August 10, 2026 · 8 min read
Hiring a paid search agency is one of those decisions that looks simple until you start reading the proposals. One shop quotes a flat monthly retainer. The next wants a percentage of your ad spend. A third bundles "strategy and optimization" into a single number with no line items behind it. Underneath the pricing noise, a paid search agency does a fairly specific job — and it is worth knowing exactly what that job is before you pay anyone to do it.
A paid search agency owns the parts of Google Ads that compound: account structure, keyword and negative-keyword strategy, bidding, landing-page alignment, and conversion tracking. Below roughly $1,000/month in ad spend, that work rarely pays for itself as an outsourced service. Above it, account structure is usually what separates ads that fund themselves from ads that quietly leak budget.
Strip away the vocabulary and the work falls into six jobs. Any agency worth paying should be able to point at each one and tell you what they changed last month.
This is the unglamorous foundation and the single biggest lever. How campaigns are split, how ad groups are themed, how tightly keywords are grouped around a single intent — all of it decides whether Google can learn what a good click looks like for you. Badly structured accounts are the most common thing we find in audits: one campaign, forty unrelated keywords, one generic ad, and a bidding algorithm with no signal to work from.
Adding keywords is easy. The discipline is in subtraction. A search campaign with no negative-keyword list pays for every loose match Google decides is close enough: job seekers, students writing papers, people looking for the free version, competitors checking your ad copy. Negative keywords are how you stop renting traffic that was never going to buy.
Most underperforming accounts are not missing clever keywords. They are missing the list of words that should have been excluded on day one.
Google's automated bidding works well — once it has conversion data to learn from. Before that, it is guessing expensively. Deciding when to hand control to automation, when to cap it, and how to split budget across campaigns that convert at very different rates is judgement work, and it is where an experienced operator earns their fee.
Responsive search ads give Google a pool of headlines and descriptions to assemble. Feeding that pool well — distinct angles rather than fifteen rewordings of the same promise — is what makes testing meaningful. So is knowing when a test has actually concluded versus when you are reading noise.
This is where most agency relationships quietly break down. The agency controls the ad; someone else controls the page the ad points at. If the page loads slowly, buries the phone number, or answers a different question than the ad promised, no amount of bid tuning will fix it. An agency that cannot touch your site can only ever do half the job.
At Nova the ads team and the development team are the same team. When a campaign needs a faster page, a clearer form, or a landing page that did not exist yesterday, that is a ticket — not a negotiation with a third party.
If tracking is wrong, everything downstream is wrong: bidding optimizes toward the wrong event, reports overstate results, and you make budget decisions on fiction. Verifying that a conversion in the dashboard corresponds to a real lead in your inbox is genuinely part of the job.
You will meet three models. None is inherently dishonest; each creates a different incentive, and it is worth knowing which one you are buying.
| Model | How it works | The incentive it creates |
|---|---|---|
| Percentage of ad spend | A share of what you spend, typically in the 10–20% range | Rewards growing your spend — which is aligned only while growth is genuinely profitable |
| Flat monthly retainer | A fixed fee regardless of spend | Predictable for you; rewards efficiency, but can under-serve fast-growing accounts |
| Hybrid / performance | Base fee plus a variable component tied to results | Aligned in principle, but only as good as the definition of "result" — insist on that in writing |
Whichever model you pick, two questions matter more than the number: who owns the ad account, and what happens on the day you leave. If the agency owns the account, your entire performance history walks out with them. That is the most expensive clause in the industry and it is usually not mentioned.
You should own your Google Ads account, your conversion data, and your history — always. We run ads month to month for exactly this reason: an agency should keep your business by being useful, not by holding the account hostage.
Plenty of businesses are better off not hiring one, at least not yet.
An agency that agrees with one of these and tells you so is worth more than one that takes the retainer anyway.
Clicks and impressions are inputs, not results. Ask instead: is cost per qualified lead moving in the right direction over a quarter? Is the share of budget going to search terms you would have chosen yourself rising? Is the negative-keyword list growing? Those three trends tell you more than any dashboard screenshot.
Give it a quarter before judging. A month is not enough for automated bidding to learn, and a week is noise.
In practice, yes. "Paid search" usually means Google and Microsoft search ads specifically, while "PPC" is sometimes used more loosely to include display, shopping and paid social. Ask what channels are actually covered rather than relying on the label.
Plan for a quarter. The first weeks are spent gathering conversion data, cutting wasted search terms, and letting bidding stabilize. Accounts judged after three weeks are almost always judged too early.
Yes, and at small budgets you probably should. The interface is learnable. What is hard to do part-time is the ongoing discipline — the weekly search-term review that keeps waste out. If you want a sense of what the numbers look like first, our guide to what Google Ads actually cost walks through the budget math.
Most Canadian agencies land in the same ranges as US shops: a percentage of spend, a flat retainer, or a hybrid. What varies more than price is scope — whether landing pages, tracking setup and creative are included or billed separately. For a full breakdown of what a typical management fee is supposed to include, and what most companies quietly leave out, see our guide to what a PPC management company actually charges for.
Look at the search terms report. If you see queries you would never pay for, and they have been running for months, the account is not being reviewed. Our 10-point Google Ads audit is the same checklist we use, and you can run it yourself in an afternoon.
We will go through your Google Ads account against the ten checks above and tell you what we would change — including if the honest answer is that you do not need an agency yet. Bilingual team in Montreal, month to month, and the account stays yours.
See how we manage adsRun the 10-point audit yourself