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What should you ask a YouTube ads agency before you hire it?

Ask what it will test, how it will count the sales YouTube brings in after the click, and who will run the account. Then check what it tells you in Google's ad archive, which keeps every video ad and the days it ran.

Who runs YouTube at the brands in our notes

  1. Jones Road runs search through an agency for now. It could see one Google person on search or YouTube, plus another channel.
  2. One brand's marketer in our notes manages YouTube himself and says it doesn't take much time. He calls YouTube pretty set it and forget it, and could see a Google specialist in the future.
  3. Ask how the agency's hours split between new cuts, tests and reports, and who is in the account each week.

More on who should be in your ad account.

The test it should propose

  1. One agency in our notes recommended a $50,000 minimum for a first YouTube test.
  2. Connor MacDonald's advice for a first creator test is to put the whole budget on one launch, so you can read it.
  3. Measure it in weeks, not days.
  4. Ridge gives YouTube creator partnerships a much lower target ROAS than paid social, because of the long tail and the brand value. Work out your own floor before the test starts.
  5. One YouTube buyer in our notes doesn't think YouTube works for every brand, and doubts it most when the average order is small.

How it should count the sales

  1. Precedent's model splits HexClad's YouTube prospecting revenue, from ads shown to people new to the brand, as 0.41% direct, 34% Shopify halo and 65% into Amazon.
  2. Direct means credited to a click on the ad. Halo means sales on the brand's own Shopify store that came in without one.
  3. In one brand's numbers in our notes, every extra Shopify order YouTube brought in came with 2.8 extra Amazon orders.
  4. Ridge shares its YouTube viewer audiences back into search, so it can see which searches for its name came from YouTube.
  5. If every dollar has to be credited to an immediate click, this won't suit your company.

Check its work in Google's ad archive

Google's Ads Transparency Center lists the ads run for a website, with the first and last day each one showed, and it keeps the ones that stopped. Search it by your website, then by your competitors'.

Ridge's video ads in Google's archiveCount
For ridge.com, first shown from November 2024 to November 20261,602
Shown since November 1, 2026393
First shown in 20261,182
Ran 90 days or more285
Ran a year or more48

Source: Our own read of Google's Ads Transparency Center, United States, November 8, 2026

  • Half of Ridge's video ads ran 33 days or more, and all 1,602 ran under one name, THE RIDGE WALLET LLC.
  • A site can have more than one buyer. On October 2, 2026, Google listed 575 ads for asus.com under 8 advertiser names. ASUS's own two had 542, and five other companies and one person had 33.
  • Ask the agency which name your ads will run under, and whose account pays for them.
  • The archive counts ads. It can't show what any of them spent.

What we do

We run YouTube ads for the creator videos we bring in, next to Meta and TikTok. Search stays with whoever runs it for you now.

See the share of budget DTC brands give to YouTube advertising and what the winning YouTube ads do.

Get your YouTube ads read before you hire

This audit comes from Influencer Advisory, our influencer marketing agency.

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You spend on ads, you pay for influencer marketing separately, and maybe someone else runs TikTok. We run all three together, so creator videos reach your ad account and the budget moves to what brings in customers.

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This audit comes from Influencer Advisory, our influencer marketing agency.