What being a Google Partner means for your campaign

Google Partner

What Google requires

The Google Partner badge is not bought and it is not permanent. Google checks three things daily across an agency's managed accounts: that the accounts are kept in good shape (an optimisation score of at least 70 percent), that the agency manages a meaningful amount of advertising (at least USD 10,000 of Google Ads spend across its managed accounts over 90 days), and that at least half of its account strategists hold current Google Ads certifications. Fall below any of the three and the badge goes.

What it means for you

Certified people run your campaign. The campaign is measured against Google's own benchmarks, not just ours. And XLR8 Media is accountable to Google for how it runs your campaign as well as to you for its results. Only agencies with current Partner status may display the badge, so it is a quick way to rule out an agency that is not what it says it is.

What it does not mean

Google does not endorse any agency's results, and a badge does not make a campaign good. It tells you the agency meets a minimum standard of certification, scale and account hygiene. The rest, in our case, is specialisation: XLR8 Media has worked only with real estate agents and agencies since it specialised, and the way we build a suburb campaign for one agent comes from that, not from the badge.

Questions to ask any Google Ads agency

Whether it is a Partner or not, ask any agency three things before you sign: whether the campaign runs for you alone or alongside competing clients in your suburb; what it reports and how often; and what happens at the end of the term. Our answers are one agent per suburb, impressions, clicks, click-through rate, position on the page and calls in plain English, and a renewal that is never automatic.