Why Standard Criteria Don't Work
When you're looking for a Google Ads agency for your online store, you always get the same advice: look at their portfolio, ask for references, check if they're a Google Partner. All technically correct, all useless in practice.
A portfolio can be fabricated. References are selected by the agency. Google Partner certification guarantees nothing about the actual quality of managing your account.
There are seven concrete, verifiable criteria that any business owner can apply without being a Google Ads expert.
Who Owns the Google Ads Account
The first thing to clarify, before any other discussion: is the Google Ads account created on your MCC or the agency's MCC? The correct answer is that you are the account owner, and the agency receives "Manager" access through Google Ads MCC. If the agency insists on creating the account on their infrastructure, it means at the end of the contract you leave without data history, without built remarketing audiences, and without tracking configurations. A Google Ads account's history has real value — the algorithm calibrates based on it.
Request Viewer Access to an Active Account They Manage
Any serious agency can offer read-only access to a real client account (with that client's consent). Not to judge their strategy, but to see what the actual structure looks like: how many active campaigns, how many negative keywords, what ad extensions are configured, whether there's segmentation by device type. An account with 3 campaigns and 0 negative keywords after 6 months of management says more than any presentation.
Check What Metrics They Report by Default
Ask: "What do I receive monthly in your report?" If the answer mainly contains impressions, CTR, and spend, that's a bad sign. If the answer includes ROAS by product category, cost per new vs. returning customer acquisition, and comparison to previous month and same period last year, that's a good sign. Agencies that report vanity metrics do so because they can't justify real profitability.
Understand the Retainer Structure and What It Actually Includes
The monthly management price says nothing without knowing what it includes. The right questions: how many actual work hours are allocated to your account per month? Who manages the account — senior or junior? Are A/B tests on ads included or extra? Are product feed optimizations included or billed separately? An agency that can't answer these questions clearly will be equally unclear in the working relationship.
Test How They Respond to a Simple Technical Objection
Ask a specific technical question, for example: "How do you approach Performance Max campaigns for a store with 500+ products and different margins?" You don't need to evaluate the technical answer in detail. Evaluate whether they explain the logic in business terms or whether they sell you generic benefits. An answer like "PMax is great, Google recommends it" is a sign they haven't thought strategically about your specific situation.
Check Whether They Have Specific Romanian eCommerce Experience
Google Ads for local services works completely differently from Google Ads for an online store with a product feed, Shopping campaigns, and Black Friday seasonality. Ask how many eCommerce accounts they actively manage and what the average media budget value is that they administer. If they predominantly work with local services or B2B, they don't have the necessary experience for optimizing a feed with thousands of products and complex Performance Max campaigns.
Clarify Contract Exit Conditions
Read the exit clause before signing anything. What happens to the Google Ads account at the end of the contract? What about remarketing audiences? What about conversion history? A fair contract stipulates that you remain owner of all digital assets. A problematic contract implicitly transfers ownership or makes exit costly through long notice period clauses and penalties.
Why Correctly Evaluating an Agency Is Harder Than It Looks
The seven criteria above are verifiable, but applying them takes time and some technical preparation. The hardest to apply is the onboarding process criterion: if you don't know what a correct onboarding should look like, you can't evaluate whether what the agency describes is solid or improvised.
And even if you've gone through all the criteria, onboarding has its own logic, but month three and month six tell you more than month one. A good agency shows in the CPA trend and the quality of optimization decisions over the medium term, not in the initial commercial proposal. The first 30 days are the earliest signal available to you — how they handle this period says a great deal about how they'll handle the rest of the relationship.
At DAFE Digital we manage Google Ads for online stores with full transparency. Account access, reports on real sales, no long-term contracts.
A Google Ads agency for eCommerce must understand product feeds, Shopping, PMax and multi-touch attribution — not just set up Search campaigns. The criteria from the article apply to us too: evaluate us by them.
Adela Mincea
Marketing Economist · Fondatoare DAFE Digital · Formator ANC
Adela is a Marketing Economist with over 10 years of paid media experience across Europe, the US and Asia. She founded DAFE Digital for one reason: serious Romanian businesses deserve the same paid media expertise companies get in any other market. That's what DAFE Digital does.
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