In the competitive world of online advertising, Google Ads remains one of the most effective platforms for businesses to reach potential customers and drive growth. However, managing a Google Ads account isn't just about setting up campaigns—it's about optimizing them for maximum return on investment (ROI), adapting to algorithm changes, and aligning with your business objectives.
If you're not an expert yourself, hiring a skilled manager or agency can save you time, money, and frustration. But with so many options available, how do you pick the right one?
This article breaks down the essential steps and factors to consider, drawing from industry best practices to help you make an informed decision.
1. Business Goals and Marketing Goals
Before you start searching for a manager, clarify what you want to achieve with Google Ads. Are you aiming to increase website traffic, generate leads, boost e-commerce sales, or build brand awareness? Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals to guide your selection process.
The better you business goals are defined, the better you know what you can ask from your Google Ads Manager.
While agencies provide end-to-end services but could be pricier, consultants are often more affordable and focused.
If your business is small or just starting with ads, a consultant might suffice; larger operations may benefit from an agency's scalability.
But in today's AI epoch, smart experienced consultant using proper tools can do the work of 10 junior employees managed by a senior manager in a high level agency.
The pittfalls of business goals:
- Not having a good conversion tracking implemented in your Google Ads is the #1 obstacle in measuring and obtaining the business goals. Even the best consultant, working with bad data, will not be able to help you go anywhere. In the best case, a good consultant might pinpoint some issues in the data and ask you to revise the conversion tracking. He will also permanently ask for different inputs coming from other reporting than Google Ads interface in order to evaluate the real performance. Keep in mind that implementing a good conversion tracking is not the Google Ads Manager job, it is a webmaster job.
- Business goals are fluid. Any business has at least sesonality of the activity. It is normal for a business to change either target or even the direction. Having a specialist that is able to synch with your business is of utmost importance. Even if your goals are clear and well established and easy measurable when you start working with a Google Ads Manager, if he is not able to change directions and adapt to your companies changing objectives and targets, you might end up spending more money on getting more orders while your logistics are messed up, your inventory is on red and your customer support is not handling all the workload.
2. Certifications and Badges
Having a certification if not a proof today that the owner is really able to handle the complex changes and permanent evolutions. First, anyone can get a certification using AI tools. Even considering honesty in obtaining it, the tests are old and simply knowing the interface of Google Ads and some basic concepts is not a proof of profesionalism.
Even the Google Ads Partner badge, which requires the manager or agency to have delivered solid ad revenue and growth for clients in the past 12 months is not really an indicator of performance and not even of good behaviour.
Even if these certifications and badges are some barrier to avoiding fake managers that only talk the lingo and have zero real know-how, it is common sens that people promoting these badges have a low confidence and have nothing to show.
If you do not have the skills to talk to a person and evaluate his/hers experience with Google Ads and you rely on some badge, you are at risk.
3. Evaluating Experience and Track Record
This is clearly the most important factor of succes in hiring a Google Ads Manager and probably the most difficult to implement.
Experience is a cornerstone of effective Google Ads management. But how can you find managers with proven expertise ideally in your industry? How can you be sure they understand nuances like competitive keywords, audience behaviors, and seasonal trends?
Word of mouth is clearly an option, but even your friends, not to mention competitors, if they have stumbled on a gold mine, would they share it with you? Few people that have great managers that are producing results for them would give references and reviews so that they risk loosing their managers to eventual competitors or other companies.
This is where your detective skill should come into place. Getting insight from successful companies, ideally competitors on who is doing their Google Ads is clearly the best recipe for getting to find out who's who in the Google Ads management space.
Getting information from competitors is not the scope of this article but if you have a big business and Google Ads is important for you, hiring a competitor employee from a relevant department for a few hours to get advice on how are they doing a particular job is a simple method. But it does not have to be a competitor, it can be a company you monitor and admire and you think or you have indicators they have a real performance on Google Ads.
Reviewing track record based on numbers, promotional videos or show-off screenshots is impossible since getting a sense of the real performance is very hard (see first point of this article about business goals). Google Ads is not that simple as having great CTR or other ROIs, these and other are just first level indicators that need interpreting in context which is impossible from outside of a company.
4. Evaluating the Skill
A good manager should know all campaign types, audience management, campaign objectives, conversion tracking, bidding strategies and much more.
How can you test him/her skills? Ask Gemini to get you a list and do a live chat. Make a 100 points list and select 10 that are of interest to you or simply go random. Have an interview and ask him/her these 10 questions and also ask him to comment on the relation to your business of that particular subject. For example, let's say you have an ecommerce website. One important questions for an ecommerce website is how to get new clients. In Google Ads there are many variants on getting new clients using audiences or campaign settings. Thowing a bucked of money on campaigns that exclude current clients is not the best one.
Asking questions and insisting on the relation to your current company will get you a feel of the skill of the manager. If you have time and many candidates, mark a score for each question on how was the answer depending also on how much you understood and made sense for you.
An alternative option is to pay a 3rd party marketing consultant or at least some actor that can pretend to be one and have this person put the questions while you watch and monitor how the candidate answers them.