What a Google Partner badge does and does not tell you

Sooner or later a shortlist includes an agency with a Google Partner badge on its homepage. It is a reasonable thing to notice. It is also easy to read more into it than it says, so here is how I would use it.

What Google says about the badge

Google's own guidelines state that only Partners or Premier Partners can display the badge. They also say the badge cannot be used in a way that suggests Google sponsors, endorses or is affiliated with the company or its products, and that it may be shown only on the company's own site or on other sites listed in its company details, using Google's code snippet. Google Partners badge guidelines are public, and they are short enough to read in a few minutes.

Put plainly, the badge is a status in Google's programme for agencies. It is not a recommendation from Google, and Google's own rules say it must not be presented as one.

What it does not tell you

The badge does not tell you whether the agency understands your market, whether the person who will run your account is the person who attended the meeting, or whether your business will own its accounts. Those are the questions that decide whether the relationship works, and none of them is answered by a badge.

It also tells you nothing about how the agency will report. A badge is silent on what the agency counts as a conversion, and that definition decides what the monthly report shows. I would still ask for it in writing.

How I would use it

I treat the badge as one input among several. If an agency displays it, I would check that it is displayed in the way Google's guidelines describe, which means on the agency's own site and with the official snippet, and then I would move on to the questions that separate agencies from each other.

Those questions are collected in questions to ask an agency before you shortlist it. Put the same ones to every agency, badge or no badge, and record the answers in the shortlist scorecard so that they can be compared later.

A word about me

This site is published by Web Marketing International FZCO, which manages Google Ads for businesses. If you are comparing me with other agencies, I would ask you to apply exactly the same test. You can read how I describe the work on the Google Ads Consultant page of my own site, and then put the questions to me as you would to anyone else.

The broader method for choosing between agencies, including how to check the legal entity and settle who owns the accounts, is in how to choose a marketing agency in the UAE.