Starting out with a Google Ads agency — how should this relationship work?

The biggest mistake is leaving the agency to their own devices and just glancing at the total invoice at month's end. Set up a quick 15-minute weekly status call. Pull up the search terms report together. If you don't regularly audit where money is being burned, your budget will get eaten up by irrelevant retail searches and vanish in minutes.

Make sure conversion tracking is bulletproof right from the start. If quote form submissions, live chat, and phone click-to-calls on your website aren't properly tagged in the dashboard, the agency will be flying blind. Clarify in the agreement whether the agency handles the tracking setup directly or if they expect your web developer to implement it.

When we started with our first agency on a 40,000 TL monthly budget, we completely left the dashboard to them. By month two, we realized 11,000 TL went to retail shoppers looking to buy single boxes. Once we tightened the negative keyword filter and shifted strictly to wholesale terms, the number of corporate leads doubled on the exact same budget.

note: I wrote this based on my own experience, it might not apply to everyone.

definitely don't hand your credit card to the agency.. then let google charge the ad spend directly to your company card and just pay the agency their agreed management fee against an invoice. keeping billing separate makes life so much easiier for your accountant too.

Agencies love showing off flashy charts with impression share quality scores and click records. None of that puts money in the bank. You need to sell bulk packaging. If the report doesn't show how many actual factories asked for a quote it's useless; evaluate the agency on qualified leads not impressions.

What pricing model did you agree on? Are they charging a flat monthly retainer or taking a percentage cut of the 45,000 TL spend? With a percentage model, they might push to inflate your ad spend regardless of conversion performance—how did you address that in the contract?

note: I wrote this based on my own experience, it might not apply to everyone.

Be sure to have explicit data ownership and confidentiality clauses included in your contract. It should state unequivocally that all campaign data, collected audience lists, and conversion history belong exclusively to your company, that your account access cannot be revoked if the relationship ends, and that no data will be shared with third parties.

Give the agency a two-week ramp-up period, but ask to see their negative keyword list at the end of the first month. If you don't see hundreds of irrelevant terms filtered out for your niche it means they aren't spending enough time on your account.

We experienced almost the exact same thing last year. The system lives on after delivery; maintenance is a separate line item.

The answer varies greatly by industry; there is no one-size-fits-all rule. This is my opinion, I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.

Following.

There's a common mistake people make when doing this. The answer varies greatly by industry; there is no one-size-fits-all rule.

If you post the result here, it will help others too.

There are three things to check when doing this. If acceptance criteria aren't written, when the work is done is open to debate.

If you post the result here, it will help others too.

exactly like that and the biggest time-waster for us was not knowing who had the final say.

if I were you, I'd go this route.

I didn't know that.

Here's how it went for us. People defend habits, not processes. Resistance comes from there.

Don't hesitate to ask; those who don't ask always pay more. Just leaving this note, it might be useful.

To get into the details: If you get three different answers on a topic, the question was asked wrong.

This is my opinion, I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.

We need to make a distinction here... Every "we'll look at it later" in a meeting means unbilled work.

Proven by experience.

I agree.