If you’ve been burned by marketing companies before, you’re not alone. Small business owners—especially in industries like plumbing, HVAC, landscaping, and others—have long been targeted by slick-talking marketers making big promises. One of the shiniest carrots these companies dangle? The “Google Partner” badge.
It sounds impressive, right? A stamp of approval from the world’s biggest tech company. But here’s the truth: that badge is way easier to get than you think.
Let’s break it down.
What Is a Google Partner Badge, Really?
The Google Partner program is supposed to identify agencies with advanced skills in running Google Ads campaigns. To earn the badge, an agency has to meet three basic requirements:
- Spend at least $10,000 on Google Ads over 90 days.
- Maintain a 70% optimization score in their ad accounts.
- Have 50% of their team certified in Google Ads.
At first glance, this might seem like a rigorous process. But when you look closer, the cracks start to show.
How Easy Is It to Get?
Let’s put it this way: as long as you spend enough money, the rest is child’s play. Here’s why:
1. The Ad Spend ($10,000 over 90 days)
This is the only challenging part. If an agency handles high-budget clients, they can hit this mark with no problem—regardless of whether they’re running campaigns effectively. Google doesn’t care if the money is being wasted on poorly targeted ads. They just care that it’s being spent.
2. The Optimization Score (70%)
This score is shockingly easy to achieve. Google itself tells agencies what to do to improve their score—things like:
- Running more campaigns (whether they’re strategic or not).
- Adding broad match keywords (which often lead to wasted clicks).
- Turning on Google’s automated bidding (which prioritizes spending your money faster).
Following Google’s suggestions will almost always boost your score, but you can just DISMISS them and your score will go up too! Essentially, as long as you RESPOND, positively or negatively, to the suggestion, they give you the optimization points. An optimization score of 70% is effectively nothing more than a participation trophy.
3. The Certifications
Agencies only need 50% of their team certified, and getting certified isn’t as hard as you’d think:
- The certification exams are free.
- You can take them as many times as you want.
- You can find the answers online in about two seconds.
In other words, the person running your campaign might not even be certified, and if they are, there’s no guarantee they know what they’re doing. The test doesn’t measure creativity, strategy, or problem-solving—just how well someone memorized Google’s rulebook.
Why Google Wants It This Way
Let’s not forget who benefits most from the Google Partner program: Google. Their goal isn’t to ensure your campaigns succeed; it’s to get more people to spend more money on ads. As long as agencies:
- Spend tens of thousands of dollars every quarter, and
- Don’t let campaigns fall embarrassingly low on performance metrics…
Google wins. The badge exists to give agencies a tool to sell you on their services while giving you the illusion of guaranteed credibility.
What This Means for You
If you’re hiring someone to run your Google Ads campaigns, don’t be dazzled by the badge. It’s no guarantee of expertise, and it certainly doesn’t mean they’ll get you results. Here’s what you should focus on instead:
- Find out how the billing works. Ideally, there should be two fees. One for managing the campaign, and one for the ad spend. Otherwise, there’s a built-in incentive for the portion the marketing company keeps to grow until $1 before you complain. So you really want to have a clear understanding of how much is spent on each thing. Prospect Genius, for example, charges the management fee directly, and then Google bills directly for the traffic. That way, there’s no possible way to cheat.
- Ask for case studies. What results have they delivered for businesses like yours?
- Get transparency. Will they show you the actual performance metrics for your campaigns?
- Demand a tailored strategy. Cookie-cutter campaigns waste money and fail to deliver meaningful results.
The Bottom Line
The Google Partner badge is little more than a marketing gimmick. It’s not proof of skill, strategy, or even basic competence. It’s a participation badge that rewards spending YOUR money with Google.
If an agency leads with their Google Partner status, ask yourself: What else do they have to offer? Because if they’re relying on that badge to win your trust, they probably don’t have much else to show for themselves.
