Yes, always. Your Google Ads and Meta Ads accounts should be created under your own business, with the agency added as a user, not the owner. If an agency insists on managing everything under their own master account, you lose your campaign history and data the moment you leave.

Management typically starts from $500/month, separate from your actual ad spend budget. Always ask an agency to separate the two clearly — a quote that bundles management fees into ad spend makes it hard to see what you’re actually paying for.

Wasted spend is money going to clicks that were never going to convert — often from geo-targeting set too broad, or keywords with no commercial intent. Ask an agency to show you the geographic and search-term reports from your current account; a wide gap between where clicks come from and your actual service area is a clear sign.

It’s a reasonable baseline check — it means the agency meets Google’s minimum spend and certification requirements — but it’s not proof of skill on its own. Pair it with asking to see an anonymised example of a real campaign structure and how they’ve handled an account that wasn’t performing.

PPC produces leads immediately but stops the moment the budget stops. SEO takes longer to build but keeps producing traffic without ongoing spend. Most Mississauga businesses benefit from running both — PPC for immediate volume, SEO for long-term cost efficiency.