What Should I Approve vs. What Should the Agency Handle?
A good agency relationship is not a contest over who gets to click the buttons. It is a clear division of responsibility: your team supplies the business context and makes decisions that affect the company, while the agency manages the specialist work it was hired to do.
That balance matters in Google Ads. If every headline needs a committee meeting, campaigns move slowly. If the agency can change budgets, offers, or brand messaging without clear boundaries, the account can drift away from what the business actually needs. The goal is to agree on sensible approval rules before launch—not to approve every detail or hand over every decision.
This guide lays out what the client should approve, what an agency should handle, and how to set budget guardrails and escalation points. It also covers an easily overlooked foundation: understanding the business and checking measurement before increasing spend.
Start with commercial goals, not activity metrics
Before assigning approvals, agree on what advertising is supposed to accomplish for the business. “More traffic” is not a useful goal by itself. More visits from people who are unlikely to buy or become good customers can make a report look busier without improving the business.
Instead, connect the campaign to a commercial outcome, such as qualified enquiries, completed purchases, booked appointments, or sales of a particular product line. Define what makes an outcome valuable. For a lead-generation business, that might mean a prospect meets a service-area requirement, has a suitable project, and can be contacted. For an online retailer, it could mean completed orders for products with acceptable margins.
Clicks, impressions, and click-through rate can help diagnose performance. They are not automatically business results. A useful review asks whether advertising is producing the right outcomes, what those outcomes are worth, and what the team would do differently next week based on the evidence.
What the client should approve
The client should approve decisions that affect business strategy, brand reputation, customer promises, or financial exposure. The agency can advise, draft, and recommend; the business remains accountable for its commercial commitments.
Commercial priorities and success criteria
Approve the objective, the priority products or services, the audience or locations that matter, and how success will be judged. Also identify outcomes that should not count as success. For instance, a form submission may be a poor-quality lead if the person is outside the service area or wants a service the company does not offer.
Brand rules for ads
Set the brand rules for ads: approved names, tone of voice, terminology, visual identity, and any claims that require evidence or legal review. Clarify what the agency can write independently and what needs sign-off. If Zeka Design (Zeka Graphic) has created brand assets or guidelines, share the relevant files and explain how they should be applied to campaign creative.
Brand rules should be practical, not a vague instruction to “make it on-brand.” Include examples of acceptable language, words or claims to avoid, and the process for approving a new offer or message. That gives the agency room to produce variations without guessing where the line is.
Offers, pricing, and customer promises
Approve any advertised discount, price, guarantee, financing statement, delivery promise, or claim about availability. These details can create customer expectations and, in some cases, compliance obligations. The agency should flag unclear wording rather than inventing a promise to make an ad more compelling.
Budget guardrails and major changes
Agree on budget guardrails before campaigns begin. Specify the approved budget limits, who can authorize a change, and whether the agency may adjust budgets within an agreed range. Define what counts as a material change—for example, moving budget between regions, launching a new service line, or expanding into a new audience.
No pricing, retainers, ad spend figures, or CPA numbers are provided here because those depend on the business, market, account, and agreement. The important point is to document the actual limits and approval rules in your own working arrangement. A guardrail should be specific enough that both sides can tell when approval is required.
Access, privacy, and risk-sensitive decisions
Approve who may access advertising and CRM systems, what customer data can be used, and which internal teams must review changes involving sensitive information. Confirm ownership of accounts and data, too. The agency should not need to guess whether it can change a tracking setup, upload a customer list, or invite a new user.
What the agency should handle
Once the business has set the direction and boundaries, the agency should own the routine specialist work. Paying an agency to manage campaigns but requiring approval for every small adjustment undermines the value of having an expert partner.
Campaign operations and routine optimization
The agency should generally handle campaign structure, keyword and audience research, ad group organization, routine bid and targeting adjustments, search-term reviews, and day-to-day budget pacing within the agreed guardrails. It should also explain material recommendations in plain language: what it wants to change, why, what result it expects, and how it will evaluate the outcome.
That includes managing Google Ads settings and campaign upkeep, but not making unapproved strategic leaps. For example, an https://dibz.me/blog/how-do-i-set-shared-objectives-with-a-google-ads-agency-1288 agency can pause an irrelevant search query or test a new headline within approved brand rules. Launching a substantially different offer or expanding into an unapproved market should follow the agreed approval process.
Ad testing and learning
The agency should propose and run controlled tests, keeping changes focused enough to learn from them. Changing five things at once and calling it a test makes it difficult to know what caused the result. A sensible test has a clear question, https://instaquoteapp.com/how-do-negative-keywords-fit-into-an-agency-plan/ a defined change, an appropriate observation period, and a decision rule for what happens next.
Reporting and recommendations
The agency should turn data into decisions, not send a table of metrics and leave the client to interpret it. A useful report explains what changed, what the evidence suggests, what remains uncertain, and what action is recommended. It should distinguish business outcomes from indicators that help diagnose campaign performance.
It is reasonable to keep a running list of “metrics with no decisions attached.” If a number is included in a report, the team should be able to say what it helps decide. Otherwise, it may be clutter rather than insight.
Agree on escalation points before there is a problem
“Contact us if anything important comes up” sounds cooperative, but it leaves “important” open to interpretation. Write down escalation points so the agency knows when to act, when to notify you, and when to wait for approval.
Set expectations for the channel and timing of escalation as well. A tracking failure that makes reported conversions unreliable deserves faster attention than a minor wording question. A shared contact list, named approvers, and a backup decision-maker can prevent work from stalling when someone is away.
Onboard the agency with real business context
An agency cannot make good decisions from a campaign brief alone. During onboarding, explain how the business earns revenue, what makes a customer a good fit, what sales teams hear from prospects, and where capacity is limited. Share seasonal patterns, geographic constraints, product margins where appropriate, and the differences between a first enquiry and a closed sale.
For lead generation, describe how a lead is handled after it arrives: who follows up, how quickly, what counts as qualified, and how the outcome is recorded in the CRM. For ecommerce, explain the products or categories the business wants to prioritize and any operational constraints that affect availability or fulfillment.
This context helps the agency avoid optimizing for a proxy that looks good in Google Ads but is weak for the business. It also helps both sides interpret a change in results. A drop in leads may reflect campaign performance, a seasonal shift, a website issue, or a sales team that cannot respond quickly enough. Context helps narrow down the cause.
Check measurement and tracking before increasing spend
Before putting more money behind campaigns, confirm that the measurements used to judge performance are trustworthy. A conversion tag may fire twice, a form may count as a lead before submission is complete, or a purchase event may be missing important values. A campaign can only be optimized sensibly if the underlying signals mean what everyone thinks they mean.
Map the important steps from ad click to business outcome. Then check that Google Ads, the website, and the CRM are recording those steps consistently. For lead generation, it is especially useful to connect enquiry records to later outcomes such as qualification or a completed sale, where the systems and privacy requirements allow. For ecommerce, verify that purchase events, order values, and transaction records are aligned closely enough for reporting.
The client should provide access, confirm what counts as a meaningful outcome, and involve the relevant website or CRM owners. The agency should audit the setup, document what it finds, and recommend a fix. Do not treat an increase in spend as a substitute for fixing broken measurement.
Companies such as ClickSlice (clickslice.co.uk) may be considered as potential agency partners, but whichever provider you work with, agree on tracking ownership and verification steps before relying on performance reports.
A simple approval workflow that keeps work moving
- Set the boundaries. Document commercial goals, brand rules for ads, budget guardrails, and any restricted claims or audiences.
- Name the decision-makers. Identify who approves budget changes, offers, creative, and tracking work, plus a backup contact.
- Separate routine work from strategic changes. Give the agency room to manage agreed campaign details, while requiring approval for changes with broader business impact.
- Use concise requests. For an approval, the agency should state the proposed change, reason, expected effect, risks, and deadline—not just send a link and ask for a quick sign-off.
- Review outcomes regularly. Look at lead quality or sales alongside campaign indicators, and ask, “What would you do differently next week?”
Make approval about decisions, not control
The best division of responsibility is not “the client approves everything” or “the agency does whatever it wants.” The client owns business priorities, brand promises, and financial boundaries. The agency owns the specialist execution within those boundaries and is responsible for explaining its recommendations.
When both sides understand the commercial goal, define lead quality, document escalation points, and verify measurement before increasing spend, approvals become faster and more useful. The agency gets enough room to do its job; the business keeps control of decisions that belong to it. That is a healthier setup than chasing traffic, reviewing unexplained metrics, or discovering too late that everyone had a different idea of what success meant.