How to choose a Google Ads specialist: 12 questions
The 12 interview questions to ask a Google Ads specialist and what a good answer looks like: access, measurement, campaign structure and reporting.
By Roozbeh Nazari · CEO
When you are looking for a Google Ads specialist, most interviews run on the results of past campaigns and get stuck there: the other side describes an example of their own choosing, and you cannot verify it. What is far more telling are the questions that show how the candidate works with an account. The 12 questions below are built to make the method visible, whether you go with an agency or a freelance Google advertising specialist. For each one we have also written what to look for inside the answer. We covered scope and fee models separately in the Google Ads consulting article.
We have grouped the questions under four headings: account access and transparency, measurement, campaign structure and budget, reporting and working rhythm. Running the interview in that order works, because if the answers in the first two headings are weak, the discussion about campaign structure has no practical meaning.
Account access and transparency (1-3)
1. In whose name will the ad account be opened? The answer you want is clear: the account is opened in your business's name and ownership stays with you, while the specialist or agency works with manager access. In arrangements where the account belongs to the agency, when the work ends you lose the historical data, the conversion records and the learned optimisation history. Access levels and the invitation flow are documented on the Google Ads side; the candidate is expected to know the distinction.
2. What access level will you give me, and how often can I look at the account myself? A good answer takes it for granted that you are given admin-level access. Approaches that suggest proceeding only through a prepared report, and treat live account access as unnecessary, remove your ability to verify anything later.
3. How do you record the changes you make? The answer you want is the in-account change history plus a short note explaining why it was made. "You can look at the change history" is not enough on its own; the history shows what changed, not why.
The common purpose of these three questions is to determine from the start whether the work will run on your infrastructure or inside the specialist's own closed arrangement. In a setup where the account, the measurement and the records are yours, changing specialist is a few days' work. Otherwise, when the work ends you have to start from zero, and that cost appears in no proposal. Noting the answers to these three questions in the interview and carrying them into the contract largely prevents disputes later.
Measurement and conversions (4-6)
4. How do you define a conversion? This is the most telling question in the whole interview. A weak answer runs on clicks, impressions or "traffic growth". A solid answer defines the action the business actually values, explains how it will be measured and which source it will come from. Google's conversion measurement documentation defines four data sources — website, app, phone calls and offline; the candidate should be able to explain which one they chose and why.
5. How do you verify that the conversion setup is working correctly? The answer you want includes testing the setup, checking tag status, and comparing the figures against the analytics side once the first records arrive. The two sides' numbers never match exactly; what matters is that the candidate can explain where the difference comes from.
6. What do you do to avoid counting the same conversion twice? This problem is common in businesses where messaging, phone and form channels all run at once. A good answer separates which conversion actions count as primary and which are kept for observation only. If you want to go deeper on the infrastructure side of measurement, the server-side tagging article sets out the setup decisions.
Campaign structure and budget (7-9)
7. What will you do in the account in the first 30 days? The answer you want is not a list of campaigns but an order: an audit of the existing account and measurement, a search terms review, verification of audience and geography settings, and only then new structure. An approach that says "let's open a new campaign" on day one is starting without using the data it already has.
8. How do you split the budget across campaigns, and when do you change that split? A good answer separates brand from non-brand searches, does not put demand-capturing and demand-creating campaigns in the same basket, and says at what threshold it will decide to shift budget. For setting expectations on what determines cost, see the Google Ads cost article.
9. In what situation would you recommend pausing the advertising? Insist on asking this one. A specialist who has an answer is thinking of the spend as tied to your outcome rather than their own revenue. A specialist without an answer tends to keep the account running under all conditions.
There is one complementary question you can add under campaign structure: how often do you review the search terms report, and how do you grow the negative keyword list? This is one of the most concrete indicators of whether the daily work is actually being done. In accounts nobody looks at regularly, a considerable share of the budget goes to queries unrelated to the service, and that loss is only visible when you look at the terms list.
Reporting and working rhythm (10-12)
10. Which three numbers sit at the top of your monthly report? The answer you want starts with the numbers the business decides on: conversion count, cost per conversion and spend in the period. Reports that open with impression and click counts usually describe activity rather than outcome.
11. How do you write the report in a bad month? A good answer is concrete: what fell, which hypothesis was tested, the result of the test, and the next step. An approach that waves a bad month away with seasonality or "an algorithm change" may not know what worked in the good month either.
12. When we stop working with you, what do we keep? The answer you want: the account itself, the conversion setup, audience lists, negative keyword lists, ad copy and change records. Work that cannot give a clear answer here starts producing dependency by the third month.
How to score the answers
After the interview, mark the 12 questions in three categories: explained the method, gave an example but not the method, dodged the question. For the decision, look less at the total and more at which questions fall into the first category. A candidate who cannot explain method under the access and measurement headings leaves their good campaign-side answers unverifiable in practice.
It also helps not to leave the scoring to a single interview. Listening to two candidates separately against the same 12 questions and putting the answers side by side yields more information than one long interview with a single candidate, because two different answers to the same question reveal on their own which one is a method.
One last warning: proposals that guarantee rankings or a particular cost per conversion are incompatible with how the ad auction works. Competition, season and landing page quality change the outcome; an approach that presents these as commitments will later change the definition to meet the commitment. We summarise how we work on the paid side on the paid media page; for the steps of setting up an account from scratch, the advertising on Google article sets out the order.