12 red flags when interviewing Google Ads agencies

The good news about bad agencies is they are not subtle. The bad news is buyers under deadline pressure miss the signals because they want to be done with the search. This is the checklist for slowing down. For the full evaluation framework see our complete buyer's guide to choosing a Google Ads agency.

Red flag 1: guaranteed ROAS or CPA before seeing your account

"We guarantee 5× ROAS in the first 90 days." Without having seen your conversion data, your average order value, your seasonality, your historical creative performance, or your tracking setup, this is either dishonest or based on a definition of "guarantee" that includes fine print you will discover at month four.

A serious agency, after a 30-minute discovery call, will give you a range. After an audit, they will give you a target. Before any of that, "guarantee" is a sales word, not an analytic claim.

What to ask instead. "Walk me through how you would set realistic ROAS expectations for an account at our scale and in our vertical. What would you need to see first?"

Red flag 2: refusal to name the strategist on your account

"We use a team approach." That sentence, said in a pitch, means a junior analyst will run the account and a senior will sign off occasionally. The senior people are unbilled time and the agency is not going to spend them on you unless you are a six-figure-fee client.

You should be able to interview the named strategist before signing. They should have at least 3 years on accounts in your size range and vertical. If the agency cannot or will not name them, your account is going into a pool.

What to ask instead. "Tell me the name and bio of the strategist who will run our account day to day, how many accounts they currently manage, and put them on the next call."

Red flag 3: request to own the Google Ads account

The classic hostage tactic. The agency creates a new Google Ads account under their own MCC and runs your spend through it. When you part ways, you lose all conversion history, audience lists, scripts, saved bid strategies, and the learning embedded in Smart Bidding for that account.

There is no legitimate efficiency reason for this. The MCC structure exists precisely so agencies can manage client accounts without owning them. Any agency that requires ownership is optimising for keeping clients trapped, not for serving them.

What to ask instead. "I will create the account under our billing and add your MCC as manager. Confirm that works."

Red flag 4: pricing hidden until a sales call

"Book a call to discuss pricing." Once is normal — pricing depends on scope and spend. As the only path to a number, it is a sign that the agency price-discriminates aggressively based on how desperate or unsophisticated you sound on the call.

The better agencies publish at least a starting price or a clearly defined tier structure. They don't lose money by being transparent; they save themselves the sales calls with prospects who were going to balk at the number anyway.

What to ask instead. "Send me your standard fee structure for our spend tier before we book a call. If you don't have one, explain how you price."

Red flag 5: undisclosed white-label or subcontracted work

The agency you are signing with hands off the actual account management to a third party — usually a cheaper team in a different geography — without telling you. You think a senior in London is running your account; in reality it's a junior in a delivery centre, and your "strategist" is reading their notes.

Ask directly. "Is anyone outside your company touching this account?" The answer should be specific. "Our senior team only" is fine. "We sometimes use partners for capacity" needs a follow-up. Anything evasive is a no.

What to ask instead. "Disclose every individual who will have access to our Google Ads account, what company they work for, and where they are based. We want this in the contract."

Red flag 6: contract length over 6 months on a fixed term

The only commercial reason for a 12-month lock-in is that the agency expects clients to want to leave by month 4 and is protecting itself from that. Three-month initial term is fair (Google Ads needs that long to generate decent data). Six months is the cap of reasonable. Twelve is them, not you.

What to ask instead. "We will sign a 3-month initial term followed by 30-day rolling. If you cannot do that, explain why."

Red flag 7: vague answers to specific technical questions

You ask: "How do you handle Performance Max audience signals when we have a small first-party audience but a large second-party one through our CRM partner?" The salesperson says: "Our team is great at PMax."

The salesperson should either know enough to give a specific answer or should have a technical person on the next call. If neither happens, you are about to sign a contract with people who can market the service but not deliver it.

What to ask instead. "Put your most senior PMax person on the next call. I have technical questions."

Red flag 8: no references in your vertical and price range

"We work with everyone from SMB to enterprise." Cool — name three clients in B2B SaaS spending €10k–€30k/month on Google Ads, and let me call them. If they cannot produce that list, they do not have the experience they claim, or none of those clients will say good things, or both.

Two references is too few. Five is fine. The references should be on accounts in your vertical and in your price range, and they should have been clients for at least 12 months — anything shorter and you are getting the honeymoon view.

What to ask instead. "Give me five reference clients in our vertical at our spend level, with at least 12 months of relationship. I will call three at random."

Red flag 9: report samples that lead with vanity metrics

You ask for a sample monthly report. The first three pages are about impressions, clicks, CTR, "engagement." Revenue and CAC appear on page seven if at all. The agency reports on what they did, not what it produced.

A report that opens with activity metrics is a tell that the agency optimises for activity metrics. That is what they think their job is. If that's not what you think their job is, you have a problem before month one.

What to ask instead. "Show me a sample report where revenue or pipeline is the first metric, and CPA and ROAS are second. If you don't have that format, you are not the right agency for us." See our KPIs guide for what matters.

Red flag 10: dismissiveness about AI and automation

The agency, in 2026, tells you their advantage is that everything is done by humans, end to end. They roll their eyes at AI tools. They imply that other agencies cut corners with automation and that they are different.

The honest position in 2026 is that AI is a real productivity multiplier for the boring parts of PPC work — search term mining, anomaly detection, ad copy generation, reporting drafts. An agency that has not figured out how to use it well is either behind or pretending. Either is bad.

What to ask instead. "Which parts of your workflow are AI-assisted and which are human? Walk me through your stack." A serious answer means you are talking to someone who has thought about it.

Red flag 11: no mention of tracking validation in onboarding

You ask about onboarding. They describe the kickoff call, the first weekly meeting, the first ad copy ideas. They do not mention validating your conversion tracking before any optimisation happens.

Half of the accounts we audit have a tracking issue: a duplicate firing, a missing enhanced conversion field, an incorrect value passed for purchases, a goal counting form-fills that go to dev/null. Optimising on broken data is worse than not optimising at all. Any agency that does not lead with a tracking audit is going to spend three months chasing the wrong number.

What to ask instead. "Describe your conversion tracking audit. What do you check? What do you do if you find something broken?"

Red flag 12: no pushback during the sales process

You said something during discovery that was wrong. Maybe you assumed broad match is the right starting point. Maybe you wanted to target a CPA that the agency knows is unrealistic. Maybe you described your offer in a way that misses what would actually sell.

A good agency disagrees, politely, in the sales process. They say: "We hear that goal — here's what we have seen happen when accounts at your stage push for that CPA." An agency that nods at everything in the sales call will nod at everything for 12 months. That is not partnership; that is order-taking. The bills will not get better because you wanted something they should have argued against.

What to ask instead. "What's something I said during discovery that you disagree with?"

Yellow flags worth a follow-up

Not deal-breakers on their own, but worth a second question:

• Founder is not on the second call. Common at larger agencies. Fine if a real partner runs the account. Not fine if the partners only show up for renewal.
• Bundled tooling you didn't ask for. Sometimes valuable. Sometimes a lock-in mechanism — when you leave, the dashboard goes too.
• Heavy emphasis on "creative" as the differentiator. Creative matters, but the channel is still mostly bid logic and structure. If the pitch is 80% creative, ask who runs the bidding.
• Reluctance to send a written proposal. "We will walk through it on a call." Walk through it on a call, then send it in writing.
• Slow response time during the sales process. Sales is the agency's best foot. If responses are 48+ hours during pitch, post-signature will be worse.

What to do when you spot a red flag

One red flag — name it directly, give them a chance to address it, judge the answer. Two red flags — they are telling you something about how they operate. Stop interviewing them, save the time. Do not assume that the things bothering you in the sales process will get better; they almost always get worse.

Where Logitelia fits

The reason we wrote this list is because we have done audits on accounts where most of these flags were present and the buyer wished they had seen them earlier. Logitelia's Growth Team is an AI-managed alternative to traditional Google Ads agencies — flat fee, EU data residency, full activity log, account ownership stays with you. If you want a 30-minute interview against your own version of this checklist, book a call. Bring the hard questions.

The agencies that disappoint do so for predictable reasons. The interview is where you find out which is which. Take an extra week if you need to.