How to evaluate an enterprise Google Ads agency

Who this is for — and who it is not

Written for CMOs, procurement leads, and growth leads shortlisting vendors for U.S. Google Ads accounts spending $50,000 to $500,000+ per month.

It is not written for buyers who want Meta, SEO, and web development under one statement of work, or for accounts under $50,000 per month. Different problem, different vendor set.

Define outcomes before you collect proposals

The most expensive mistake in an enterprise Google Ads RFP is writing the scope before writing the outcome. If the brief asks for campaign management, you will receive proposals about campaign management. If it asks for qualified pipeline at a defensible cost, with a named measurement definition, the responses separate immediately.

Write down the outcome metric, the system of record it lives in, the time horizon you will judge it over, and what you will do if it moves the wrong way. Vendors who cannot commit to being measured that way will tell you so in the first call, which is the point.

Scope filter: Google Ads specialist vs multi-channel holding pitch

A holding-company pitch bundles Google with social, SEO, creative, and analytics, then staffs each with whoever is available. At $50k–$500k+/month in Google Ads alone, the channel deserves senior attention that does not compete with five other disciplines for the same head.

Neither model is universally right. Decide which one you are buying before the bake-off, and say so in the brief. Mixing the two in one shortlist produces an apples-to-oranges scoring exercise that nobody wins.

People model: who actually runs the account?

Ask for the name, the tenure, and the account load of the person who will be in the account weekly — not the org chart. The gap between the pitch team and the delivery team is the single most common source of disappointment in enterprise retainers.

Ask how many accounts that person carries, and ask the same question of every finalist so the answers are comparable. Then ask what happens during vacation, turnover, or a spend spike.

Premier Partner — useful filter, not a substitute for diligence

Premier Partner status confirms certification, spend thresholds, and performance requirements Google sets for the top tier of its partner program. That makes it a reasonable first filter on a long list, and a fair question to ask any respondent. What it does not tell you is who will run your account, how your conversions are defined, or whether the agency will argue with you when the data says to cut spend.

Use the badge to shorten the list, then do the diligence. Our Premier Partner page explains what the status covers and what it does not.

Measurement and reporting finance will accept

The reporting question is not “what dashboard do you use.” It is whether the numbers presented to your board reconcile to the system of record. Ask each finalist how platform conversions map to CRM stages, how offline conversion import is maintained when the sales process changes, and what they do when the two sources disagree.

Ask who presents the reporting, and whether that person can defend a decision to reduce spend. Our own operating approach is documented in the methodology and the tooling behind it in the X-Vault.

Commercial terms: fees, software pass-through, termination, data ownership

Separate three things in every proposal: the management fee, any software billed or passed through, and one-time work such as tracking rebuilds. When they are bundled into one number, you cannot compare finalists and you cannot renegotiate later. How fee models differ is covered in Google Ads agency pricing, and the software line specifically in the guide to Google Ads software fees.

Then settle the exit before you sign: notice period, who owns the Google Ads account and its history, whether scripts and conversion configuration transfer, and how long the agency supports a handover. An agency confident in its work will make this easy.

Use an independent audit before the bake-off

A diagnostic run before the finalist presentations changes the conversation. Instead of comparing claims, you are comparing each respondent’s reaction to a documented set of findings in your own account — which surfaces both competence and candor.

Ours is the free X-Audit for U.S. accounts spending $50k+/month, read-only access, no obligation to engage. What a senior-led audit includes describes the scope so you can hold any vendor’s diagnostic to the same standard.

Sample RFP questions

Send the same list to every finalist and compare the answers verbatim. There is no scoring matrix here on purpose — weights invented by a vendor tell you more about the vendor than about your shortlist.

1. 01What is your minimum and typical client spend band, and where does our account sit inside it?
2. 02Is your scope Google Ads only, or is Google one line inside a multi-channel retainer?
3. 03Name the strategist who will run this account. What is their tenure, and how long have they managed accounts at our spend level?
4. 04How many accounts does that strategist carry at once, and who covers during leave?
5. 05Does your diagnostic require edit access, or is read-only sufficient?
6. 06List every software line item you would bill or pass through, and state whether the contract is in our name or yours.
7. 07If the contract ends, who owns the Google Ads account, the conversion configuration, the scripts, and the historical data?
8. 08What is the reporting cadence, who presents it, and will the numbers reconcile to our CRM rather than to platform conversions?
9. 09How do you handle offline conversion import, and what happens when the CRM stage model changes?
10. 10What is your policy on Search and Performance Max overlap, and how do you prove PMax is incremental to brand and non-brand Search?
11. 11What would you change in the first 30 days, and what would you deliberately leave alone?
12. 12Which named references run accounts in our spend band, and may we speak to them without you on the call?

FAQ

Should procurement or marketing own the RFP?

Marketing should own the outcome definition and the technical questions; procurement should own commercial terms, data ownership, and termination. When procurement owns the whole process, the shortlist tends to sort on fee percentage rather than on who will actually run the account.

How many agencies should make the shortlist?

Three is usually enough at this spend level. Past that, the evaluation degrades into deck comparison, and every additional finalist costs your team hours of diligence it will not use.

When is in-house better than an agency?

When you already have senior Google Ads tenure on staff, stable headcount, and tooling budget. The trade-offs are laid out in our in-house versus agency comparison.

Do you manage channels outside Google?

No. SalesX runs Google Ads only. If your RFP requires Meta, SEO, and web development under one statement of work, we are not the right respondent.