How to Hire a Google Ads Consultant: 7 Red Flags That Cost You Money

If you're looking for a Google Ads consultant for a small business, you'll find plenty of confident profiles and very few ways to tell the good ones from the expensive ones. I'm Aditya, a solo Google Ads and Meta Ads consultant based in India, working remotely with owners overseas. I've managed 89 ad accounts and ₹93.4L (~$112K) of spend, ₹21.1L (about $25K) of it on Google.

I've also made the mistakes a bad consultant makes, and I publish them. These are the seven red flags I'd check for if I were hiring.

The 7 red flags

1. They only show winners. Anyone can screenshot a good campaign. Ask what they stopped, and why.
2. They want to own the account. More on this below.
3. They promise a number. "Guaranteed 5× return" is a guess dressed up as a plan. Nobody controls your margins, your website or your competitors.
4. The report is clicks and impressions. Clicks don't pay anyone. A report that can't show enquiries or sales is hiding something.
5. They run Smart campaigns or Max Clicks by default. Both can be fine in the right hands. Both can also quietly burn your budget, as you'll see below.
6. Nobody checks search terms. If your consultant never mentions the actual searches that triggered your ads, you're probably paying for irrelevant clicks.
7. They can't explain the plan in plain words. If you can't repeat it back to a colleague, you can't judge it.

Who should own my Google Ads account?

You should. The Google Ads account must sit under your business, with your consultant given access as a manager or user. You can see every dollar of spend and remove their access at any time.

If they own it and "lend" it to you, you lose your campaigns, your conversion data and your search history the day you part ways. For an overseas owner this matters even more, because chasing someone across time zones for a login is a bad place to be. I always work inside the client's own account.

What should a Google Ads report show?

A useful report shows cost per conversion, the number of conversions (calls, form fills, bookings), total spend, and what changed since last time and why.

It should also tell you what was cut. A report that only ever goes up and to the right is a report nobody has checked.

Clicks are supporting detail, never the headline. If calls and form fills aren't tracked, fix that first.

What is a normal cost per lead for my business?

It depends on your industry, your country and what counts as a lead, so be wary of anyone who quotes you a flat number before seeing your account. A plumber's call in New York and a café's enquiry in Dubai are very different things.

What I can give you is real data from my own accounts, in India, where clicks cost far less than in the US, UK or UAE. Expect higher costs in your market. The structure carries over, the prices don't.

• A restaurant's Google Business Profile search ads got 3,857 actions at ₹2.68 (about $0.03) each.
• A hotel's campaign got 1,170 actions at ₹9.87 (about $0.12) each.
• A physio clinic's YouTube campaign cost ₹4.47 (about $0.05) per conversion and returned 18.6×.

The better approach is to work out your own number. As a hypothetical example: if a new customer is worth $400 to you and one in five enquiries becomes a customer, then you can afford to pay up to $80 for an enquiry before you lose money. Your figures will differ, but the sum is the same.

What the red flags look like when they go wrong

I'd rather you hear this from me. On my results page I list the campaigns I killed.

An education client's Google call campaign spent ₹4.79L (about $5.7K) for 157 conversions, which is ₹3,043 (about $36) each. I'd used Max Clicks bidding on broad course keywords with no negative keyword list. It's the most expensive mistake in my portfolio, and the reason I now check search terms regularly.

A nightlife venue's Google Smart campaign got 4 lakh impressions and 16,326 clicks for a single conversion. Smart campaigns hide the search terms, so I moved it to a standard Search campaign where I could see and control everything.

Those are red flags 5 and 6 above. A consultant who admits this, and shows what they changed, tells you how they'll act when your account has a bad month.

Working with a consultant in another time zone

I run day-to-day work over WhatsApp and email. You get a written report on a set schedule, and anything urgent is flagged straight away. Ad accounts don't need a call every day, so the time gap matters less than people expect. I've run Google Ads for a business in Ontario, Canada and for a film production company in the UK, both through a third party, and I'm now taking direct clients in the US, UK, UAE, Australia and Singapore.

Before you hire anyone

Ask three things. Who will log into my account each week? Who owns the account? What will the report show? Then ask to see what they've stopped.

If you want to hire a Google Ads expert who works on your account personally, look through the results first, including the cuts. Then get in touch with your business, your budget and what you've tried. I'll tell you honestly whether Google Ads makes sense yet.

If you're still deciding between a specialist and a larger firm, read Google Ads expert vs agency.