Search advertising is unusual among marketing channels in that the mechanics are largely public and the platforms automate more of them every year. What remains scarce is judgement: which queries are worth buying at all, what a customer is worth, what to feed the bidding system so it learns the right thing, and when to stop. A proposal that opens with account structure and ad extensions has skipped the part that decides whether any of it makes money.
The economics have to come before the account
What is a customer worth over their lifetime, what proportion of enquiries become customers, and what can you afford to pay for one? Without those three numbers no bid target means anything and every performance conversation becomes an argument about cost per click. A competent agency will ask for them in the first meeting and will decline to promise a cost per lead before it has them.
Feeding the machine is the modern skill
Automated bidding optimises toward whatever conversion you report to it, so the highest-value work is usually getting accurate, de-duplicated, qualified conversion data back into the platform, including offline outcomes from your sales system. Ask how they have done that elsewhere and with which tools. Agencies that treat conversion tracking as a setup checkbox will optimize your account toward form fills from people who were never going to buy.
Brand terms, competitor terms and what they are worth
Bidding on your own brand is cheap and defensive, and some of it would have been free traffic. Bidding on competitors is legal in most circumstances but invites retaliation and usually converts poorly. Both deserve an explicit decision and a separate line in reporting, because mixing them with generic campaigns makes the whole account look more efficient than it is.
Ask what they would stop doing
An agency that only ever adds campaigns is managing a budget rather than an account. The useful answer describes what they would turn off first, what they consider unprofitable at your numbers, and the circumstances under which they would recommend reducing spend. Willingness to hand budget back is the clearest signal available that the interests are aligned.
Questions people ask about search advertising agency
Search advertising or SEO first?
They answer different questions on different timescales. Paid search tells you within weeks which queries convert and what a customer costs, which is precisely the research an organic program needs. Many businesses use paid deliberately as market research while the slower organic work compounds.
How much of the account is automated now?
Bidding, much of the matching and increasingly asset selection. That shifts the agency's job to budget allocation, conversion quality, negative keywords, creative and offers. Proposals still sold on manual bid tuning are either dated or describe campaign types that are shrinking.
What is a fair management fee?
Enough to fund real weekly attention on your account. Compare fees as hours rather than as percentages, then ask who those hours belong to. A low percentage of a large budget can still be a poorly serviced account if one person carries twenty of them.
Should the agency have access to our CRM?
Ideally yes, at least to the outcome data, because sending qualified results back to the platform is where the largest gains usually are. If access is impossible, agree a manual upload process and a cadence, and accept that the account will optimize more slowly without it.