How to hire a UK Google Ads expert — 9 questions that separate the good from the ordinary

"Google Ads expert" is an unregulated title in 2026. Anyone can put it on their LinkedIn profile. Google's own certification programme — which used to be a rough filter — has been diluted to the point where thousands of people pass it every year and relatively few of them could run a live £20k/month account without breaking it.

If you're hiring someone to run your Google Ads in the UK — as a freelancer, a fractional consultant, or the person who'll lead an agency relationship from your side — these nine questions expose who's done the actual work vs who's done the course.

1. "Walk me through the last account you saved."

What you're looking for: a specific story. Account was doing X. Diagnosis revealed the binding constraint was Y. The change made was Z. Here's what happened next.

Red flag: generic statements about "optimising campaigns" or "improving ROAS by 40%" without a plausible sequence of decisions. If they can't remember the specifics of a recent engagement, they probably didn't own it.

Good answer: a story with specific numbers, specific decisions, and honest mention of what they tried that didn't work. Real accounts have dead-ends.

2. "Which smart-bidding strategy would you use for a low-volume B2B lead-gen account, and why?"

This is a diagnostic question — the right answer depends on volume, and a real expert will ask you what the volume is before answering.

Good answer starts: "What are the conversions per month per campaign?" Then: "Under 20/month, I'd probably start on Maximise Conversions without a target cap, because Target CPA will thrash. I'd broaden the conversion definition temporarily to accelerate learning. Move to Target CPA once campaigns settle at 30+ conversions on rolling 30."

Red flag: jumping straight to a strategy name ("Target ROAS") without asking about the account's state. Real bid-strategy choice is contextual.

3. "What's your first move when you inherit an account?"

Good answer includes some form of: check conversion tracking before anything else. Are the conversions actually firing? Are they measuring the right events? What's primary vs secondary? Without this, every downstream observation is unreliable.

Red flag: "I look at the Recommendations tab." The Recommendations tab is Google's sales pitch for itself, not a diagnostic tool.

4. "How do you set up Performance Max so it doesn't cannibalise Search?"

This is the most common quiet budget-killer of the last two years and any expert who's worked on live accounts in 2025–2026 has a view.

Good answer touches on: brand negative-keyword lists applied to Performance Max (now possible in the UI), separate high-priority brand Search campaigns, asset group segmentation by product intent, and regular review of which channel Performance Max is actually winning in.

Red flag: "Performance Max works best when you leave it alone." That's Google's marketing, not reality.

5. "When would you advise against Google Ads entirely?"

A real expert knows when their tool is the wrong tool. If the answer is "Google Ads can work for any business", that's a sales pitch. The right answer involves specific scenarios: no clear intent in the query landscape, offer/market fit problems, budgets too small for smart bidding to learn, category where the buyer journey is entirely offline.

Good answer demonstrates they'd send you away rather than sell you a package you'll regret.

6. "Show me an example of a monthly report you've produced."

Most Google Ads reports are a data dump. A good report is a narrative: what did we do, what happened, what does it mean, what's next. That's a writer's task as much as an analyst's.

Good answer: they'll have something to show (redacted of course). Notice whether the report answers "why" or just "what".

Red flag: "I send the Google Ads built-in dashboard." The Google Ads dashboard is data delivery, not management.

7. "What's the last thing you learned about Google Ads that surprised you?"

This surfaces whether they're still actively studying the platform. Google Ads in 2026 is not the same product it was in 2023 — Performance Max has matured, data-driven attribution is default, Enhanced Conversions for Leads has changed what's trackable offline, the match-type behaviour continues to evolve.

Good answer: specific recent thing, concrete, with a plausible timeline. "I realised last month that…" Bad answer: generic ("the platform keeps changing") or clearly something they learned in 2021.

8. "Will you want to see our CRM / offline sales data?"

The right answer is yes, and they should volunteer why.

Without offline conversion data, smart bidding optimises to form submissions rather than actual closed revenue. For B2B lead-gen especially, this is the difference between optimising to "cheap to convert" and "cheap to close". A real expert will ask about this unprompted.

Red flag: no interest in your sales data. It means they'll optimise the platform numbers without regard for what the business is actually earning.

9. "What do you not do?"

Everyone claims to cover everything. A real expert has a defined scope and a clear set of boundaries. Do they build landing pages? Do they write email sequences? Do they handle social ads? Do they touch SEO?

Good answer: specific list of "in scope" and "out of scope", and a sense for how they coordinate with whoever covers the gaps.

Red flag: "I do everything." Nobody does everything well. "Everything" usually means maintenance quality on all of it rather than expert quality on any of it.

UK-specific considerations

Hiring a UK Google Ads expert comes with a few country-specific things to check.

Currency and reporting. Your account is probably in GBP. If you're working with someone used to thinking in USD or EUR, benchmarks for CPC, CPL and ROAS don't port across — UK auction economics look different. Ask explicitly for UK account examples.

London vs rest-of-UK auction dynamics. London CPCs for most B2B categories are 30–60% higher than equivalents in Manchester, Birmingham or Leeds. Someone who's worked exclusively on London accounts may misjudge budget/yield expectations for a regional business, and vice versa.

ICO and GDPR compliance on remarketing lists. Your expert should be comfortable with UK/EU consent frameworks — knowing when to use consent-mode v2, what counts as legitimate interest for remarketing, how Enhanced Conversions for Leads works under current UK data-protection guidance.

Industry coverage. UK has some sector-specific regulatory constraints in Google Ads (gambling, financial services, alcohol, crypto) that aren't symmetric with other markets. If you're in a regulated sector, ask specifically about their experience with that sector's UK advertising rules.

The question no-one asks but should

At the end of the conversation, ask: "What's one thing about our account or business that makes you unsure this will work?"

A real expert will have one. They've spent the last hour learning enough about you to have a concern. A sales-mode answer ("I don't see any concerns, this is going to be great") is the tell.

If you want an uncomfortable version of this conversation, run through these nine questions on a free call with us. If there's a fit for us working together we'll say so. If not, the conversation is still useful — you'll have a sharper brief for whoever you hire next. Book a free audit + scoping call.