Are There Any Good Marketing Agencies? The Truth Business Owners Deserve

Here's something that doesn't get said enough: the reason good agencies are hard to find isn't just that bad ones are loud and more sales reps than ad managers.

It's that the channel that used to make good ones visible is broken.

For years, the way real experts in PPC built trust was through education. 

People like me explained match types. We talked about the pivot tables we use to analyze our accounts. We broke down campaign structure (I still do this as a subject matter expert over on Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal. But we wrote about the nuances that only come from actually doing the work on our own blogs.

The detailed writing, that’s how you could tell the difference between someone who understood paid search and someone who just sold it.

AI ate that channel. Writing about PPC is harder now. AI flattened the entire execution layer of the industry which was the tutorials, the walkthroughs, the “nuanced” explanations that used to differentiate experts.

A model can generate all of that in seconds. And as Google keeps automating away the levers we used to teach, there’s simply less execution‑level ground to cover. The channel didn’t disappear fully, but the part of it that was easy to write about did.

I’d argue there are always new stories to tell in PPC especially as real accounts evolve, markets shift, and buyer behavior never stays still.

But I personally find it has become harder to write about the channel in the way we used to.

As more of the execution layer gets absorbed by Google’s own AI, there’s simply less tactical ground to cover.

The levers are disappearing, the workflows are changing, and the platform is doing more of the “how” on its own. What matters now is interpreting what the system is doing, not documenting every button.

So here we are where the the experts who built their reputations on thought leadership have watched that advantage disappear.

Many have stopped publishing entirely and moved toward sales teams instead in order to fill their piplines. The ones still trying to write with genuine insight are grinding against an environment where nobody's sure what to trust anymore.

Another factor is that AI has made it possible for poorly managed accounts to still produce “good enough” results.

Automation can cover a lot of gaps in execution now, which means an account from a bad agency can look stable on the surface even when the underlying structure isn’t supporting long‑term performance or efficiency.

All of this together means the business owner trying to find a good agency is now navigating a much noisier landscape with fewer reliable signals.

And while I still find agregious mistakes in accounts that I audit, you're not being paranoid when you say, “there are no good agencies”.

The problem is structural.

So What Do Other Business Owners Actually Say

This is where if you want to feel validated you can head over to Reddit.

A recent Reddit thread on agency experiences had comments that felt almost identical — different businesses, different industries, same story.

One marketing leader who had hired or managed over 20 agencies across their career put it this way:

"I always felt like they were never going to have the depth of industry knowledge needed to truly add value. It didn't matter how much documentation, how many hours I spent explaining, or third-party resources I sent to them. It never seemed to click. So then, it's basically outsourced low-value work at exorbitant consultant rates."

Another commenter:

"It's part of the job. Agencies charge a lot, internally they're often overworked, many companies don't have someone on staff knowledgeable enough to ask the right questions so the results may not be as good as promised. Sometimes your budget is among the lowest and your business account is assigned to someone who doesn't know what they're really doing."

A third, with the most accurate framing I've seen: "It's a concept like founder dating. You go through a few to find the right one for yourself."

What strikes me about these comments isn't just the frustration — it's the resignation.

Nobody's even angry anymore. They've all adjusted their expectations down to "this is just how it works." That's a sign of an industry that has normalized something it shouldn't have and frankly I feel bad about it all.

Why Does the Agency Model Produce This Unfortunate Outcome

I feel like the why behind not being able to find a good agency’s matters.

This matters because it's not about agencies being dishonest. Many of them aren't. Some are dishonest.

It's about economics of agencies is making quality almost impossible to deliver at the prices most agencies charge.

Here's the math: a senior PPC expert costs $150,000 or more as a full-time employee. If an agency charges you $500 to $1,000 a month to manage your Google Ads, ask yourself how they're paying for a strategist, an account manager, a copywriter, a reporting team, sales overhead, and profit — all from your monthly fee.

They're not.

What you're getting is a junior person managing 30 to 40 accounts simultaneously, working through a checklist, with no time to think strategically and no real incentive to dig.

And at Google Marketing Live this year (when I was there in person) one of the keynotes explicitly stated that thanks to AI agencies can now do more. 

So it is likely going to get worse and paid search managers will be managing 100 accounts.

The Reddit commenter who described it as "outsourced low-value work at exorbitant consultant rates" was being precise.

The sales pitch is expert-level. The fulfillment is entry-level. The gap between those two things is where most agency horror stories live.

This isn't a character flaw. It's what the agency margins require and I am doing my best work here on this blog to break it down.

What Happens When You Leave A Bad Agency

One of the things I used to constantly post about on my LinkedIn agency practices is account ownership (this always got high engagement from agency owners because it is awful) — and it's the one I want every business owner to understand before they sign anything.

Some agencies build your Google Ads account inside their own infrastructure. The account is in their name. Your campaigns, your conversion history, your audience data, your quality signals — everything lives in their house.

When you leave, you leave it all behind and start over from scratch.

In the Google Ads and PPC industry we call this, “holding ad accounts hostage”.

I just took on a client in exactly this situation.

We had to rebuild the entire account: conversion tracking setup, Tag Manager, Analytics goals, campaign structure — everything.

At $6,000 a month in ad spend, that rebuild costs roughly three months of lost learning while the algorithm relearns the account. That's $18,000 in spend going toward restarting and learning rather than growing — not counting anyone's time.

There is no good reason for this arrangement. Your Google Ads account should be in your name, under your control, accessible to you whether you're working with someone or not. If an agency won't guarantee full account ownership and direct access before you sign, that's the conversation that ends the relationship before it starts.

So How Do You Know If You Are Talking To The Wrong Agency

After 17 years in paid search, including being regularly hired by agencies to audit and train their own teams and working at agencies I've learned the fastest diagnostic isn't the red flags you see in the account.

It's the language they use in the sales call.

Please walk away if you hear any of these:

"We have a proprietary system."

There is no proprietary system that meaningfully improves on Google Ads itself. There's Google Ads, and there's how well someone uses it. Anyone claiming secret sauce is selling you a pitch, not expertise.

"Our platform gives you better reporting."

Some agencies run all of their clients' ads out of a single master account and point clients to a third-party dashboard to see results. You're never looking at your real Google Ads account instead you're looking at a layer the agency controls, and you lose access when you leave. Client access to the actual Google Ads account is non-negotiable.

"We guarantee results."

OMG NO!

Google Ads results are influenced by your market, your competitors, your landing page, your offer, your seasonality, and dozens of factors no agency controls. A real expert won't guarantee results ever.

They'll guarantee honesty and their best thinking. If someone guarantees you results, they're either lying or they don't understand what they're selling or banking that you don’t understand which I file under nefarious.

"We have a proven process for Google Ads."

Ask them what they do when the process doesn't work. That single question separates people who understand the platform from people who learned a workflow. I have heard that at “good agencies” as well. Again, I think they are holding on to what once was and it is sad to see. It doesn’t help you. Google Ads and PPC are custom solutions and not processes that can be proven.

For example, I’m working with a client right now whose competitor campaign is outperforming their non‑brand campaign. Under normal circumstances, I would never build that campaign first — it goes against every best practice I’ve developed over the years. But the data told a different story. If I hadn’t been watching the patterns closely, I would have missed an opportunity the platform itself would never have surfaced.

The competior campain currently is converting at an $8 CPA and the Non-Brand is at $239.

And before you sign anything, ask these directly:

— Will I have direct login access to the actual Google Ads account in my name?

— Who manages my account day to day, and how many other accounts do they manage?

— How do you determine match types for a new account?

— What does a week of optimization actually look like?

— Can you show me an account where something didn't work and what you changed? (like for me, I currently have a non-brand that isn’t working and I have 3 other ideas to try before we pause the campaign)

How they answer those questions tells you more than any case study.

Why Agency Case Studies Won’t Tell You Much

Agencies LOVE telling you about their past successes. Then when agency owners are in a room they laugh and say, “well we all know it is situational performance in a case study”

Case studies are marketing. Like a timeshare presentation.

They're cherry-picked from best-case outcomes, they can be faked, they can be bought from "agency in a box" programs, and they hide the months where performance tanked.

Some of the biggest names in the industry — the ones with the flashiest case studies — are the accounts I've been brought in to rebuild from scratch.

There was a major industry event recently where an agency was highlighted on stage.

I won’t name the event, because it would immediately reveal who I’m talking about, but every seasoned practitioner in the room — myself included — couldn’t help but laugh and you could hear it. We all know their work is consistently poor.

Unfortunately, their size and visibility still attract clients, and the rest of us end up cleaning up the mess they leave behind.

The accounts held hostage situation I described above?

I've found it inside agencies whose websites show 5-star reviews and impressive revenue attribution numbers and awards. The case study had nothing to do with what I found when I opened the actual Google Ads account.

So What Does A Good Agency Look Like

I know because some hire me to consult or to train their staff and I refer clients to them. I promise they exist. I also promise they are struggling in this new world.

A good agency brings in outside expertise to audit their work and train their teams.

They want to know what they're missing. Even in those agencies, I see the same pressures — owners expecting two-hour email response times, volume demands that strain senior capacity, young teams doing their best under real stress.

But they're honest about the gaps. They're actively trying to close them and work towards making the industry a better place. And they're not protecting their process from scrutiny.

The hard part is the average business owner might not know about them because many of the best Google Ads experts like myself struggle to talk to the client because we are busy educating the industry. Some of that is accidental. For me it is because that is where I am comfortable. It is harder for me to simplify than to talk about the details and it is something I actively work on so my content reaches the people who need to hear it.

A good agency explains their decisions in plain language.

They say "it depends" instead of giving you false confidence. They don't hold your account hostage. They don't oversell and it probably costs them.

I experienced this just the other day. I likely lost a potential client because they were fixated on impression share. I kept explaining that impression share isn’t the goal — it’s a directional metric, not a business outcome — but their last freelancer had promised to “fix” it, and they couldn’t move off that promise. I could have helped them, but I won’t reinforce a metric that doesn’t serve their actual goals.

And as a final note a true Google Ads expert won't flinch when you ask for an outside audit — in fact, the good ones will suggest it themselves.

That's rare. But it exists and I don’t want business owners to lose hope.

The Most Honest Answer To: Are There Good Marketing Agencies?

Are there good marketing agencies? Yes.

Are they what most business owners end up with? No. And the odds are working against you in ways that have nothing to do with your judgment.

The best protection you have is going in with the right questions, insisting on account ownership before you sign, and listening for the language that separates people who understand the work from people who understand how to sell it.

If you want a second opinion on what's actually happening inside your current account — or want to know what to look for before you hire someone new — that's exactly what a Protective PPC™ Assessment is for.