Questions to Ask a PPC Agency Before You Sign (A Painter's Checklist)
The questions to ask a PPC agency before hiring one for your painting company: account ownership, tracking, exclusivity, contracts, and the answers that matter.
Published July 5, 2026 · PaintingPPC
The questions to ask a PPC agency before hiring one come down to five things: who owns the ad account, how results get tracked, whether the agency also works for your competitors, what the contract locks you into, and what number they report success in. A painting contractor who gets straight answers on those five can hire with confidence. A painter who skips them usually finds out the hard way, about six months and several thousand dollars later.
I run Google Ads for painting contractors, which means I sit on the other side of this interview several times a month. What follows is the checklist I would hand my own brother if he ran a painting company and was shopping for an agency. Including agencies that are not us.
Who owns the Google Ads account?
You should. Full stop. The correct setup is that the Google Ads account, the conversion tracking, and the website analytics all live under your ownership, and the agency gets admin access to work in them. If the agency “sets everything up for you” inside their own account, every dollar of history, every keyword lesson, and every quality score improvement you paid for walks out the door with them when you leave.
This is the single most common trap in the industry, and it is not an accident. An agency that owns your account owns your exit cost. Guides on evaluating PPC agencies flag insistence on account ownership as a proposal-stage red flag for exactly this reason. Ask the question in the first meeting. A good agency answers “you own everything, we get access” without blinking. If you hear anything about their proprietary system or a shared account, keep shopping.
How will you track which ads become booked jobs?
If the answer stops at “we track calls and form fills,” push harder, because that only counts inquiries. A painting lead is not money. A lead becomes money when the estimate is signed, and an agency that cannot connect a signed job back to the keyword that produced it is flying blind, no matter how nice the dashboard looks.
The real answer involves plumbing: call tracking that records which keyword and ad triggered each call, spam filtering so bot calls don’t pollute the numbers, and some feedback loop where you tell the agency which estimates actually closed. We wrote up the difference this makes in cost per lead vs cost per booked job, but the short version is that an account optimized toward inquiries drifts toward cheap, low-intent clicks, and an account optimized toward booked jobs hunts for customers. Ask any agency you interview to walk you through, step by step, how a signed cabinet job in their system traces back to a search query. Vague answers here predict vague reports later.
Do you work with other painters in my market?
Most painting contractors never think to ask this, and most agencies are quietly grateful. If your agency also manages the painter across town, both of you are bidding on “exterior painters near me” through the same firm. Someone at that agency decides, every day, which client gets the aggressive strategy. Both of you pay full price for it.
There is no clever workaround. The honest fix is structural: the agency takes one painter per market and turns the others away. If the agency you’re interviewing won’t commit to that in writing, at minimum get them to disclose every painting client they run within your service area, then decide whether you’re comfortable being one of several horses in their race. We’ve laid out the conflict-of-interest math in full if you want the worked example.
What does the contract lock me into?
Confidence in results shows up as short commitments. Reviews of common agency red flags consistently list long contracts with steep termination fees among the warning signs, and the logic is simple: an agency that expects to earn your business every month doesn’t need a twelve-month cage to keep you. A reasonable ask is month-to-month after an initial 90-day ramp, since Google Ads legitimately needs 60 to 90 days of data before judging it is fair.
While you’re in the paperwork, check three clauses: who owns the account and its data at termination (see question one), what exactly the management fee covers, and whether there’s a fee tied to a percentage of ad spend, which quietly rewards the agency for spending more of your money whether or not jobs come in.
What number will you report, and what’s a realistic result?
Here is a comparison worth keeping:
| Answer you’ll hear | What it actually means |
|---|---|
| ”We report impressions, clicks, and CTR” | Activity metrics. None of them pay a crew. |
| ”We report cost per lead” | Better, but spam and tire-kickers count as wins. |
| ”We report cost per booked job” | The number that has to agree with your bank account. |
| ”We guarantee X leads / #1 position” | Nobody can promise that honestly. Walk away. |
Guaranteed results are a classic pre-signature red flag, because no honest agency can promise outcomes before auditing your tracking and your market. What they can do is talk benchmarks. Painting is now among the most expensive home-service trades to advertise, with industry data putting average painting CPCs around $13.74, roughly 75 percent above the home services average. An agency quoting you $3 clicks and $20 leads in a competitive metro either doesn’t know the trade or hopes you don’t. Our own answer to the reporting question is public on the how we measure page.
FAQ
What should a PPC agency charge a painting contractor? Typical structures are a flat monthly fee, a percentage of ad spend (often 10 to 20 percent), or a hybrid. The structure matters more than the amount: flat fees keep incentives clean, while percentage-of-spend models reward the agency for spending more whether or not it books jobs. Always confirm the fee is separate from ad spend and ask what happens to the fee if spend changes.
How long should I give a new PPC agency before judging results? About 90 days. Google’s bidding systems need conversion data to learn, and the first month is usually spent building negatives and killing junk search terms. If nothing has visibly improved by day 90, ask hard questions. If the agency demands 12 months before you’re allowed to judge anything, that’s the contract protecting them, not the strategy.
Should the agency have painting industry experience? It helps more than generalists admit. An agency that knows the trade already has negative keyword lists for DIY searches and paint suppliers, knows cabinet refinishing converts differently than exterior repaints, and knows July is peak exterior season while January is when interior keywords carry the account. A generalist can learn all that, but they learn it on your budget.
Can I just run Google Ads myself instead? Yes, and some painters do it well. The setup work is the hard part: keyword match types, negatives, tracking, and location settings. We published the full DIY prep checklist with no pitch attached. If you’d rather spend that time on ladders and estimates, that’s what agencies are for.
The bottom line
Five questions: who owns the account, how do booked jobs get tracked, do you run my competitors, what does the contract bind me to, and what number defines success. Any agency worth hiring, PaintingPPC included, should answer all five in plain English in the first conversation.
If you want to hear our answers directly, book a call. Twenty minutes, and you can read this checklist straight at us.