regardless of spend | Predictability; effort depends on the agency's discipline | Scope drifting in either direction until the fee no longer matches the work |
| Performance based | Fee tied to leads, sales, or return targets | Hitting the number, sometimes by any means available | Attribution disputes, loose conversion definitions, and lead quality drift |
| Hybrid retainer plus bonus | Base fee plus a bonus on agreed outcomes | Sustained effort with shared upside | Complexity; the outcome must be measured cleanly or the bonus becomes an argument |
| Hourly or project | Billed for time or defined deliverables | Clear scope for audits and rebuilds | Poor fit for ongoing management, where the work is continuous |
We do not think any of these is wrong on its face. In our experience, a flat or hybrid fee with a clearly defined scope and a measurement layer both sides trust produces the fewest surprises. A percentage of spend can work when the agency also carries responsibility for the return on that spend, and rarely works when it does not.
“The fee model tells you what the agency will want to be true at the end of the month. Choose the one where what they want and what you want are the same thing.”
Red flags.
- Reporting that leads with clicks, impressions, or click-through rate instead of the conversion you agreed on.
- Reluctance to give you administrative access to your own accounts, or a proprietary dashboard that replaces platform access rather than adding to it.
- A pitch that promises results before anyone has looked at your tracking.
- Long contracts with early termination penalties. Ninety days with notice is a reasonable commitment; a year with no exit is a warning.
- No mention of negative keywords, search term reviews, or placement exclusions in the first conversation.
- Every client, regardless of industry, gets the same campaign template.
- The person who pitched you disappears after signature and the account is run by someone you have never met.
- Resistance to offline conversion tracking, usually phrased as a CRM problem rather than a campaign problem.
What good reporting looks like after the first quarter.
By the end of the first quarter, the report should be short, and it should read the same way every month. One page: spend, the primary conversion count and cost, a quality indicator from your CRM or sales team, and a short list of what changed and why. Platform metrics belong in an appendix. If the agency's report cannot be understood by someone who has never opened Google Ads, it is written for the agency, not for you.
Reporting should also close the loop. If the agency asked for a landing page change, a budget increase, or a CRM field, the report should say whether it happened and what it did. Requests that vanish are a sign that nobody is tracking outcomes. For lead-driven businesses, the quality indicator is the whole point, and it depends on what happens after the click, which is why we treat lead systems as part of the paid media scope rather than a separate project.
How to run the selection.
Keep the process short and structured. Three agencies, the same list of questions, the same request for a written 30-day plan and a sample bad-month report. Check that account ownership terms are in the contract, not just in conversation. Then choose the agency whose answers were most specific, even if its deck was the least polished. Specificity in the pitch is the best available predictor of specificity in the work.
If you would like to run these questions past us, we are happy to answer them the same way we would want to be asked. Start here.
Should a PPC agency specialize in our industry?
Industry experience helps with search term intuition and offer design, but method matters more. An agency with strong measurement discipline learns a new vertical faster than an industry specialist fixes weak tracking. Ask for both and weight method higher.
How much should we expect to spend on media before an agency makes sense?
There is no universal threshold. The practical test is whether the agency's fee is small relative to the improvement it can make in how the media budget performs. Below a certain spend, a well-built account run by a capable generalist may be the better answer, and a good agency will say so.
What if we already have an agency and are not sure it is working?
Run the same questions on your current agency and ask for the bad-month report. If you cannot get administrative access to your own accounts or a plain explanation of what changed last month, those are the answers you were looking for.
Can we hire a PPC agency for Google Ads only and keep Meta in-house?
Yes, and it is common. Make sure conversion definitions and the offline conversion feed are shared across both, or the two channels will be graded on different scoreboards and the arguments about attribution will start within a quarter.