A £1,500 monthly Google Ads budget sounds modest until you realise that six months of poor management means £9,000 of ad spend gone, often with nothing to show for it except a dashboard full of impressive-looking numbers. Most UK small business owners only spot the problem when they notice that the phone has barely rung despite the agency's glowing reports. By that point, the contract period is nearly up and the damage is done.
The good news is that most of this is avoidable. The questions you ask before signing a contract reveal more about an agency than anything they put in their pitch deck. Here is what to look for, what to demand in writing, and how to protect yourself before you commit a single pound.
Why Picking the Wrong Agency Costs More Than the Monthly Fee
The monthly management fee is the number most business owners fixate on. It feels like the controllable cost. But the real financial exposure sits in the ad spend itself, and that is where a bad agency does its worst damage. For a typical UK SME running £1,500 per month on Google Ads, six months of misdirected spend adds up to £9,000 or more burned through before the problems become undeniable. Add the management fees on top and you are looking at a significant hole in your marketing budget with nothing to show for it.
The reason problems take so long to surface is that weak agencies are skilled at presenting activity as results. Clicks go up, impressions climb, the cost per click looks reasonable. What the dashboard does not show is that none of those clicks turned into phone calls, contact form submissions, or paying customers. This happens because agencies with poor tracking setups optimise for the metrics they can easily report, not the ones that matter to your business. Clicks are easy to generate. Qualified enquiries require a properly configured conversion tracking setup, and many agencies simply never build one.
There is another layer to the problem that many business owners do not know about. The UK market for Google Ads management is crowded with resellers and white-label providers. Some agencies you contact are not running your campaigns themselves at all. They are outsourcing the work to a third-party provider, often overseas, and adding a markup on top of both the ad spend and the management fee. The person you speak to on the sales call may be a convincing account manager who has never opened Google Ads in their life, and the person who actually logs into your account may have no knowledge of your industry, your location, or your customers.
This article is focused entirely on the due-diligence stage, the window between first contact with an agency and the moment you put pen to paper. It covers the specific questions to ask during the sales process, the responses that should end the conversation immediately, and the contract terms worth scrutinising before you commit. Getting this stage right costs you nothing. Getting it wrong costs you months.
The Difference Between a Traffic Agency and a Revenue Agency
The single most useful distinction to understand before you speak to any Google Ads agency is the difference between one that is optimising for traffic and one that is optimising for revenue. The two are not the same, and confusing them is how businesses end up paying for campaigns that look successful on paper while their enquiry line stays quiet.
A traffic-focused agency measures success in terms of impressions, clicks, and click-through rate. These are real metrics, but they are upstream of the thing your business actually needs. Getting 500 clicks a week means nothing if none of those visitors pick up the phone. A revenue-focused agency thinks in different units entirely: cost per lead, cost per sale, and return on ad spend (ROAS). When they report back to you at the end of the month, the headline number is what it cost to acquire a qualified enquiry, not how many people happened to visit your website.
One of the most useful things you can do before hiring any agency is to ask them to share a sample monthly report. You do not need to be a Google Ads expert to read it. Just look at what the first number is. If the report leads with something like "we achieved 12,000 impressions this month" or "your click-through rate improved to 4.2%", that agency is reporting on traffic. If it leads with "your cost per qualified lead was £18, down from £24 last month" or "you generated 34 phone call conversions at a cost per conversion of £22", that is an agency thinking about your business outcomes.
Revenue-focused agencies also behave differently before the campaign even launches. They will insist on getting conversion tracking in place before spending a single penny of your budget. In practice, that means using Google Tag Manager to set up Google Ads conversion actions that fire when something meaningful happens: a phone call from the website, a contact form submitted, a booking confirmed, a product purchased. Without this foundation, no optimisation is possible. The campaign is flying blind. Any agency that wants to start spending your budget before this infrastructure is built is not serious about results.
There is a simple question that separates the two types of agency clearly. Ask them: "What metric will you primarily optimise toward, and how does that metric connect to my revenue?" A revenue-focused agency will give you a direct, specific answer tied to your business model. A traffic-focused agency will answer with something vague like "overall campaign performance" or "we look at a full suite of metrics." That kind of non-answer is a warning sign, not a sign of sophistication.
For service businesses, this distinction becomes even more concrete. If you are a plumber, an electrician, a consultant, or a local tradesperson, the metric that matters is cost per booked appointment, not cost per click. A click from someone who clicks away immediately costs the same as a click from someone who calls you and books a job. Only conversion tracking tells you which is which, and only a revenue-focused agency will have built the systems to measure it. A good agency working with a trades business should be able to tell you, within the first conversation, what a realistic cost per qualified call looks like in your area and what kind of budget is needed to generate a meaningful volume of them. If they cannot articulate that distinction immediately, they are probably not the right fit for a small or local business.
Six Questions to Ask Before the Sales Call Ends
Sales calls have a natural momentum that works in the agency's favour. The pitch is polished, the case studies are cherry-picked, and it is easy to come away feeling reassured without having asked the things that actually matter. These six questions are designed to break that momentum and get you specific, verifiable answers before you hang up.
Question 1: Who will actually manage my account day to day?
This is the question agencies least like being asked directly. Many sell on the strength of a senior strategist or a named founder who appears in their marketing material, then hand your account to a junior employee or an offshore team once the contract is signed. The person you speak to during the pitch may never look at your campaigns again.
Ask for the name of the specific individual who will manage your account. Then ask how long they have been working in Google Ads, what other accounts they currently manage, and roughly how many accounts each manager handles. If a single person is managing 40 or 50 accounts simultaneously, the attention your campaigns will receive is minimal. Get the answer to this question confirmed in writing, either in the contract or in a follow-up email. If the agency refuses to name the account manager before you sign, that refusal tells you something important.
Question 2: What is your approach to negative keywords?
Negative keywords are the list of search terms you tell Google not to show your ads for. Without regular negative keyword reviews, your plumbing ads appear for searches like "DIY fix leaking pipe" or "plumbing apprenticeship courses", burning budget on people who will never call you. A competent agency will mention proactive negative keyword management without being prompted, and should commit to reviewing search term reports within the first week of any new campaign going live.
If an agency responds to this question with a blank or vague answer, or treats it as a minor technicality, that is a meaningful signal about their attention to detail. Negative keyword management is unglamorous work, but it is one of the clearest indicators of whether an agency is actively protecting your budget or just letting campaigns run.
Question 3: Can you show me a case study from a business similar to mine?
Ask specifically for a case study from a business in your industry and at a similar monthly budget level. Results from a £50,000-per-month e-commerce brand are not just irrelevant to a local business running £1,200 a month, they can actively mislead you. Larger budgets generate more data faster, allow more aggressive bidding strategies, and operate in completely different competitive environments.
A relevant case study should show you the starting point, the approach taken, and the specific outcome in terms of cost per lead or ROAS, not just percentage improvements. If the agency cannot produce anything comparable to your situation, ask them honestly whether they have worked with businesses at your budget level before. It is a reasonable question and a trustworthy agency will answer it honestly rather than deflect.
Question 4: How do you handle underperformance?
Every agency will tell you their campaigns perform well. What separates a professional agency from an average one is what they do when the numbers are not where they should be. Ask specifically: if ROAS drops below an agreed threshold for two consecutive months, what is your process?
You are listening for a structured answer here. A good agency will describe something like a formal performance review, a written summary of what changed and why, and a documented plan with a timeframe. An agency that says "we would just keep optimising" or "these things take time" is not describing a process, it is describing inaction dressed up in vague language. The willingness to be held to a defined standard is one of the clearest signals of an agency that takes accountability seriously.
Question 5: Is your management fee a fixed amount or a percentage of ad spend?
This question matters because fee structures create incentives. Percentage-of-spend models, which typically run at 10 to 20 percent of monthly ad spend, mean the agency earns more money the more you spend. That creates a structural pressure to recommend budget increases regardless of whether the current budget is performing well. For a small account running £1,500 a month, a 15 percent fee is £225. For an account running £3,000, it doubles. The agency benefits from the increase even if your results do not.
Fixed-fee models remove that conflict. The agency earns the same whether your budget is £1,000 or £2,000, which means their advice about budget levels is more likely to be genuinely in your interest. Neither model is universally better, but for small businesses the fixed-fee arrangement tends to align interests more cleanly. Ask directly which model applies to your account and get the answer confirmed in writing.
Question 6: Will I have admin access to my own Google Ads account from day one?
The answer to this question must be yes, without hesitation. Your Google Ads account contains the entire history of your campaigns: every keyword, every ad, every conversion, every pound spent. If an agency controls the account and you do not have admin access, you cannot verify what is being done, you cannot take the account elsewhere without losing that history, and you have no independent view of your own data.
Any hesitation, any suggestion that you will be given "reporting access" rather than full admin access, or any explanation about why they need to retain ownership of the account, is a serious red flag. Reputable agencies create accounts under your own Google Ads login or grant you full admin access via account linking. Your account, your data, your access. This is non-negotiable.
Red Flags That Should End the Conversation Immediately
Some warning signs are uncomfortable to act on mid-conversation, especially when an agency sounds confident and professional. But certain statements or behaviours are not negotiable, and recognising them early saves you months of wasted budget.
Guaranteed top placement or guaranteed results. Google itself is explicit on this: no one outside Google can guarantee a specific ad position, because every auction is dynamic and depends on competitor bids, Quality Scores, and user context in real time. Any agency that promises you the top spot is either misrepresenting how the platform works or hoping you will not know the difference. Either way, that is not someone you want managing your money.
Refusing to give you access to your own Google Ads account. This is a serious structural problem. Some agencies insist campaigns are set up under their own Google Manager Account (MCC) rather than an account owned by your business. If you ever leave, you walk away with nothing: no campaign history, no audience lists, no conversion data, no record of what worked. Insist from day one that your business email address is the account owner. The agency can still be linked as a manager. That is the correct structure.
Bundled all-in pricing with no spend breakdown. If an agency quotes you £1,200 per month and cannot tell you how much of that reaches Google as actual ad spend and how much is their management fee, that opacity is intentional. You should always know precisely what Google is billing and what the agency is billing. Some agencies quietly take a percentage of ad spend on top of a management fee without disclosing it clearly.
Pressure to sign a long initial contract before any testing. Committing to six or twelve months before the agency has run a single campaign for your business is a significant risk transfer from them to you. A good agency does not need to lock you in to feel secure. They keep clients by performing.
Vague reporting language with no numbers. Phrases like "we improved your presence" or "brand awareness has grown" are not results. If an agency cannot connect their activity to clicks, conversions, or revenue figures, they are not measuring performance at all.
No mention of landing pages. Google Ads does not begin and end at the click. If an agency proposes to run campaigns without discussing where users land after the click, they are optimising only half the equation. A poorly converting landing page will waste every pound of ad spend regardless of how well-tuned the campaigns are. An agency that does not raise this is telling you something about their level of thinking.
How to Read a Google Ads Agency Contract Without a Solicitor
Most small business owners sign agency contracts quickly, especially after a good sales call. That is exactly when to slow down. You do not need a solicitor for a standard agency agreement, but you do need to know which four or five clauses actually matter and what bad versions of them look like.
The four clauses to find before you sign
Notice period. This is the single most important term in the contract for a small business. A 30-day rolling arrangement means that if the campaigns are not performing, you can exit after one month without further financial exposure. Anything over 90 days is a serious risk, particularly if the agency has not yet demonstrated results for your specific business. Push for 30 days rolling. If they will not go below 60, understand that you are taking on real financial risk.
Account ownership. The contract should state in plain language that your business is the owner of the Google Ads account and that the agency operates as a linked manager. If the contract says nothing about account ownership, or uses language implying the account belongs to the agency's infrastructure, ask for it to be amended before signing. This is not an unusual request and any agency accustomed to working with professional clients will not object.
Data access on termination. You must be able to export your full conversion history, keyword performance data, and audience lists when you leave. Some contracts limit what data you can take with you. Make sure the agreement explicitly states that all data generated from your ad spend belongs to you and is exportable on request.
Scope creep language. Read carefully for phrases like "services may be amended at our discretion" or "the scope of work may be updated from time to time." These clauses allow an agency to quietly reduce what they deliver without breaching the contract. The contract should specify exactly what is included each month: weekly bid adjustments, a monthly reporting call, quarterly strategy reviews, ad copy testing frequency. Vague scope language almost always benefits the agency, not you.
Two clauses that catch people out most often
Auto-renewal. This is common across agency contracts and genuinely dangerous for small businesses. Many agreements renew automatically for a full year unless you give written notice 30 to 60 days before the anniversary date. If you miss that window, you are committed for another twelve months regardless of performance. The fix is simple: set a calendar reminder on the day you sign, two months before your contract anniversary, with a note to review performance and decide whether to renew or give notice.
The minimum spend floor. Some agency contracts include a clause stating that their management fee scales up if you increase your ad budget but does not scale down if you reduce it. In practice this means that if you cut your monthly Google spend from £2,000 to £800 during a quieter period, the management fee stays fixed at the higher rate. This effectively locks in a cost floor that makes it financially painful to adjust your budget in response to business conditions. Ask directly: "If I reduce my ad spend, does your fee reduce proportionally?" Get the answer in the contract, not just verbally.
One final point that is easy to underestimate. If you ask an agency to amend a contract clause and they flatly refuse to discuss any changes, that rigidity tells you something important about how they will handle disagreements later. Agencies that are confident in their work and fair in their dealings do not need bulletproof contracts. The willingness to negotiate is itself a signal about how the relationship will function under pressure.
What 'Transparent Reporting' Actually Looks Like in Practice
The phrase "full transparency" appears in nearly every agency pitch deck. What it means in practice varies enormously. Some agencies consider it transparent to send you a PDF with three bar charts and a summary paragraph. That is not transparency. Here is what the real version looks like.
What a genuine report must contain
At a minimum, a monthly report for a small business Google Ads account should show you:
- Total ad spend for the period, broken down by campaign
- Number of conversions and the specific conversion actions being counted (phone calls, form fills, purchases)
- Cost per conversion, compared with the previous period
- Which campaigns and which individual keywords drove those conversions
- A clear account change log: what bid adjustments were made, which ads were paused or tested, what targeting changes were applied and when
If your report does not include a record of what the agency actually did to the account that month, you have no way of knowing whether you are paying for active management or a set-and-forget arrangement. The change log is non-negotiable.
Default Google Ads dashboard screenshots are not transparent reporting. The standard Google Ads interface is designed to show you metrics Google wants you to focus on. It excludes search term level data by default, does not surface impression share comparisons easily, and makes quality scores awkward to access. An agency that emails you a screenshot of the Campaigns overview tab has done the minimum possible work. They are showing you what Google shows everyone, not an analysis of what is actually happening in your account.
Ask to see a sample report before you sign anything. A good agency will have a standard reporting template they can show you. Look specifically for three things:
- Search term reports: these show the actual queries users typed before clicking your ads, not just the keywords you bid on. This distinction matters because broad and phrase match keywords can trigger your ads for searches with no relevance to your business.
- Quality Score data: this metric (scored 1 to 10 per keyword) reflects Google's assessment of your ad relevance and landing page experience. Low Quality Scores mean you are paying more per click than competitors with better-structured accounts.
- Impression share figures: these tell you what percentage of eligible searches your ads actually appeared for, and how much you are losing to budget limits versus competitor rank. If your impression share is 30%, there is a conversation to be had about whether budget or quality is the constraint.
Monthly reporting calls are not optional. Email-only reporting is the format that makes it easiest to obscure underperformance. A table of numbers is much easier to question in a live conversation than in a follow-up email that may or may not get answered. A 30-minute monthly call where the agency walks through performance and explains what they plan to change in the next four weeks is a basic accountability mechanism. If an agency presents email reporting as standard and calls as an add-on service, push back.
For a concrete benchmark: your agency should be able to tell you your cost per lead to within a few pence at any given moment, and explain whether that figure is trending upward or downward compared with the previous four-week period. If they cannot answer that question without pulling up a report and spending five minutes searching, the account is either not being monitored closely enough or the tracking has not been set up correctly. Both are problems that cost you money.
