Absolute disgrace – 5 months of paying for NOTHING
Where do I even start. We worked with Ad-Lab for over 5 months and in that entire period our ads were never live for a single day. Not one. We paid for a service that was simply never delivered.
Every time we asked what was going on, we received long messages full of excuses and technical explanations but never a solution. It was always Google's fault, the external agency's fault, our fault, everyone's fault except their own. They point fingers in every direction but take zero responsibility for anything.
We came to this agency through a friend, with full trust that they were the best. That trust was completely betrayed. Instead of actually helping us and solving problems like a professional agency should, all we got was deflection, delays, and empty promises for months on end.
A refund? Absolutely not, apparently. Even though they delivered nothing we actually paid for.
This is by far the worst experience we have ever had with any agency. We will never recommend Ad-Lab to anyone, not to our worst enemy. Stay as far away from these people as possible. Complete waste of time and money.
⭐ (1 star, and that's already one too many)
Antwoord van Ad-Lab
This review leaves out the record, so here is the full context for anyone reading it.
The client started with us on November 11, 2025. On day two, November 12, our team asked them not to change the store theme or products, because Google had the store in a strong position for Merchant Center approval. They changed both anyway, and Google flagged the store for misrepresentation soon after.
Google had also banned the client's original ad account before they ever came to us, and they did not tell us. We found that out on January 16, the same day Google approved their Merchant Center after two months of work on our side. That reset the launch back to day one.
The store could not run as it was built. The new theme was a pirated copy, and Shopify served a DMCA notice on December 21, so the whole store had to be rebuilt again.
The client told us more than once that his own store developer kept delaying the work and pushing the timeline further back. On December 27 he wrote to us, "sorry for the delay, my store developer has been delaying the work." Those delays sat on his side, not ours.
The client's Google Ads account was managed by an outside agency before us. To finish setting up conversion tracking, the tracking that tells us which clicks turn into actual sales, we needed admin access to that account. The outside agency refused. They would only grant Standard access, which does not allow that setup. We asked them to upgrade it and they would not. We lost over a week working around a block that was never ours to remove.
The claim that the client paid for five months of service is also inaccurate. The client was charged for the initial month only. Despite the ongoing issues preventing launch, we continued working on the account for several additional months at no charge in an effort to resolve the store, Merchant Center, tracking, compliance, and account-access problems.
We ran this account for five months and sent the client full written breakdowns on February 15 and again on March 13. He stopped responding after March 13. This review went up days later.
The ads not going live came down to a banned account the client hid from us, a pirated store theme, a Shopify DMCA takedown, a store developer who kept missing his own deadlines, and ad-account access another agency refused us. We documented every step and shared it with the client the whole way through.
If you are reading this while choosing an agency, take something useful from it. Tell your agency the full history of your account up front, including any past bans or strikes on it. Keep your store and your developer on schedule, because the ads can only run once the store is clean and approved by Google. Make sure whoever holds your ad account will grant proper access from day one. Those few things would have changed this entire outcome, and we hope sharing it helps someone in the same position avoid the same lost months.
