A good coach is the fastest way to stop wasting ad budget and finally understand the channel yourself. A bad one just sells you a course you will never finish, or quietly turns into an agency that runs your account behind a curtain. The difference is rarely about price. It is about transparency, real experience, and whether the goal is to make you independent or keep you dependent.
This guide gives you ten questions to ask before you hire anyone, and tells you what a strong answer sounds like versus a weak one. Work through them on a free intro call and you will know within half an hour whether the person across the screen is the real thing. That is the whole idea behind how I work, what I call the Glass Box Method: everything open, nothing hidden, and you in control at the end.
This is the single most useful question, because it sorts genuine coaches from course sellers in one sentence. A real coach gets on a screen-share, opens your actual Google Ads account, and works on your campaigns, your budget, and your search terms. A course seller hands you a library of videos about a hypothetical account and leaves you to map it onto your own.
Generic training has its place, but it cannot tell you why your specific campaign is bleeding money on the wrong searches. Coaching that touches your live account does, and what you learn applies the moment you log back in.
Good sign: "We will share your screen and build it in your account together, step by step."
Watch out: "You get lifetime access to my video modules" with no live, account-specific work attached.
Credentials are not everything, but they are a clean, checkable baseline. The Google Partner badge is earned at the company level and has real requirements around spend, certified people, and account performance. Skillshop certifications are the individual exams Google publishes for Search, Display, and so on.
Ask for both, then verify rather than take it on trust. You can look up a company in the public Google Partners directory, and you can see exactly what the individual certifications cover on Google's own Skillshop. A coach who is proud of their work will happily point you to both.
Watch out: vague claims like "Google certified" with nothing you can actually check, or a Partner badge shown as an image but no findable listing.
Years alone do not make a coach, but real time in the platform across many accounts builds the pattern recognition you are paying for. Someone who has managed a wide range of businesses has seen the same money leaks again and again and can spot yours quickly.
Ask specifically whether they have worked with businesses like yours: similar budget, similar model (lead generation versus ecommerce, local versus national). A coach who has only run large national ecommerce accounts may not be the right fit for a local service business spending a few hundred a month, and a good one will tell you that honestly.
Put them on the spot, kindly. Ask them to explain Quality Score, or why match types matter, or how Smart Bidding decides what to pay. The answer tells you two things at once: whether they truly understand it, and whether they can teach it. Plenty of people can run ads but cannot explain them, and a coach has to do both.
You want someone who reaches for plain words and a clear example, not someone who hides behind jargon. If you leave the explanation more confused than when you started, imagine five sessions of that.
Good sign: a clear, jargon-free answer with a real-world example, and a check that you actually followed it.
Account ownership is where a lot of business owners get quietly trapped. Your Google Ads account, with all of its data and history, should be yours from start to finish. A coach guides the decisions; you keep the keys. Be wary of anyone who wants campaigns built inside their own account or under a structure you cannot access without them.
The honest test is simple: if you walked away tomorrow, would you still have your account, your data, and the ability to run it? With real coaching, the answer is always yes.
Watch out: "We will set it up on our side and give you reports," which is management dressed up as coaching.
Coaching pricing varies, and that is fine, but it should be clear and it should match what you are getting. A defined program with a set number of sessions and a set price is easy to judge. An open-ended monthly retainer with no clear end point starts to look a lot like an agency.
For reference, my own coaching, The Build, is a one-off $1,000 for five sessions, with optional monthly coaching afterwards only if you want it. The number matters less than the shape: you should know what you are paying, what you get, and that you are free to stop. Run from long contracts that hold you hostage. Good coaches keep clients because the work pays for itself, not because of a clause.
A serious coach talks about outcomes that matter to your business: leads, sales, cost per lead, return on ad spend. A weaker one talks about vanity metrics like impressions, clicks, or a click-through rate that looks nice and pays no bills.
Crucially, ask how you will even see those outcomes. That means conversion tracking. If a coach is not setting up or fixing your tracking early, every decision after that is a guess. Google explains the basics well in the official Google Ads Help on conversion tracking, and any coach worth hiring will treat getting it right as step one, not an afterthought.
This is the question that reveals intent. The entire point of coaching is that you end up able to run and improve the account yourself, without needing anyone. Ask directly: "At the end of this, will I be able to do it on my own?" Listen for whether the honest goal is your independence or your ongoing fees.
It is a fair question even of a good coach, and the right answer is enthusiastic. There is a real difference between coaching, which hands you the skills, and done-for-you work, which keeps the skills with the provider. Both are legitimate. They are just not the same thing, and you deserve to know which one you are buying.
Be honest with yourself here. Coaching is the right call if you want to understand the channel and run it yourself. But if you genuinely do not have the time or the appetite, forcing yourself through coaching is a waste of money, and a good coach will say so.
The tell of someone trustworthy is that they will point you elsewhere when coaching is not the fit, rather than selling you the only thing they offer. In my case, if you would rather hand it over, I run accounts done-for-you with the same transparency, and you still own everything. The principle holds whoever you choose: a coach who only ever recommends their own single product is selling, not advising.
Testimonials on a website are a start, but real proof stands up to a follow-up. Ask whether you can hear from a past client, or at least see named, specific results rather than anonymous five-star quotes. Look the person up. A coach with a genuine track record will have a trail you can follow and references who will speak plainly about what changed.
Be skeptical of guarantees of a specific return. Nobody honest can promise an exact ROAS, because too much depends on your offer, your margins, and your market. What a good coach can promise is that you will understand your account and be able to make better decisions in it. That is the thing that actually compounds.
You do not need all ten answers to be perfect. You are listening for a pattern: someone who works in your real account, explains things so they stick, keeps you in control, charges clearly with no lock-in, and is honest enough to tell you when coaching is not the right fit. Tick most of those and you have found a good one.
If that is the kind of help you are after, that is exactly what my Google Ads coaching is built to do: five sessions in your own account, in plain English, finishing with you running it yourself. And if a call makes it clear you would be better handing it over, I will tell you that too. Either way, you will leave knowing where you stand.
Ben Allen is a Google Ads coach and Google Partner who has spent 8+ years in the platform and managed $10M+ in ad spend. He coaches business owners to run their own campaigns with full transparency through the Glass Box Method, and offers done-for-you and white-label management for those who would rather hand it over.
Book a free 30-minute call. We will look at your live account together, and you will leave knowing exactly where you stand, whether you coach with me or not.
Ready when you are. Start with the call, then decide.
Prefer to read more first? See how Google Ads coaching works, or how I manage accounts for people who would rather hand it over.