How do you test Google ads assistants? Obviously everyone says that're great, etc. So how can you tell? Are there any common mistakes that I could test them on? I'm looking for someone who will follow my directions correctly, but also I would like to be able to see if they're able to think and make adjustments or just simply follow directions. Are there questions I could ask or a test-out I could do?

@Ryan Baker thank you! I will use that "test" you posted. I realized I've been testing ALL of my tutors, assistants, graphics people, everyone EXCEPT Google ads people. What a blind spot! And also - no surprise we haven't seen results ha? Also, I've made, what seems to be, a big mistake of assuming many years of experience + a lot of clients + higher prices = good quality. But you mentioned in the post "if someone has been following directions for the past 5-10 years, they won't know what to do on their own, or when to do it, or in what order." 1000% true! 10 years of experience doesn't help you make good decisions. 10 years of making decisions does help you make good decisions.

@Ryan Baker thank you so much, this is really, really helpful. About the audit, yes I meant the questionnaire. So my problem right now is that the agency I hired didn't ask me anything about my business. There was no questionnaire. They just wrote the ads. Our ctr is alright (8.3%) and it seems to be going up BUT no clients or even requests and I looked at the ad and it's written for the students. Students don't hire us, their parents do - for their children. So the ads are written for the students, my website is written to the parents, so no wonder we're getting nothing. If they didn't know that, didn't think to ask, didn't research, to me that's a big red flag. If I hadn't noticed that, we would have been running the bad ads for weeks to come, most likely. Also the owner of the company is the one I hired (technically) but he gave me someone else to work with and he doesn't have nearly as much experience. So it seems like a bait and switch. So they rewrote the ads for me to approve but now I don't know what other obvious mistakes they're making that come from simply not asking me anything and just doing whatever they do. And at this point, it seems like I'm the driving force of change, so it's like I'm managing the ads. That's not what this is supposed to be like, correct? To me, it would be the #1 question to ask: "who are your prospects?" In your estimation, are those big issues?

@Ryan Baker thank you for your help. At the end it turned out they didn't even set up the tracking correctly.

Thank you, Ryan. Got it! We offer math tutoring so I think they're aware of the problem. They usually search "math tutoring" or "find a math tutor" or something like that, so we can go straight to empathizing with their problems and then presenting how we're different. I will ask our clients which title they like the best. We're definitely missing "how we're different" section, I have to fix that tonight. How do you split test sections - do you do that through Google optimize?