Choosing a Google Ads Marketing Agency

Google Ads is the easiest marketing channel to spend money on and one of the hardest to do well. That combination has produced an entire industry of agencies who are very good at spending your budget and much less good at explaining what it bought.

This is a guide to telling the difference before you sign, not after.

The fee structure question, first

Most agencies charge one of two ways, and the difference matters more than almost anything else on their pitch deck.

Percentage of ad spend. The agency takes a cut of what you spend, typically 10 to 20%. The problem is structural rather than moral: an agency paid this way earns more when you spend more. When they recommend increasing your budget, or adding a high-spend channel, or broadening your targeting, you cannot fully separate the advice from the incentive. Most will act honestly anyway. But you are asking them to give you advice that costs them money to give.

Flat fee. The agency charges a fixed monthly amount regardless of your media spend. Their income does not change if they tell you to spend less. Which means when they do tell you to spend less, you can believe them.

We charge flat fees, and we say so plainly because it is the single clearest signal of whose interests the advice serves.

Ask about this in the first conversation. The answer tells you what to discount for.

What a good Google Ads account actually looks like

You can audit this yourself, roughly, in twenty minutes. Ask for access to your own account (you should have it, and if you do not, that is the first red flag).

Search terms report. This shows what people actually typed to trigger your ads, as opposed to the keywords you bought. Look at it. If it is full of irrelevant searches, you are paying for clicks from people who will never buy, and nobody is maintaining the negative keyword list. This is the most common form of budget leak in this market and it is entirely preventable.

Negative keyword list. Should be substantial and growing. If it is short or empty, nobody is watching.

Conversion tracking. Should exist, should be accurate, and should track a real business outcome (an enquiry, a call, a sale), not a page view. If your agency is optimising toward "clicks" or "page views", they are optimising toward a number that does not pay you.

Match types. If everything is broad match with no controls, the account is on autopilot and Google is deciding where your money goes.

Landing pages. Are people who click a specific ad taken to a page about that specific thing, or dumped on the homepage? Dumping traffic on the homepage is the single fastest way to waste an ad budget.

Ad copy. Multiple variations, being tested, refreshed. Not one ad written eighteen months ago.

If most of these are wrong, you are not being managed. You are being billed.

The questions to ask before you hire

1. "Who owns the account?" It must be you. If the agency runs your campaigns inside their own account, then when you leave, you leave with nothing: no history, no data, no learning, no assets. Some agencies do this deliberately. Insist on your own Google Ads account with the agency as a manager.

2. "What will you actually do in month one?" The honest answer is: audit the account, fix the tracking, clean the search terms, restructure what is broken. If the answer is "launch new campaigns", ask why they are building on a foundation they have not checked.

3. "What will you report on?" Impressions and clicks are not results. Cost per enquiry is. Cost per customer is better. An agency that reports on "engagement" is reporting on something that cannot be spent.

4. "What would make you tell us to stop spending?" A good agency has an answer. A bad one has never considered the question.

5. "Show me a search terms report you cleaned up." Specific, verifiable, and revealing. It is the work most agencies skip because it is boring and invisible, and it is where most of the money is saved.

Red flags

• Guaranteed positions or guaranteed results. Nobody controls the auction.
• They will not give you account access. There is no legitimate reason for this.
• Reporting that leads with impressions. A report that opens with reach is a report designed to obscure.
• No mention of negative keywords, ever. They are not maintaining the account.
• A very cheap management fee. Managing an account properly takes real hours. If the fee is implausibly low, either the work is not being done or the money is coming from somewhere else, usually a percentage of spend, sometimes an undisclosed markup.
• Setup with a long lock-in. A good agency should have to keep earning the next month.

What is different about Google Ads in the UAE

Cost per click is high in competitive categories. Property, legal, medical, and financial services are expensive. Budget discipline matters more here than in most markets.

Bilingual search is a genuine advantage. Arabic search campaigns are competed for far less than English ones, and most advertisers ignore them entirely. Written natively rather than translated, they can produce a materially lower cost per enquiry.

Phone and WhatsApp beat forms. UAE buyers convert on the phone. Call extensions, click-to-call campaigns, and WhatsApp as a conversion path usually outperform a contact form. If your account is optimising for form fills only, it is optimising for the weaker signal.

Local intent is strong. "Near me" and city-modified searches carry high intent and lower competition than the head terms. Most advertisers bid on the head terms and ignore these.

The thing nobody tells you

Your Google Ads data is the best keyword research you will ever own.

The search terms that actually convert in your ad account are the terms worth ranking for organically. Most businesses run ads and SEO as separate projects with separate agencies who never speak. That is a waste of the most valuable data you have.

If you are doing both, make sure whoever runs your SEO has access to your ads data. If they have not asked for it, they are not doing the job properly.

How we work

We build Google Ads accounts to be handed over. Your account, your data, your history, whether or not you stay with us.

We are a Google Partner. Our fees are flat and monthly, and we never take a percentage of your ad spend. If the right answer is to spend less, that advice costs us nothing to give and you can take it at face value.

We report on enquiries and cost per enquiry, not impressions. And we will tell you when a campaign is not working rather than reframing it.