What a Google Ads agency actually does

The five jobs

Choosing the searches. Which phrases to bid on and with what match types. Broad settings spend a budget fast and teach you little; tight ones spend slowly and teach you exactly what works.

Choosing the exclusions. Negative keywords: the searches you pay not to appear for. In a trade at thirteen dollars a click, a hundred wasted clicks a month is thirteen hundred dollars of nothing, and the wasted searches are usually obvious in hindsight and invisible in advance. This is the job that pays for the management fee.

The ads and the landing pages. An ad that promises something the page does not deliver wastes the click twice, once in money and once in the account's quality signals.

The measurement. Conversion tracking that records enquiries rather than visits, and call tracking where the phone is the main channel. Without it the account optimises toward clicks, which is optimising toward cost.

The weekly pruning. Reading the actual search terms that triggered your ads and cutting the ones that will never convert. This is unglamorous, it is where the account improves, and it is the first thing that stops happening when an agency is stretched.

How fees are usually charged

Two shapes. A flat monthly management fee, or a percentage of ad spend. Both are common and they behave differently.

A percentage of spend has a structural problem worth naming: it rewards the agency for increasing your budget, which is not always the right advice. That does not make it wrong, and it does make it worth asking how the agency handles the case where the honest recommendation is to spend less.

In both shapes the ad spend itself goes to Google and is separate from the fee. Ask which figure any quote refers to.

What separates a manager from a button-presser

Willingness to tell you to stop. An account that should be paused in a quiet month, a keyword that should be dropped, a whole campaign that has never returned its cost. An agency paid monthly has no natural incentive to say any of that, and the ones worth keeping say it anyway.

The publisher

SEO Agency Dublin sells Google Ads management and publishes this page. The questions on the next page apply to it exactly as written, including the one about fee structure.