The short version
Make ownership the first question
Your Google Ads account, your domain, and your Business Profile all in your name, or you are renting your own business back from them.
Ask for month to month
A 12-month lock-in protects the agency during the slow months. Good work earns the next month on its own.
Find the markup on your spend
If they run your ad budget through their account and bill you a number you cannot verify, they are taking a cut you cannot see.
Ask what the report leads with
Booked jobs and what they cost, or impressions and clicks. The first line of the report tells you what they actually optimize for.
Ask to talk to a current client
Not a logo wall. A real contractor, in a trade near yours, who will pick up the phone.
The pitch is the one part of an agency that is engineered to be perfect, so it tells you the least. The answers to a handful of plain questions, asked before money changes hands, tell you almost everything.
How we learned which questions matter. We learned them the expensive way, on our own shop. An agency ran our ads for six months with the conversion tracking broken, so most calls and forms were never counted and we were paying half-blind. We took it in-house, fixed the tracking, and rebuilt the campaigns, and qualified leads (real calls and form fills) went from about 10 a month to 58. That 10-to-58 is the only first-party number on this site. The questions below are the ones we wish we had asked first.
Ask these before you sign, not after. Once the contract is in place, your bargaining power is gone, and the honest answers are harder to come by. Each question below comes with why it matters, what a straight answer sounds like, and the dodge to listen for.
1. Do I own my Google Ads account, my domain, and my Business Profile?
Why it matters. These are the deed to your marketing. Your Google Ads account holds years of spend history that makes your ads cheaper over time. Your domain is your address on the internet. Your Google Business Profile is the listing that wins the map pack. If the agency holds any of them, leaving means starting over from zero, and they know it. That single fact quietly props up a lot of mediocre work. We dug into the whole list in why you should own your marketing accounts.
What a good answer sounds like. “You own all of them. We set up the Google Ads account under your email, the domain is registered in your name, and you are the primary owner on the Business Profile. We get manager access to do the work, and you can revoke it any day.” Clear, no hedging, and the ownership sits with you.
The dodge to watch for. “Don’t worry about the technical side, we handle all of that for you.” That is not a convenience, it is a leash. If owning your own accounts is framed as something you should not bother with, assume the reason is that holding them is what keeps you from leaving.
2. Is there a long contract, or is it month to month?
Why it matters. A long contract answers a question you should be asking yourself: what happens when the results are not there? A 12-month lock-in means the agency keeps getting paid through the months it produces nothing. Month to month means they have to earn the next invoice with the last month of work. The contract length tells you who is carrying the risk.
What a good answer sounds like. “Month to month. If we are not producing, you should be able to walk, and that keeps us honest.” An agency confident in its work does not need to trap you. The shops that bring results want you to stay because of the results, not because of a clause.
The dodge to watch for. “Marketing takes time to work, so we require twelve months to see results.” There is a grain of truth in it, which is what makes it effective. Yes, results build over months. No, that does not require locking you in. A fair version sets expectations honestly and still lets you leave if the numbers never come. The lock-in is for them, not for you.
3. Do you mark up my ad spend?
Why it matters. Your ad spend is money that goes straight to Google, Bing, and Meta to buy clicks and leads. It is yours, and it should reach those platforms at face value. Some agencies run that spend through their own account and bill you a marked-up number, so you never see the real cost. It is the most common hidden charge in this business, and it scales with your budget, so the more you spend, the bigger the cut you cannot see.
What a good answer sounds like. “No markup. You pay Google and Meta directly from your own accounts, so you see every real dollar. We charge a flat fee for the work, and it does not move with your spend.” That last part matters too: a fee tied to a percentage of ad spend rewards the agency for spending more of your money, whether or not it books jobs.
The dodge to watch for. “We get better rates because of our spend volume, so it actually saves you money.” It sounds generous and it almost never is. If you cannot see your spend hit the ad platforms at the real number, you cannot check the claim, and a discount you cannot verify is just a markup with a story attached.
4. What does your monthly report lead with, booked jobs or clicks?
Why it matters. The first line of the report is a confession. It tells you what the agency points its work at, because that is the number it wants you looking at. Marketing is working if it produces more booked jobs than it costs to run. Impressions, clicks, and “engagement” are steps on the way there, not the destination, and they are easy to make look good while the calendar stays empty. The full version of this is the whole point of how to tell if your marketing agency is actually working.
What a good answer sounds like. “Leads and booked jobs first, and what each one cost you, all in. You see it on a live dashboard any day, not just in a monthly PDF.” A report that leads with the number tied to your bank account is a report from an agency that is not hiding from it.
The dodge to watch for. A sample report that opens with a big impressions figure and a chart of clicks trending up. Reach and clicks that climb while your booked jobs sit flat are the wrong numbers going up. If you have to scroll past three pages of activity to find a lead count, the activity is the point and the leads are the afterthought.
5. Who actually does the work, and can I talk to a current client?
Why it matters. The person who sells you is rarely the person who runs your account. You want to know who is actually in your campaigns every week, and whether real clients would say it is working. A current client in a trade near yours, willing to take your call, is worth more than every case study on the site. Anyone can build a logo wall. Not everyone can hand you a phone number.
What a good answer sounds like. “Here is who manages your account, and here are two contractors we work with now who said they would talk to you. Call them and ask whatever you want.” References they offer up freely, in your line of work, are the strongest signal you can get before signing.
The dodge to watch for. “We protect our clients’ privacy, so we can’t share contacts.” Privacy is real, but a happy client who has agreed to be a reference is not a privacy problem. If no one will get on the phone for them, ask yourself why. The logo wall and the testimonial quotes are the easy part. A live reference is the part that is hard to fake.
A sixth one, if you want it: how do you measure success?
If you ask one more, ask this, because the answer reveals the whole philosophy in a sentence. You are listening for cost per booked job, measured against a real baseline of what you did before, with the slow months reported alongside the wins. A good answer ties success to your bank account. A weak one ties it to whatever number is easiest to grow this month.
Who this is and is not for
These questions are not about catching agencies in a lie, and most are not running a scam. They are a filter. If you want the cheapest monthly fee and you do not much care what it produces, you can skip all five and you will probably be fine paying for activity. If you want your money tracked to booked work, on accounts you own, with nothing hidden, these five will sort the contenders from the deck in about fifteen minutes. We answer them the same way every time, which is the whole reason we wrote them down. You can see exactly how we price the work, every figure in the open, on our pricing page.
Where to point these
Start with whoever runs your marketing right now. Ask the five, in writing, and watch which ones get a straight answer and which ones get a meeting invite instead. Then, if you want a second read, point them at us. A free game plan is our answer on paper: we read your site, your ads, and your top local competitors and send back a plain report on where your leads are leaking and what each fix is worth in booked jobs. It comes back in a few days, there is no call unless you want one, and you keep it either way. Bring us on and you walk your finished site before a dollar moves, the scope is in writing, satisfaction is guaranteed on the build, and everything is yours from day one: month to month, walk anytime and keep it all. Get my free game plan.