12 Questions to Ask a PPC Agency Before You Hire

These are the questions to ask a PPC agency before you hire one. Hiring a PPC agency feels like buying a car from someone who will not let you look under the hood. You can see the finished pitch, but you cannot see how the work gets done, and by the time you can, you have paid for a few months.

These twelve questions are how you look under the hood on the first call.

Questions about ownership and access

1. Who owns the ad accounts, and who is the admin?

You should own the Google Ads, Meta and analytics accounts, with the agency added as a user. Anything else puts your data and your account history at their mercy.

2. Can I see everything you do inside the account?

You want full read access at all times. An agency that hides the account is hiding something, or is protecting a sloppy setup.

Questions about how they work

3. What will you look at before you recommend a budget or a plan?

A real answer names your offer, your sales process, your current ad data and your website. A weak answer jumps straight to “we’d start at X per month.”

4. How do you set up conversion tracking?

This is the question most buyers skip, and it decides everything. If tracking is wrong, the platforms optimise toward the wrong people. Ask whether they track form fills, calls and booked meetings, and whether they can send closed deals back to Google or Meta. We cover that in our guide to sending CRM sales back to Google Ads.

5. How do you decide what to test first?

You want a sequence: fix tracking, fix the offer and landing page, then test audiences and ads. An agency that starts with “new creative every week” before the basics are in place is guessing.

Questions about results and reporting

6. Which numbers will you report, and how often?

Ask for cost per lead, but also lead quality, booked calls and, where possible, cost per closed deal. The difference between those numbers is covered in cost per lead vs cost per closed deal.

7. What do you do when leads come in but are not good?

This happens to nearly every account. A good agency talks about tightening targeting, adding qualifying questions, adjusting the offer and feeding sales outcomes back to the platform. A bad one says “that’s a sales problem.”

8. What does a bad month look like, and what will you do about it?

Every account has them. You want to hear a process: check tracking, check budget pacing, review search terms or audiences, then decide what to change. You do not want to hear that it never happens.

Questions about money and terms

9. How do you charge, and what is included?

Flat fee, percentage of spend and hybrid models all exist. The question is not which is right, it is whether the pricing rewards the right behaviour. A percentage of spend, for example, pays the agency more when you spend more, whether or not it works.

10. What is the minimum term and how do I leave?

Short initial terms and clear notice periods are healthy. Ask what you keep if you leave: accounts, creative, audience data, landing pages.

11. How much of my budget goes to testing in the first month?

Some budget has to go to learning. A straight agency will say so, explain how much, and tell you what decision the learning will feed.

The question that tells you the most

12. Who will run my account, and how often will we talk?

The pitch is not the work. Ask to meet the person who will be in the account every week, and ask how you will communicate. Fast, plain answers here predict a good working relationship better than any case study.

Which answers should you check against the platforms?

An agency’s claims are easy to test. Ask how they handle bidding and read Google’s own description in About Smart Bidding. A good agency can explain which conversion goal the system is learning from and why. If the answer is “clicks”, you have found a gap.

Ask about measurement. About offline conversion imports describes how to import sales that happen offline. A strong PPC agency will want your sales data, because it lets the campaign learn from real customers. One that never asks about your sales process is optimising in the dark.

Ask how they use diagnostics. About Quality Score explains Google’s Quality Score as a diagnostic, and an agency should be able to say what they changed because of it.

Finally, ask about advertising claims. The Federal Trade Commission’s Advertising and Marketing says that claims must be truthful and not misleading, and an agency writing your ads should know that. Compare the answers you get with our guide to marketing agency red flags, and if you want a view on your current agency, see our paid media service or book a free diagnostic.

How do you use these questions to ask a PPC agency?

You do not need to ask all twelve in one call. Pick the ones that matter most for your situation, and write down the answers. After two or three calls you will start to notice which agencies answer clearly and which ones change the subject.

If you want to see how we answer these, look at our process, or read about paid media at Omega. Before you sign with anyone, it also helps to read nine red flags to watch for.

What a good answer sounds like

A good agency gives specific answers and shows examples. It explains trade-offs, admits what it does not know and asks you questions back about your sales process. A weak agency gives general answers, changes the subject to its own results or avoids committing to anything in writing. Take notes during the call, compare the answers side by side and ask the same questions of every agency on your list so that the comparison is fair.