Is it worth paying someone to manage Google Ads?
It is worth it when your ad spend is large enough that better management saves or earns more than the fee, and when you do not have the hours to learn and run the account yourself. Below a few thousand dollars a month in spend, the math usually does not work.
Run the numbers honestly. Our minimum is $2,000 a month in management with at least $3,000 a month in ad spend. At that level the account has to perform meaningfully better to cover the fee, which is why we will tell you when doing it yourself makes more sense. If you are under that line, start with our guide to doing ads on a small budget.
Management pays for itself most clearly in three situations: an account wasting spend on search terms nobody reviews, conversion tracking that counts the wrong things, and growth beyond one or two campaigns. A free audit shows which of those apply to you within 48 hours, before you commit to anything.
How can I tell if my Google Ads agency is doing a good job?
Check three things in your own account: change history, the search terms report and your conversion actions. Together they show whether anyone is working, whether money is leaking and whether bidding is chasing real outcomes.
Change history lists every edit, who made it and when, going back two years. Long stretches with only automated changes mean nobody is managing. In the search terms report, sort the last 30 days by cost and look for terms with spend and zero conversions that still are not negatives. Then open conversion settings and confirm the primary actions are purchases, qualified leads or booked calls, not page views.
Also read reports past the headline. A blended cost per acquisition can improve while one campaign raises its spend and converts nothing; the winners hide the leak. Ask your agency to break results out by campaign every month and name the fix for anything that spent without converting. If they cannot, our Google Ads audit will.
Sources: Review your account history (Google Ads Help)
What access do you need to my Google Ads account?
We send a link request from our Google Ads manager account to your account's customer ID, and an admin on your side accepts it. You stay an admin on your own account, and we never ask for your login.
Linking a manager account lets our team work in your campaigns without a separate user invite for each person. You can see the link under Access and security and remove it at any time. Billing stays between you and Google, so ad spend never passes through us.
For full management we also ask for access to GA4, Google Tag Manager and Merchant Center if you sell products, because many performance problems live in tracking or the feed rather than the campaigns. Buddy works through the Google Ads API under the same permissions, asks before acting and labels every change for rollback. If you are switching from another agency, make sure someone at your company holds admin access before you remove the old agency. Our conversion tracking audit covers the tracking side.
Sources: Manager Accounts: Link accounts to your manager accounts (Google Ads Help), About access levels in your Google Ads account (Google Ads Help)
Why did my Google Ads cost per lead suddenly go up?
Usually because spend shifted toward a campaign or a set of search terms that does not convert, not because Google raised prices across the board. Find what moved before you change a bid.
We use the same order every time. First read pacing: did spend rise, fall or hold against conversions? Then split the account by campaign to find what moved. Often one campaign took a bigger share of budget and returned nothing while the others held steady. Then explain why, which almost always means opening that campaign's search terms. Only then name the fix.
The fix is often a negative keyword list plus a temporary budget cap on the leaking campaign, not a cut across the whole account that would also starve the campaigns still converting. Lowering a bid on a junk term just buys the same junk more cheaply. Recheck the same comparison next week before calling it fixed. Also rule out a conversion tag that stopped firing, a new competitor in auction insights, or a recent bid strategy change still learning. See our bidding strategy work.
Why isn't Smart Bidding working in my account?
Most often the campaign does not have enough conversions to learn from, the bid strategy contradicts the goal, or someone keeps changing settings during the learning period. Fix those three in that order.
Start by counting conversions per campaign over the last 30 days. My rule of thumb is around 30 before I trust Target CPA or Target ROAS; under that, the model is guessing. Consolidate campaigns or broaden coverage so the signal pools. Then look for mismatches. A campaign on Maximize Clicks with a CPA goal is a common one. Google does not count Maximize Clicks as Smart Bidding, it simply buys the cheapest clicks it can, and it will let you save that setup without a warning.
After switching to Target CPA or Maximize Conversions, leave bids, budgets and audiences alone for about two weeks. The first week often looks worse while the system explores. And no bid strategy replaces search term hygiene; a conversion-based strategy will still buy junk queries you never excluded. See how we pick targets on our bidding strategy page.
Sources: Your guide to Smart Bidding (Google Ads Help)
What should I do before switching Google Ads agencies?
Make sure someone at your company has admin access, record a performance baseline, and agree on a handover date so campaigns never run unattended. Do not let a new agency delete the account and start over.
The account's history has real value. Conversion data and Smart Bidding learning live in the existing account, and a fresh build throws them away. A good new manager audits first, keeps what works and restructures gradually.
Before the switch, write down the last 90 days by campaign: spend, conversions, cost per acquisition and which conversion actions are primary. That becomes the baseline you judge the new agency against. Ask the old agency for any negative keyword lists, scripts or audiences stored in their manager account rather than yours, since those can disappear when the link is removed. Then unlink the old manager account. Every change we make is labeled with a date and reason, so if you ever leave us, that history stays with you. Start with a free audit.
