How to Spot a Bad Google Ads Agency Before It’s Too Late

Bad agencies are everywhere and they’re costing businesses millions. 

In this episode of Google Ads Unleashed, host Jeremy breaks down the biggest red flags to watch for when hiring or working with a Google Ads agency or freelancer. Learn how to identify poor tracking setups, vanity reporting, lack of communication, and shady ownership practices before they sink your results. 

Get the ultimate Google Ads Q4 checklist here: https://checklist.younganddigital.marketing/

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

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Transcript

The world of Google ads is unfortunately full of black sheep. There are many good people out there, but also equally as many bad players. How to spot a good and a bad agency depends on many factors. But how you find out whether your agency or freelancer is any good? You will find out in this episode. Welcome back to Google ads and leash guys. Hope everyone is doing fabulous this Monday. So I am at the moment a little bit on a war path, and that is, I'm on the war path against bad agencies and bad freelancers. I do probably about three audits on a week, two to three audits of ad accounts. People come to me from all sizes, all niches, all walks of life, and ask me, Hey, Jeremy. I think at the moment, my agency is not really doing an amazing job, or my Freelancer got a guy who's like, so I pay a few 100 quid a month, which already is a red flag in itself. And as I don't really feel like they're doing anything it's going as well as it should be. So, which is why I want to put this pod together with a few red flags that you can look for in your current agency, in your current freelancer, whether they might not be a good fit. Let's start with one I've just mentioned, and that is very strange pricing or dumping pricing. Very often I see people who say, Oh, I've got a guy who manages it for like, $300 a month or something like that. Usually, that's already a bad sign, because if you do the maths, you will have to realize how many ad accounts someone who does pricing like this must be looking after in order to make a decent amount of money. So depending on where you live in the world, let's say Britain, the average wage in Britain, I think, is 30,000 pounds a year. If someone is a very good Google Ads Freelancer agency, they obviously want to be making 30 to 50k as a minimum, right? As a senior absolute minimum, probably a lot more, right? I'm just saying this as really crazy low balling to emphasize my example here. And if they are charging only about 300 quid a month, that means they must look after roughly 1012 accounts at the same time in order to be able to get some sort of margin out of those projects. And that is just too many ad accounts, right? No one can manage that many. At Windy we manage six, between six and eight clients per per media buyer, and that is huge. Eight is really the ultimate maximum. Right six is more sort of the sweet spot that we try to go for. But this is usually one of the first red flags that I see, because especially if you're hiring an agency and it's that cheap, there's absolutely no chance that they can actually service your ad account and give him, give it the respect that it needs. For instance, in Germany, we very often come across an agency. Here in Britain, I think yell is a very common one. They do absolute dump in prices. But I've come across a few media buyers who've come from that agency, and they said that they manage between 30 and 40 or sometimes 50 ad accounts, right? Totally burnt out, totally couldn't give any sort of proper due diligence to an ad account. It's just not, not right, right? So pricing is the first red flag. The second red flag I come across extremely often, more often than not is no access to the ad account, or the ad account doesn't actually belong to the business owner. Guys, if you're a business owner and the ad account doesn't belong to you, or they don't give you access to the ad account, or you've had or they threaten to delete your complete history, or something like that, you have a bad agency or freelancer. It's just not on. There is no negotiation on this. There's no gray area. There's nothing here. You have to own the ad account. You have to own the Merchant Center, Google Analytics for there is absolutely nothing. Saying that you should, yeah, so there's just no negotiation, which goes to my next point, no ownership of the data or of the ads. So I've had this very often, despite actually owning the ad account, that the agency just deletes all campaigns once they get booted out, or they do that before they get booted out. That is crazy, yeah, if they leave the entire situation, the entire sort of set of disappears. That is not a client agency relationship. That is a hostage situation, right? If this is the case, don't panic. You can always download your data in Google Ads Editor or do an export if that is the current situation. If, if you do have access, and you can always, if this is in your contracts, boot out the agency or freelancer before shit hits the fan. Okay, so this is something to really keep an eye on. The next red flag that I like to bring up very often is shitty conversion tracking. If you have a feeling that they're either not tracking the right things that are important to your business, and I've done plenty of episodes and conversion tracking and what to track if you have a feeling that the data in the ad account doesn't really match what's happening on in your bank account, then that is a red flag. There's something, something going terribly wrong, and the you need to seriously question whether the person in charge actually knows what they're doing okay. Which also brings you to the next point, what they report on. So I'll be honest at y and d, we're not like the most amazing reporters, and I say that out of actually conviction, because we use first, we usually use business intelligence tools with our clients, who we educate on how to use them right something like triple whale, North beam, true profit, whatever it is. And very often, our clients have extreme good control over their data. We actually train them to have control over their data so they don't really need reporting, because at any given point in know what we're working on, what has been done, what, what, what, what we're planning to do, right? And they also know what the data is looking like at any given point. So we don't really do any bizarre reporting. We don't we don't usually do that. We do monthly reports of a certain clients, but we also do not report on vanity reports, right? So which I call more fake reports? So you know, showed like things like, oh, click through, rate is up or impressions up. If your agency does that, that's usually a red flag, right? Only report you're only, only interested in hard metrics, right? Our sales up, or as raw us up, right? Or whatever you need roast up is not even that important, but you get what I mean. And they very often just show platform metrics and show data, but they don't actually tell you what the data means, right? If you can't show if your agency or freelancer doesn't actually show or interpret the data for you, if they just throw a report at you. And here's the report, and that's the end of it. That is usually a sign of bad agency or bad freelancer, right? They have to focus on business outcomes and actual graspable results and not just on sort of vanity reporting, right? The next thing that I see, which is usually a red flag is that you don't really get a hold of them or hear from them. I've had this example a couple of times where certain freelancers suddenly just disappear, or they don't show up to handovers or gone as what right avoid those like the plague. As soon as there is some form of inconsistent talking to or reporting, get rid of them, right? That is usually a red flag, and that is not something that you should have. Should pain be paying for every single month.
The next thing that I see very often is no work in the feed, right? If you are an E commerce business and your current agency doesn't optimize or control the feed to a certain extent, then what the fuck is actually going on? What are they doing? Feed optimization is one of. The absolute core fundamentals of getting results for E commerce businesses on Google ads. And if your agency doesn't play around with images, titles, with the feed, with get you know, making your listings look the dog, dogs bollocks, then I don't actually know what the hell you're paying for, because I've only had this example last week. I've done an audit on an ad account, and I looked at the shopping results, and it just took all of the titles from the actual shop, which were, you know, like, here's the hair bundle, something like that. Well, what's no one searches for hair bundle or something like that. People search for conditioner, for ladies with alopecia, or something like that, right? That is how people search. This is how product titles need to be written. If your agency doesn't do that and doesn't care about that or don't know how to do it, that is usually when the alarm bells should be going off. Okay? The next thing that I find very alarming is when an agency or freelancer don't use audiences or don't really know what what the point is a first party data, right? I've done plenty of episodes on the importance of first party data. Go back and listen to the episodes. But if you go into your ad account and you don't find any customer lists uploaded, that is usually not a good thing. Okay, going about what going about communication. So absences is one thing that I've mentioned, vanity reporting is one, if you don't actually know what they're working on each month and don't have regular updates, we, for instance, do weekly updates, which sometimes go over to bi weekly with our clients and with updates, I mean at a minimum, a loom at best, an in person meeting, Right? So over Google meet or whatever. If you don't actually know what the hell's going on or what they're testing, that is usually a bad sign. At least one or two bullet points should come to mind for you to know what are they working on and what are they doing. Okay, so that if you don't know, that's usually a red flag, maybe something that I've always meant, that I've talked about as well, is if they are not open and honest about problems. So we've had plenty of times at the agency where things are not going well, maybe because I'm doing this podcast and so on. It always sounds like I've got everything under control, and life is all rosy and whatnot. And yes, of course, we are good. We're very good at what we do, but things don't always go as well, right? So I think honesty is a currency that no one is talking about enough, when shit is not good, right, when performance is down, etc, or if tracking is broken, or if something has gone wrong, then we have to be open and honest in the communication about this. And too often bad freelancers or bad agencies and say, Yeah, always say, Oh, it's fine, or it's okay, or, you know, it needs more learning. For instance, right? It's only just been set up, and trust the algorithm and all that crap. That is usually a warning sign that you are with in the wrong hands here. Okay? Then I think lastly, when it goes to communication as well, is that there is a misalignment in communication, and they don't actually understand your business goals, right? So they, for instance, don't understand what your margins are. They don't understand what your profits are. They don't understand your lifetime value. They don't understand sort of, your anything in this about your business, okay? And that is usually pretty bad. If they don't actually ask those questions, that's pretty bad. And also, if you challenge them on those and they push back, that is usually a pretty bad sign as well for bad agency or freelancer. So these are sort of quite common things that I see, right? So to sum it up, that you don't own or control the infrastructure and data, that is usually a massive, massive bad sign that you pay dumping prices. Because for a good expert who really dedicates their time, of a team of experts who dedicate their time, they are worth. Their money, right? So if you pay four figures, you get a full figure service. That's just how it is. If you pay five figures, you get a five figure service with with massive agencies. Usually, they should be good communicators. They should be regular communicators. They should be proactive communicators, who also can admit that they're sometimes right wrong, and who admit that things sometimes maybe are not going as well, they should understand your business beyond just of what's going on in the ad account. They should be making proactive recommendations on that, and they should know the basics. They should know how to set up conversion tracking properly and have no mistakes there. They should be using first party data. They should be making no mistakes in the media buying and they should also be able to control the feed. If none of this applies with your current agency or freelancer, we're more than happy to have a look always. Just reach out to me at Jeremy, at young and digital dot marketing, you can also sort of send me a message on LinkedIn, Jeremy and Google ads, you'll find me there. I simply reach out and have a chat with me, and I am more than happy to help you what I'm more than happy to help you with, as well as this q4 if you don't want to have a chat, you can always head to the website young and digital or marketing. At the moment, we have a free q4 checklist that is downloadable, that you can download and use to optimize your Google Ads this q4 let me know what you think, and I'm always happy for feedback. Also, if you have further ideas for red flags that some agencies or freelancers have bad freelancers or bad freelancers have do, let me know and drop it in the comments under this under this podcast on this note, thank you very much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.