How to Tell If Your Google Ads Manager Actually Knows What They're Doing

A client came to me after spending $27,000 on Performance Max over two months.

When I pulled up the account, something was wrong immediately and not in a subtle, hard-to-spot way. I found an obvious mistake.

There were no audience signals.

If you're not deep in Google Ads, here's why that matters: audience signals are how you tell Google who to learn from when you launch a Performance Max campaign. They're the starting point for campaign management. Without them, you're essentially handing Google $13,500 a month in ad spend and saying "figure it out." Google Ads will spend the money. It just won't necessarily spend it well.

What made this painful wasn't just the wasted budget. It was what the missing signals revealed to me: this showed me someone had tried PMax with this clients budget with no plan, no strategy, no real understanding of how a powerful advertising platform works — and a real business paid for that ignorance.

This is the thing no one in the digital advertising industry talks about openly: most small business owners have no way to evaluate whether the person managing their money is actually good. Not from a proposal. Not from a certification. Not from a polished agency deck. The information gap is almost total.

This post is my attempt to close that gap a little. Because many people who are looking to hire still believe that if someone is ‘Google Ads Certified’ they are safe.

Why The Google Ads Certification Doesn't Tell You What You Need to Know

The Google Ads certification exists because Google needs advertisers. More "certified experts" means more accounts, more spend, and more ad revenue for Google. The test validates that someone understands Google's preferred way of doing things — not that they can protect a real budget.

For large agencies managing multiple Google Ads accounts they want the their entire Google Ads teams to be certified. This is because they think it make them look good and they want to manage campaigns for brands that value the certification.

Many agencies wave a Certified Google Partner badge around like a shield. But that badge simply means they met a minimum spend threshold and passed a baseline test. It does not mean they know how to make data-driven decisions that protect your bottom line.

I worked at a large agency a few years ago that was a Google Ads Certified Premier Partner, that is something only the top 3% of agencies would get. And in this program we still didn’t have an agency rep. We didn’t have anything unique or different.

It doesn't mean their ad management is better either.

I've been doing this for 17 years. I don't think much about the certification. What I think about is the account in front of me, the business behind it, and whether every dollar of ad spend has a clear reason to be there.

Here's what the certification doesn't test:

• What to do when the data is contradicting itself.

• How to balance efficiency against scale when they're in conflict.

• Whether a campaign type is actually right for this business at this stage.

• How to tell a you the landing page is the problem, not the ads.

• How to read an ad account that's never had proper tracking set up and untangle what's real from what's noise.

None of those are on the exam. And all of them come up constantly. To manage multiple accounts you need to be strategic and understand the nuances of account performance.

Red Flags I See in the First Two Seconds

When a client grants me access to their manager account (what agencies use to safely manage multiple client accounts under one platform without sharing passwords), I'm scanning for specific things. Most of them take about two seconds to spot.

Here is what immediately raises a flag for me inside the sub-account settings:

1. Display Checked Inside a Search Campaign

Search and Display are completely different intent environments. Someone searching "emergency plumber Chicago" is not in the same headspace as someone passively scrolling a news site. Combining them in one campaign blurs your data, misaligns your messaging, and quietly bleeds budget. It's a default Google leaves on—and the first thing an experienced Google Ads expert turns off to protect your campaign performance.

2. Location Targeting Set to "People Interested In"

This is one of Google's sneakier defaults. If your business serves customers in Chicago, you don't want your ads showing to someone in Florida who googled "Chicago restaurants." But that's exactly what this setting does. I've seen six-figure annual budgets running on this setting for months because someone forgot to verify the basic location and time zone parameters. This is a sign to be of problems in the ad account.

3. Modified Broad Match Keywords

This match type was retired in 2021. If I see it in an account, it tells me no one has touched the account in years — or the person who built it learned from an outdated course and never kept up.

4. Brand and Non-Brand in the Same Campaign

These serve completely different purposes. Just like the display and search networks are different inventory types. They have different CPCs, different conversion rates, different competitive dynamics. Mixing brand and non-brand together makes your data unreadable and your bidding strategy incoherent.

5. All Broad Match with No Conversion Tracking

Broad match needs Smart Bidding to work. Smart Bidding needs conversion data. Without real tracking in place, you're giving Google permission to spend your budget on almost anything while optimizing toward nothing. This one alone can cost a business thousands before anyone notices.

The "Enterprise" Confusion: Google Ads vs. Google Ad Manager

Another massive red flag is a practitioner who doesn't understand the tools they are using. I routinely see "experts" confuse Google Ads with Google Ad Manager.

They are entirely different ecosystems:

• Google Ads is where advertisers buy traffic on the Google Display Network and Search results to improve ROI.

• Google Ad Manager (which includes enterprise tools like Doubleclick Ad Exchange) is a platform used by massive publishers to sell their own ad inventory.

If a manager starts throwing around terms like ad server architecture, ad operations, or Google AdSense monetization when you are just a small business trying to get more leads or sales, they are revealing a dangerous lack of focus. They are applying enterprise publishing vocabulary to a performance marketing problem and they are probably talking about these powerful tools to sound impressive.

The One Question That Separates Experts from Beginners

If you're evaluating someone to manage your ad campaigns and you want to cut through the sales pitch in about two minutes, ask them this:

"How do you determine match types?"

It sounds almost too simple because it is an easy question. That's exactly why it works.

• A junior answer sounds like:"I use phrase match" or "I prefer exact." It's definitive. It's a rigid rule they follow.

• An expert answer sounds like:"It depends on your risk tolerance, what we're optimizing for — efficiency or growth — what the account history shows, and what stage of data collection we're in. Match type is also a decision about what targeting you can't control at the keyword level. It's something we'd work through together based on your specific goals."

The difference isn't knowledge. It's thinking. An expert will create ad campaigns that align with your business goals.

A junior practitioner has rules. An expert has a decision process and thinking patters. They can explain, defend, and adapt based on new information. When I sit down with a client to talk match types, I'm not telling them what I always do or what saves time. I'm having a real conversation about their business, their risk tolerance, and what we're trying to accomplish and the benefits and downsides of any decision. That conversation requires expertise. It can't be faked.

When Your PPC Person Needs to Know More Than PPC

One of the things I keep coming back to is how much the work spills outside the platform. If a manager only knows how to look at multiple campaigns inside a vacuum, they will miss the macro environment.

A truly skilled partner looks across multiple channels. They understand how your Google strategy interacts with Microsoft Ads to capture cross-platform searchers. They use advanced reporting tools to extract deeper insights about your specific audiences across your entire digital footprint.

A while back, I was reviewing a client's account and noticed something off about the ads Google's AI was generating. The auto-generated copy didn't make sense for the business. I did something most PPC managers would never think to do: I pulled up the landing page and did a view source.

There was text in the page code — invisible to anyone just looking at the site, but visible to the crawler — that Google's AI was pulling into the ads.

A PPC-only specialist doesn't look there. They're not thinking about what's in the page's underlying code. But because I came from web development and SEO before I moved into paid search, I knew where to look. I found the problem. We fixed it.

Google Ads doesn't exist in isolation. Your landing page experience, your review ratings, your SEO signals, your brand perception — all of it feeds into how your campaigns perform. A specialist who only knows the platform can only fix platform problems. The issues that live in the space between channels are invisible to them.

What Actually Makes Someone Good at This

Here's something I want to say directly, because I think it matters: Credentials alone are not what you're looking for. Google Ads is a highly integrated platform.

Whether an agency is managing people's accounts for small businesses or executing complex multi-region strategies for big brands, what the good managers have in common isn't their resume. It was how they think.

They are comfortable with ambiguity. They can make an educated guess, commit to a direction, and adjust when they get more data. They understand that Google is a living, changing platform — not a rulebook you memorize once and apply forever.

We also aren't going to gt more control and go back to 2010's PPC.

What disqualifies someone isn't inexperience. It's rigid thinking. The need to have a set process for everything. The inability to say "I'm not sure yet, but here's how I'd reason through it."

If someone tells you they have a "proven system," ask what they do when the system doesn't work. There on no guarantees in Google Ads and PPC. That answer will tell you more than their Google Ads certification, their years of experience, or their case study deck.

Back to the $27,000 Account

The client who spent $27,000 on Performance Max with no audience signals didn't need a different campaign type. They needed someone who understood what PMax actually requires — that you bring the machine learning signals, that you teach the algorithm rather than just unleash it.

They needed a plan before the launch, not another deck two months later.

The fix wasn't complicated once I found it. That's often how it goes. The mistake itself is simple — a missing setup step, a default setting left on, a fundamental misunderstanding of how a campaign type works. The cost of not catching it is not simple at all.

When I find something like that — the missing audience signals, the Display network quietly draining a Search budget, the location setting running ads to the wrong geography — there's something deeply satisfying about it. Not because the mistake exists, but because I can fix it. And fixing it means protecting real money that belongs to a real business trying to grow.

That's the job. Not managing settings. Protecting outcomes.

Is Your Account Doing This Right Now?

If you are wondering how to find a good Google Ads manager and found yourself wondering whether this might be happening in your account — that's worth finding out.

A Protective PPC™ Assessment is exactly what it sounds like: I look at your account the same way I looked at the $27K PMax account. I tell you what I see, what it means, and what I'd do about it.

If something's draining your budget, I will find out what is happening.

For a more in-depth discussion on these concepts and a look at real-world examples of costly Google Ads mistakes, check out my companion video: