South Africa, Aug. 28 -- Premier Partner is a status Google assigns, not one an agency requests. Each year Google runs every Partner agency in a country through the same benchmarks and hands the Premier tier to the top 3% alone. The annual reset matters: the badge tells a prospective client that an agency's Google Ads accounts are performing at this moment, not that they performed well at some point in the past.

"Google looks at the same things our clients look at," said Josh Maraney, Founder and CEO of Top Click Media. "Are the accounts performing, are the clients growing, and are they staying. We have clients who have been with us for well over a decade, and that retention is the number we are proudest of. Nobody stays with an agency f...