The renewal email lands the same week as the invoice
Results are the easiest thing for an agency to explain and the hardest for you to check. So don’t ask about results first. Ask who controls the account
Here are the 5 PPC agency questions I’d put to any agency before signing again, ours included. A good one answers all 5 in a day. A vague answer to any of them is information too
The PPC agency questions, in order
Whose name is on the account?
Start here, because it decides what leaving costs you.
Google’s help pages say a manager account can unlink from a client at any time, as long as the client account has at least one user with access or is linked to a manager with administrative ownership. The client account can unlink too, and it keeps its own campaign history. That’s the good news.
Now the part to ask about. If the account is on monthly invoicing and the manager account being unlinked is the one paying Google, the account stops serving after the unlink. Some agencies do pay Google for the ad spend and invoice the client. That can be legitimate. It does change what leaving looks like.
So ask who pays Google. Ask whether your ads would still run the day you left. Ask whether you rely on the agency’s shared remarketing lists or conversion tag, because lists that rely on a shared tag stop populating after an unlink. One consultant’s standard is simple: your own account, your own payment method on file, the agency granted management access. Get the answer in writing. Same questions for your GA4 property and, if you sell products, your Merchant.
What counts as a conversion?
Ask them to show you the whole conversion actions list.
Google splits actions into 2 kinds. Primary actions appear in the Conversions column and drive bidding. Secondary actions are for observation and show up under All conversions. One setting decides what the bidding is chasing. One tracking vendor warns that marking every Shopify event as primary inflates the Conversions column and confuses Smart Bidding.
So which actions are primary? Is add to cart sitting there next to purchases? If purchases are primary, does Google’s count land in the same neighbourhood as the orders in your own store for the same week? It won’t match to the order, because platforms and stores count differently. But if it’s wildly off, find out why before you pay for another month. That’s my rule of thumb, not Google’s.
What changed in my account?
Google Ads keeps a log. Open Change history under Campaigns to see what changed, and filter by tool or item. Conversion edits made through Google Analytics show up there too. Ask for view-only access and look yourself. If that’s a problem, that’s the answer to question one again.
Then ask about this year’s platform changes. On 5 August, Google emailed advertisers that Search campaigns using automatically created assets or the campaign-level broad match setting would be upgraded to AI Max from 1 September. The migration ran through 30 September, and advertisers who had switched those settings off beforehand weren’t touched. The notice came by email, not a blog post.
Did your agency see it? What did they change before 1 September, and what did they check after? A good agency answers in a sentence. A better one has a note in the account from that week.
What do the reports leave out?
Platform ROAS isn’t profit. It’s revenue divided by ad spend.
Here’s the maths. Break-even ROAS is one divided by your gross margin. At a 40% margin that’s 2.5. That margin is my example, not a benchmark, so use yours. When we started on a Shopify store, the existing campaigns were returning 1.87. At that example margin, each £1 of ad spend brings £1.87 in revenue and about 75p of gross profit. You lose roughly 25p of every pound, and the report still shows a number that sounds fine.
Ask for 3 things. Spend, revenue and orders from your own store for the same dates. The margin the agency assumes. And whether the report runs on the platform’s numbers or yours.
What does the fee buy, and how do I leave?
Published UK prices vary by who’s selling. One agency puts the average UK management fee at £1,000 to £1,600 a month. Another says £750 to £3,000. A third starts at £400 and goes past £10,000. They’re all agency blogs, so read them as a spread, not a price list.
The model matters more than the number. Percentage-of-spend deals commonly run 10 to 20 percent, alongside flat retainers. One UK agency flags that percentage deals can reward higher spend rather than efficiency. Neither model is wrong. Ask how they protect efficiency as the budget grows.
Ask for the management fee and the media spend on separate lines, because an all-in figure hides how much goes to clicks. Ask who does the work, by name. Ask what’s included and what costs extra. Then read the exit terms: notice period, and what you take with you. Account access, conversion history, creative files, reporting templates.
20 minutes before you reply
You don’t need much beyond view-only access. Check who pays Google. Open the conversion actions list. Open Change history. Compare a week of Google’s conversions with a week of your orders.
A good agency is glad when you ask. We’d rather you asked us than wondered. Defensiveness is information too.
The agency isn’t the enemy here. An account you can’t see into is. Fix that before you sign anything.
----
If this sounds like your situation, let’s look at it together — everther.com
