PPC and Google Ads agencies: the weekly work, the fees and the warning signs

Around that loop sits slower work. Once a month the agency should look at the account's structure, how search campaigns and Performance Max share the budget, and how often you appear against competitors. For an online shop that also means the product feed in Google Merchant Center, because Shopping ads are only as good as the titles, prices and images in it. For a lead generation business it means sending the outcome of each lead from the CRM back to Google Ads, so bidding learns which searches bring buyers and which bring tyre-kickers.

ToastPal shows what that loop looks like when it is kept up. Jakub managed its Google Ads across four markets as a freelance consultant, before he founded the company. Every Monday the previous week was reviewed across markets, ad groups and ad variants, weak ads were paused, winners got more budget and new tests went live. Over 12 months $528K of revenue was tracked from Google Ads, and by October 2024 ToastPal held the highest search impression share among the competitors tracked. The ToastPal case study has the detail.^[1]

Most buyers start with a search for a PPC or Google Ads agency, and the volumes below show how common the question is on both sides of the Atlantic. The shortlists that come back are long, so the checks that follow do the filtering.

Google's own rules for third parties back up two of those checks. An agency that charges a management fee must tell new customers in writing before they buy and show the fee on every invoice. It must report costs, clicks and impressions at account level, with Google's charges shown apart from its own fees, and it must give you your Google Ads customer ID whenever you ask.^[3]

Ownership matters because in Google Ads only a user with Admin access can give other people access or take it away. If the agency holds the only Admin login, you cannot take the account, and the years of conversion history that make its bidding work, with you when you leave.^[4]

A Google Partner badge is a floor, and a weak signal of results. To earn it, a company needs an optimisation score of at least 70%, $10,000 of spend across its managed accounts over 90 days, and half its account strategists certified in Google Ads; Premier Partners must also rank in the top 3% of participating companies in their country. Optimisation score is Google's estimate of how well an account is set up, worked out from its settings and the recommendations applied, so the badge shows spend and training rather than whether the agency made its clients money.^[5][6]

Four questions on the first call will tell you most of what you need:

Whatever the model, the test is arithmetic you can do yourself. Add the fee to the ad spend, and set the total against the gross profit the ads brought in, measured in your own store or CRM rather than in Google Ads. If the fee is a share of spend, it rises every time the budget does, even when the extra spend returns less than the first pound or dollar did.

What the fee should buy is the weekly loop described above, a named person who knows your account, tests with recorded results, and a report you can read in a few minutes and act on. An agency that cannot show you last month's search term cuts and test results is charging for the hours in the invoice rather than the work in the account.

AI for Marketing runs Google Ads as part of one managed service, next to the landing pages and follow-up the ads depend on, judged on what they return. It is one monthly fee for the whole service, agreed on a call, never a share of your ad spend. For how AI changes the work itself, see AI advertising.