There are more than twenty agencies in Minnesota that will happily run your Google Ads. Almost none of them are wrong for everyone — they’re wrong for you, specifically, in ways that only become obvious about four months in.
So this isn’t a ranked list. Ranking twenty agencies against each other on a single scale would require pretending that a roofing contractor in Blaine and a Series B software company in the North Loop are shopping for the same thing. They aren’t.
What follows is every Google Ads agency I’m aware of in Minnesota, grouped by the kind of business they’re actually built to serve, plus the part most of these lists leave out: how to tell, before you sign anything, whether an agency will be good for you.
I run one of the agencies on this list. Bellringer Marketing is mine, it appears in the industry specialists section, and I have an obvious interest in you calling me.
What I’ve tried to do instead of pretending otherwise: describe the other nineteen accurately, group everyone by who they genuinely fit, and give you a set of questions in the questions section that would expose a weak agency — including mine. If Bellringer isn’t right for your business, several of the agencies below are better choices, and I’ve said which.
- Agencies are included if they publicly offer Google Ads management and operate in Minnesota. This is intended to be comprehensive rather than curated.
- Grouping is based on the industries and services each agency describes in its own public materials, not on my assessment of their work quality.
- No agency paid to be included or positioned. There are no affiliate arrangements on this page.
- I have not audited these agencies’ client results and I’m not in a position to rank their performance. Anyone claiming to have done that for twenty agencies is guessing.
- Details change. If something here is out of date or wrong about your agency, email me and I’ll correct it.
Start hereWhich Group Should You Be Looking At?
Skip to the section that matches your situation. Most people only need one.
Before the listWhat Actually Separates a Good Agency From a Bad One
Having sat on both sides of this — running accounts, and inheriting accounts other agencies ran — the differences that matter aren’t the ones on agency websites. Certifications, awards, and team size predict almost nothing. These four things predict a lot.
1. Do they measure outcomes or activity?
An agency reporting clicks, impressions, and cost per lead is reporting activity. An agency reporting cost per signed case, per booked job, per closed deal is reporting outcomes. The gap between those two is where most wasted ad spend lives, because a campaign can generate a pile of cheap leads that never become customers and look excellent the entire time.
Ask what they’d need from you to report on outcomes. If the answer is vague, they don’t do it.
2. Who actually touches the account?
At many agencies, the person who sells you is not the person who manages you, and the person who manages you may be a junior running fifteen accounts from a checklist. This isn’t inherently disqualifying — larger agencies buy you depth and coverage — but you should know before signing, not after.
3. Do you own your account?
Your Google Ads account, your GA4 property, your conversion tracking, and your call tracking data should belong to you and survive the relationship ending. Some agencies run clients inside their own accounts, which means leaving costs you your entire performance history. Ask directly and get it in writing.
4. Will they tell you when paid search isn’t the answer?
Some businesses shouldn’t run Google Ads. Not enough search volume, margins too thin to survive the click costs, or a website that won’t convert traffic no matter how good it is. An agency that has never turned away a prospect isn’t being selective on your behalf either.
The most useful thing an agency can tell you in a first call is a reason not to hire them.
Group 01Industry Specialists
These agencies focus on specific verticals. The advantage is real: someone who has run fifty roofing accounts already knows which searches waste money in that industry, which is knowledge you’d otherwise pay to rediscover on your own budget. The tradeoff is that if you’re outside their vertical, you’re a learning project.
Hook Agency
Best for: roofing and construction contractorsFocused on digital marketing for construction and home service businesses, combining SEM, SEO, and web development. Well known in the contractor marketing space nationally, not just locally.
Worth considering if you’re a contractor who wants search and website handled by the same team.
Roofer Marketers
Best for: roofing contractors, exclusivelyWorks only with roofers — Google Ads management, website development, and roofing SEO. The narrowest focus on this list.
If you’re a roofer, this kind of specialization is genuinely valuable. If you’re anything else, they’re not for you and won’t pretend to be.
Backcountry Digital
Best for: outdoor, adventure, and lifestyle brandsPPC, SEO, and web work for e-commerce and service businesses, with a stated focus on adventure and outdoor audiences.
A good fit if your customers are defined more by interest and lifestyle than by an urgent need — which changes how campaigns should be built.
Bellringer Marketing — this is my agency
Best for: law firms, trucking, and home servicesI run Google Ads for businesses where a single client is worth thousands and inquiries come in by phone. The work centers on connecting ad spend to signed cases and booked jobs rather than reporting on leads — which means call tracking, intake source capture, and feeding real outcomes back into Google so bidding optimizes toward clients instead of clicks.
You can check the work rather than take my word for it: a criminal defense firm case study with two months of verified numbers, and a personal injury launch written up with its limitations stated.
When I’m the wrong choice: if you need brand strategy, creative production, or media across several channels, one person can’t be that team — look at the full-service agencies below. If you sell products online, e-commerce specialists will serve you better. And if your monthly budget is under about $1,500, you’ll usually get more from spending that money on ads and learning the platform yourself than from paying anyone to manage it.
Group 02Paid Search and Performance Specialists
Agencies where search and performance media are the main event rather than one service among many. Generally the right call when you already know paid search is your channel and you want depth rather than breadth.
ThinkSem
Best for: firms wanting an established search-first partnerGoogle Ads management, SEO, local SEO, and web development, and a recognized Google Ads Premier Partner in the Minneapolis market. One of the longer-established search-focused shops in the state.
Collective Measures
Best for: mid-market and larger performance budgetsA performance marketing agency covering paid search, SEO, and social with an analytics-led approach. Better suited to organizations with the budget and internal structure to use that depth.
NordicClick Interactive
Best for: businesses capturing existing demandDigital marketing with a strong paid search practice, oriented toward capturing demand that already exists rather than building awareness.
Augerian
Best for: growing companies wanting search and SEO togetherAn advertising agency with a focus on Google Ads and SEO, and one of the faster-growing shops in the downtown market.
Group 03Full-Service Agencies
Brand, creative, web, and media under one roof. The right structure when paid search is one part of a larger program and you’d rather manage one relationship than five. The tradeoff is that paid search is rarely the deepest capability in a full-service shop, and your account may be smaller to them than it is to you.
Rocket 55
Best for: established businesses wanting full digital coverageA full-spectrum digital agency with experienced PPC staff alongside SEO, content, and web capability. One of the more substantial full-service options in the metro.
Supervox Agency
Best for: brands where positioning matters as much as performanceDigital marketing and branding together — branding, SEO, PPC, web development, and paid social. Oriented toward brand-led companies rather than pure direct response.
MJ Kretsinger
Best for: businesses needing design and marketing togetherA full-service digital marketing and design agency covering SEO, branding, SEM, and web development.
Nativ3
Best for: companies wanting paid and content in one programGoogle Ads optimization alongside SEO, email, content, and social — built for businesses running several channels at once rather than paid search alone.
Stolber Digital Marketing Agency
Best for: businesses needing video and creative alongside adsGoogle Ads and PPC management plus graphic design, SEO, and video production. Useful if creative assets are part of what you need built.
Group 04Small Business and Local
Smaller shops working with local businesses and modest budgets. Often the right answer when your budget wouldn’t get much attention at a larger agency — an account that’s small to a big agency can be a priority to a small one.
Northscale Media Group
Best for: local businesses prioritizing local searchA smaller agency covering SEO, SEM, social, and web development with a focus on local SEO — worth a look if being found in your immediate area matters more than reach.
Promotech Marketing
Best for: small businesses wanting one provider for everythingGoogle Ads, SEO, web design, video, and SEM aimed at small businesses looking for comprehensive support rather than a single specialist service.
Hill Web Creations
Best for: local businesses in the south metroGoogle Ads alongside SEO, local SEO, and email marketing, working with businesses outside the Minneapolis core.
Spark Logix Studio
Best for: businesses building an online presence from scratchGoogle Ads management with SEO, web development, and social — a reasonable fit if you’re starting from very little rather than optimizing something existing.
Romain Berg
Best for: businesses that value long operating historyPPC alongside SEO, web development, and e-commerce work, with more than two decades in the market — one of the longest track records on this list.
Group 05E-Commerce, Tech, and Agency Partners
Selling products online is a genuinely different discipline from generating leads — different campaign types, different metrics, different failure modes. So is white-label work for other agencies.
Uproar
Best for: e-commerce and technology companiesSEM and SEO with a stated focus on e-commerce and tech — the closest thing on this list to a dedicated Shopping and product-feed specialist.
The Guerrilla Agency
Best for: in-house teams and other agenciesSEO, web design, and video, working with both in-house marketing teams and other agencies. Relevant if you have internal capability and need specific gaps filled rather than a full outsource.
MoneyWhat Google Ads Management Costs in Minnesota
Nobody publishes this, so here’s roughly how pricing works in this market. These are structures, not quotes, and any agency will have its own numbers.
| Model | How it works | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Percentage of spend | Typically 10–20% of monthly ad spend | The agency earns more when you spend more, which isn’t always aligned with what’s best for you |
| Flat monthly retainer | A fixed fee regardless of spend | Confirm what’s included — landing pages and tracking work are often billed separately |
| Hybrid | Base fee plus a percentage above a spend threshold | Common for mid-size accounts; check where the threshold sits |
| Performance-based | Payment tied to leads or sales | Sounds appealing, but requires airtight tracking both sides trust, and creates pressure toward lead volume over lead quality |
A more useful question than “what does it cost” is “at what monthly ad spend does paying for management start to make sense?” Below roughly $1,500 a month in spend, management fees consume enough of the budget that most businesses do better running it themselves or waiting until they can spend more. Any agency willing to take your money at $500 a month is not thinking about your outcome.
Before you signEight Questions to Ask Any Agency on This List
Ask all eight, of everyone you’re considering. Including me — I’ve written them to be uncomfortable for a weak agency to answer, and I’d rather be held to the same standard.
- Who will actually be in my account week to week, and how many other accounts do they manage? You’re looking for a name and a number, not a description of the team.
- Will the Google Ads account be owned by me? If the answer isn’t an immediate yes, ask what happens to your data if you leave.
- How would you connect ad spend to a closed sale, not just a lead? Listen for specifics: call tracking, CRM integration, uploading outcomes back into Google. Vagueness here is the answer.
- What would you need from my team, and how much of our time? Every good tracking setup requires something from you. An agency that says “nothing” either hasn’t thought it through or isn’t planning to measure outcomes.
- Show me a report you’d send me in month three. A real one, redacted. If it’s a screenshot of the Google Ads dashboard, that’s what you’re buying.
- What’s your contract length and what happens if I want out? Long lock-ins with no performance clause favor one party.
- Tell me about an account that didn’t work and why. Anyone who has managed accounts for more than a year has one. An agency with no failures either isn’t being straight with you or hasn’t done much.
- Under what circumstances would you tell me not to run Google Ads? The best answer names a real scenario. The worst is that there isn’t one.
Ask number three. How an agency answers “how do you connect spend to a closed sale” tells you almost everything about how they’ll manage your money — because measuring outcomes properly is difficult, and agencies that don’t do it will change the subject to leads within about two sentences.
QuestionsCommon Questions
How do I choose a Google Ads agency in Minnesota?
Start by identifying which group above matches your business, which usually cuts twenty options to four or five. Then ask all eight questions from the previous section of every agency on your shortlist. The differences that matter show up in those answers, not in agency websites, which all say approximately the same things.
Does the agency need to be in Minnesota?
For most businesses, no. Google Ads is managed remotely and geography rarely affects account quality. It matters more if you need in-person meetings, or if local market knowledge is genuinely relevant — a home services company competing across the Twin Cities suburbs benefits from someone who knows the difference between Edina and Blaine as markets.
How long before Google Ads produces results?
Search campaigns can produce inquiries in the first week, because you’re capturing demand that already exists. Reliable performance data takes longer — automated bidding needs conversion volume before its decisions become trustworthy, which in a low-volume business can take a couple of months. Be skeptical of anyone promising a transformation in thirty days, and equally skeptical of anyone who wants six months before showing you anything.
Should I hire an agency or a freelancer?
It depends on what you need beyond the ads themselves. A freelancer or solo operator usually means the person selling you is the person doing the work, at lower cost and with more direct access. An agency buys you coverage when someone is on vacation, and capability across creative, web, and other channels. Neither is better in the abstract.
What’s a reasonable Google Ads budget to start with?
It depends far more on your industry’s click costs and what a customer is worth to you than on any general benchmark. In competitive categories like legal, a single click can cost more than an entire day’s budget in other industries. Work backward: what’s a customer worth, what percentage of that can you spend to acquire one, and how many do you want per month.
Why isn’t this list ranked one through twenty?
Because I’d be making it up. I haven’t audited these agencies’ accounts or their client results, and neither has anyone else publishing a ranked list of twenty agencies. Grouping by fit is something I can do honestly; ranking by quality isn’t.
FinallyThe Short Version
Most bad agency relationships don’t come from hiring a bad agency. They come from hiring a perfectly competent agency built for a different kind of business than yours, and finding out four months and several thousand dollars later.
Work out which group you belong in. Shortlist three. Ask the eight questions. The right choice usually becomes obvious somewhere in the second conversation.
If your business is in the first group, let’s talk
Law firms, trucking, home services — businesses where one client is worth thousands and the phone is how they reach you. Bring roughly what a signed client is worth and where your inquiries come from now. I’ll tell you whether paid search fits, what I’d build first, and if I’m not the right fit, which agency above probably is.
Talk to Henry directly 15 minutes · Henry Bell, not an account rep
