On this page
Who owns the accounts
Ask first, before anything else: if we part company, what do I keep?
The Google Ads account, the Meta business account, the analytics property, the Google Business Profile, the domain and the hosting should all be in your company’s name, with the agency added as a user. Not created under an agency umbrella account. Not registered to their email address. Yours, with their access revocable by you in about a minute.
This is not a technicality. An advertising account’s conversion history is the most valuable thing it accumulates, because it is what makes bidding accurate. Starting again elsewhere means starting without it. An agency that holds the account is holding something you need, and it is the single most common reason firms stay somewhere they stopped being happy eight months ago.
- Reassuring: “We build everything in your name and add ourselves as users. If you leave, you remove us and it all keeps running.”
- Worrying: “We run it through our MCC for efficiency” with no offer of an account in your name, or a domain registered to them, or vagueness about who the analytics property belongs to.
- Test it: ask to be sent an admin invitation to the account in week one. The answer to that request tells you more than any part of the pitch.
How ad spend is handled
There are two clean models and one that is not.
Clean: you pay Google and Meta directly on your own card, and the agency charges a separate management fee. You can see every penny of spend at source. Also clean, if disclosed: a percentage-of-spend fee, stated openly, which you know creates an incentive to recommend larger budgets and can watch for accordingly.
Not clean: the agency buys the media, marks it up, and bills you a combined figure. You cannot see the true cost per click, cannot verify what was actually spent, and cannot compare your account against any benchmark. If a single invoice covers both spend and fee with no breakdown, ask for the split in writing before signing anything.
- Ask: “Does my card pay Google directly?” and “Is any part of your income a percentage of what I spend?”
- Worrying: reluctance to separate spend from fee, or an inability to explain how they are paid in one sentence.
- Also worth knowing: UK paid search is a large, mature market. The IAB UK Digital Adspend study for 2025 put UK digital advertising at £40.5bn with paid search at £17.9bn, about 44% of it. Nobody has a secret discount on that auction. Anyone implying they get cheaper clicks through a relationship is describing something that does not exist.
Contract length and notice
Long tie-ins mostly protect the agency from the consequences of its own performance. A rolling arrangement with thirty days notice keeps the pressure where it belongs.
There is one fair exception. Where an agency is building something substantial up front, a site, a full account build, a migration, it is reasonable to ask for a minimum term or a build fee that covers it. What is not reasonable is a twelve-month lock on ongoing management with no build attached, or an auto-renewal you have to remember to cancel ninety days ahead.
- Ask: notice period, auto-renewal terms, whether an early exit triggers a charge, and what happens to work in progress.
- Worrying: a twelve-month minimum justified with “it takes that long to see results”. Paid search produces enquiries in week one and readable data in a month. That justification fits SEO and is being borrowed.
- Reassuring: an agency comfortable being judged monthly, because it expects to still be there.
What a report actually contains
The reporting question separates agencies faster than any other, because bad reporting is not an oversight. It is a design choice.
A report should tell you how many enquiries arrived, what each cost, which campaigns and searches produced them, what changed since last month and what will change next month. Impressions, reach, click-through rate and the phrase “brand awareness” are inputs, not outcomes. A twenty-page automated dashboard with no commentary is a way of appearing accountable while saying nothing.
| Question | An answer that reassures | An answer that should worry you |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns the ad accounts? | You do, in your company name, from day one, with admin access. | “We manage everything through our own account.” |
| How is spend billed? | Direct to the platform on your card, fee invoiced separately. | One combined invoice, no breakdown. |
| What is the notice period? | Rolling, thirty days, no auto-renew trap. | Twelve months, justified by results timelines that do not apply to the channel. |
| What does the report show? | Enquiries, cost per enquiry, which searches produced them, what changes next. | Impressions, reach, engagement, and a chart of clicks. |
| Who does the daily work? | A named person you have met and can contact. | “Our team”, with no names. |
| Can I see a real account? | An uncropped screen share of a live account, campaign names visible. | Polished slides with percentages and no absolute numbers. |
| Can you guarantee leads? | “No, and here is what we will forecast instead.” | “Yes, thirty a month.” |
What our own reports contain, and how a lead is counted so the number means something, is set out on the methodology page.
Who does the work
You will be sold to by the best communicator in the business. Establish whether that person is also the one who will open your account on a Tuesday morning.
There is nothing wrong with delegation, and nothing wrong with white-labelled specialists provided you are told. What causes problems is discovering in month four that your account is being handled by someone you have never spoken to, managing forty other accounts, with no knowledge of your trade.
- Ask: who logs into my account, how many accounts do they handle, is any of this subcontracted, and who do I speak to when something is wrong.
- Ask: how often does a human read my search terms report. For a local trade account the honest answer is weekly. Anything less and the account drifts towards whatever the platform finds easiest to spend.
- Worrying: unwillingness to name the person, or an answer that describes a process rather than a human being.
What proof they can show
Proof means live accounts, not case studies. Ask them to share a screen and show you a real account with the numbers uncropped and the campaign names visible, so you can see the context rather than the highlight.
Be equally alert to the opposite failure: an agency claiming deep experience in every one of fifty industries. Nobody has that. What a good one will do is separate what it has measured from what it has researched, and say which is which. On this site, our own measured advertising results come from four sectors, scaffolding, roofing, glazing and surfacing, and they are on the results page. Everything else across the industry pages is research and a transferable method, which is useful but is not a track record, and we try never to blur the two.
- Ask: which sectors have you actually run accounts in, as opposed to written pages about.
- Ask: for a client in a similar trade you can telephone. Not a written quotation. A phone number.
- Worrying: percentage improvements with no absolute figures. A 400% increase from one enquiry to five is technically true and tells you nothing about whether they can help you.
- Worrying: any guarantee of lead volume. Search demand in your trade and your area is a fixed quantity nobody controls. A guarantee is either padded enough to be safe or counting something that is not a real enquiry.
What a good agency asks you
Invert the interview. The questions they ask you are more diagnostic than the answers they give, and this is the part most buyers never think about.
An agency that will do good work asks about your average job value, your gross margin, how many quotes you turn into jobs, the radius where a job is still profitable once travel is priced, what happens to an enquiry between the phone ringing and someone quoting, and which jobs you actually want more of. Those questions decide whether advertising can work at all and what it is allowed to cost.
An agency that asks none of that, and moves straight to packages, is selling a product rather than solving your problem. It may still be a fine product. But nobody can tell you whether a channel will pay without knowing what a job earns you, and any proposal written before those numbers were asked for is a template.
When to walk away, including from us
Some of these are about them and some are about you.
- They guarantee results. Covered above. Walk.
- They will not give you account ownership. Everything else is negotiable; this is not.
- They cannot explain how they are paid in one sentence. Complexity in a fee structure is rarely accidental.
- They pressure you to decide today. A discount that expires on Friday is a sales technique, not an offer.
- They never say no to anything. An agency that thinks every channel suits every business is either inexperienced or indifferent.
And the cases where you should not hire us specifically. If your average job is worth very little and your close rate is poor, gross profit per enquiry will not cover a contested click plus management, and we will say so on the first call. If your enquiries are already going unanswered, fix follow-up before buying more of them. If you are turning work away, better pricing or another crew will earn more than we can. If you want to hand it over entirely and never look at a report, the arrangement will disappoint us both, because the accounts that work have an owner who tells us which enquiries were rubbish. And if you are in a sector where our own history is thin, ask what specifically we would bring that a generalist would not. Sometimes the answer is a lot. Sometimes it is that someone who lives in your industry would serve you better, and you should hear that too.
If you want to put these questions to us, the shortest route is the contact page. Ask the ownership one first. That is the one that matters most and it is the one that costs an agency the most to answer honestly.
Want this decided on your numbers rather than in the abstract?Average job value, close rate and the area you cover. That is enough to say which of these is right for you, including when the answer is neither.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppCommon questions
What is the single most important question to ask an agency?
Who owns the accounts. If the Google Ads account, analytics property and domain are in your company’s name with the agency added as a user, every other problem is fixable by leaving. If they are not, you are negotiating from a weak position for as long as the relationship lasts.
Should I sign a twelve-month contract?
Not for ongoing management alone. A minimum term is defensible when the agency is building something substantial up front, such as a site or a full account build, and that should be priced as a build. A twelve-month lock on management is usually protection against being judged on performance.
Is it a problem if an agency marks up my ad spend?
It is a problem if it is not disclosed. A stated percentage-of-spend fee is a legitimate model as long as you know it exists and watch the incentive it creates. A combined invoice with no breakdown means you cannot see your true cost per click, which makes the account impossible to judge.
How can I tell if an agency really knows my trade?
Ask which sectors they have run live accounts in, as distinct from written pages about, and ask for a screen share of a real one. Then ask what the three most common wasted searches are in your trade. Anyone who has actually run an account in your field answers that instantly and specifically.
What should a monthly report tell me?
How many enquiries arrived, what each one cost, which campaigns and searches produced them, what changed since last month and what changes next. If the headline figures are impressions, reach or engagement, the report is describing activity rather than outcomes.