Red Flag #8

They don't ask, in any depth, who your customers actually are

A Google Ads campaign is, at its core, a series of bets about who your customer is, what they search for, what they read before they buy, and what makes them ready to act. Every keyword is a bet. Every audience overlay is a bet. Every landing page is a bet. The accuracy of those bets is bounded by how well the people running the account understand your customer.

Most agencies do roughly an hour of customer discovery during onboarding, fill in a one-page ICP (ideal customer profile) document, file it in a Google Drive folder, and never look at it again. Twelve months later they’re still running campaigns based on assumptions made in a forty-five-minute call with someone who isn’t at your company anymore. The campaigns work to the extent they happen to be correct by accident.

Why agencies do it

Customer understanding is the highest-leverage thing an account team can do, and the lowest-billable.

Spending two hours talking to your sales team about which deals close fast and which ones stall is unbillable on a fixed retainer. Reading the transcripts of three of your closed-won discovery calls is unbillable. Sitting in on a customer success call to hear what your existing customers actually say about why they bought is unbillable. All of it pays off — in better keywords, better ad copy, better audiences, better landing pages — but the payoff is diffuse and the cost is concentrated. So it doesn’t happen.

There is also a competence problem. Asking deep questions about a customer requires curiosity, time, and a willingness to admit you don’t already know. Agency analysts are often optimised for technical platform skill rather than commercial intuition. They can build a tightly structured campaign in six hours; they can’t tell you what your buyer is afraid of. Both skills exist on every senior team. Only one of them tends to be staffed at the level your retainer is paying for.

What it looks like in your report or account

Ad copy talks about features, not outcomes. Every variant says “leading provider” and “industry-leading” and lists product attributes. None of it says what your customer is trying to accomplish or what they’re afraid will happen if they get the buying decision wrong.
Keyword targeting is built around your product’s category nouns, not the language your customers actually use. Your customers say “machine that does X.” Your campaigns target “industrial X-ing equipment.” Different searches, different intent, different conversion rates.
Audiences are demographic, not behavioural. “CFOs at companies with 500–5,000 employees” instead of “people who’ve hit a pricing page in the last 30 days,” or “people who’ve read three pieces of competitor content.”
Nobody on the agency team has spoken to one of your customers, ever. When you ask, “Have you sat in on any of our discovery or sales calls?” the answer is no, and the suggestion that they should is treated as scope creep.
The original onboarding ICP document, if you can find it, is generic enough to apply to four other companies in your industry.

What to ask your agency

“Walk me through who you think our customer is. Not from the onboarding doc — from your own understanding now, ten months in. Who buys, why, and what stops them?”

If they don’t have a confident answer, that is the answer.

Good answer

“Your buyer is a plant manager or operations director at a mid-sized manufacturer, typically replacing equipment after a downtime event has cost them more than the new system. They search by problem, not category — queries like ‘reducing changeover time’ convert at 4x the rate of generic equipment terms. They stall on internal capex approval, which is why our remarketing copy hammers ROI calculators rather than features. I sat in on three of your sales calls last quarter; this is partly informed by that. We have a discovery refresh scheduled with your sales team next month.”

Bad answer

“Based on the onboarding documentation, we’re targeting decision-makers at mid-market B2B accounts in your verticals. We’ve seen good engagement from those audiences and our campaigns are aligned to that ICP. Happy to revisit if there’s additional customer information you’d like to share.”

What it means if you get the bad answer

It means the campaigns are built on the platform’s defaults plus an outdated one-page summary, and the agency hasn’t done meaningful customer thinking since the kickoff call. Performance is whatever the algorithm happens to find. The agency’s value reduces to platform mechanics, which is real value but a fraction of what you’re paying for.

The fix is uncomfortable for both sides. Either the agency commits to a quarterly customer-discovery cadence — sales call shadowing, customer interviews, ICP refresh — and treats it as part of the retainer, or you start treating customer briefing as your own work and feed them the answers each quarter. The first version produces better campaigns. The second produces an agency that is functionally an executor of your strategy rather than a thinking partner. Both can work. The version that doesn’t work is the one where neither side is doing it and the campaigns drift.