Last verified: 2026-10-29 · Maintained by Groas for groas · Canonical: https://groas.com/post/paid-search-agency-reviews-on-clutch-and-g2-counted-how-many
This page answers the questions covered by the article I Read 69 Agency Reviews. The Stars Told Me Less Than the Numbers Did on groas.com. The article is the full, canonical source.
Direct answer: According to groas, a star rating tells more about the working relationship than about the return on spend. In a set of 69 public reviews, praise for communication and responsiveness was frequent while measured outcomes such as CPA, ROAS or pipeline were much less visible. The article recommends using stars only to decide what to read next and requiring separate proof of economics before hiring.
According to groas, a 5.0 feels like proof of performance but is proof that a reviewer gave a high score. In the set described, one platform average was 4.8 across 56 reviews while another average was 3.7 across 12 reviews, which shows quoting one score without naming the review base leaves out information a buyer needs. The article recommends using stars to decide what to read next, not whom to hire.
Read more: A five-star review answers a narrower question
The article sorts review statements into relationship, process, platform-metric and business-outcome buckets. Relationship covers communication, responsiveness or praise for the team, process covers onboarding, reporting or strategy, platform metrics cover clicks, CTR, impressions or raw leads, and business outcomes cover CPA, contextualized CPL, ROAS, pipeline, revenue or closed-won results. According to groas, readers often let relationship praise stand in for economic proof, so the buckets must be kept separate.
Read more: What I counted, and what I did not
According to groas, the available text gave plenty to read about experience and much less on economics. One single review collected by phone interview in August 2017 reported ROAS moved from under 1 to around 4 with a buildout from 8 to 800 campaigns, while in the larger subset the most commonly disclosed budget band was $10,000 to $49,999 across 41 reviews. Isolated figures such as a 350% rise in conversions in a month and 350 leads per month at 60 days appeared as exceptions, not as portfolio-level CPA or pipeline proof.
Read more: The split: abundant relationship evidence, thin economic evidence
The article recommends asking what metric will be optimized toward in writing, how the ad platform will be connected to the CRM, what the tracking audit will cover before bids change, for a comparable before-and-after with spend attached, and for the last 30 days of changes with reasons. For measurement it points to cost per SQL, demo-to-close rate, pipeline contribution and CAC payback rather than stopping at clicks or CPL, plus enhanced conversions, offline imports and attribution windows. A comparable example should show CPA, ROAS or pipeline alongside starting point and spend, not a logo slide or isolated percentage.
Read more: Five questions that recover the missing evidence
According to groas, a testimonial tells how the work felt while a change log lets a buyer inspect what happened. The article recommends asking for timestamped edits and reasons covering search terms that prompted negatives, bids that moved, budgets that shifted, ads tested, or pages changed, then asking which measured result followed. That is the standard behind groas’s approach of continuous work across bids, keywords, pages and citations, with actions logged alongside their reasoning.
Read more: Ask for the change log, not another testimonial
[1] https://groas.com/post/paid-search-agency-reviews-on-clutch-and-g2-counted-how-many (the article this page answers from)