How To Tell If Your Google Ads Agency Is Actually Any Good: The Complete Owner’s Guide

You are paying an agency every month to run your Google Ads, and you have a quiet, nagging feeling you cannot shake: you have no real idea whether they are any good.

The reports look busy. The calls sound reasonable. The numbers go up sometimes and down sometimes and the agency always has an explanation. But you cannot tell whether you are getting expert management or paying a monthly fee for someone to log in occasionally and adjust nothing.

You are not being paranoid, and you are not stupid for not knowing. The problem is structural. It is called information asymmetry, and it sits at the centre of every agency relationship. Your agency knows exactly what is happening inside your account. You know only what they choose to tell you. Those are often two very different things, and the gap between them is where both incompetence and complacency hide.

This guide closes that gap. It is written for the business owner who is not a Google Ads expert and does not want to become one, but who wants to know, with actual evidence, whether the agency is earning its fee.

Everything here you can check yourself, inside your own account, in an afternoon. No tools to buy. No expert required. I will tell you exactly where to click, exactly what number is good and what number is a problem, and exactly what to say when you raise it.

One disclosure, because it should colour how you read this. River Stone is a Google Ads agency. We are, in a sense, the competition to whoever you currently use, and we also offer the kind of independent audit this guide teaches you to run yourself. That is a conflict of interest and you should know about it. So I have written this to be genuinely useful even if you never speak to us, and specifically so you can run every check without hiring anyone. If, having read it, you conclude your current agency is doing fine, this guide did its job. The goal is to make you informed, not to make you switch.

Let me start with the single most important idea, because it reframes everything else.

Part 1: Why you cannot trust the reports (and it is not about honesty)

Imagine asking your accountant to audit their own tax return. However honest they are, you would not accept “I checked, it’s all fine” as proof. You would want an independent look. Not because your accountant is a crook, but because self-assessment is not evidence.

Your Google Ads agency’s monthly report is exactly this. It is the agency grading its own homework.

This matters because most agencies are not villains. The dramatic version of a bad agency, one actively lying, stealing, deceiving, is rare. The common version is far more mundane and far more expensive: an agency that is simply coasting. Your account was set up competently a year ago, and since then nobody has really touched it. It runs on autopilot. The reports get generated automatically. The monthly call recycles the same three observations. And your budget slowly leaks into inefficiency that no one is watching, because watching it is work and the fee arrives whether they do that work or not.

You will never see this in a report, because the report is produced by the people who would have to admit to it.

So the entire approach of this guide is to bypass the report and look at the raw evidence directly, the same evidence the agency sees, using access you are entitled to and probably already have. The report tells you what the agency wants you to conclude. The account tells you the truth.

Which leads to the first and most important check of all.

Part 2: The one thing to verify before anything else, do you even own your account?

Before you assess whether the work is good, confirm you can see the work at all. This is the single biggest structural red flag in the entire industry, and it is worryingly common.

You must own your Google Ads account, and you must have admin access to it.

Some agencies build your campaigns inside their own Google Ads manager account (called an MCC, a “My Client Center”) and never give you direct access. You get reports. You get dashboards. But you cannot log into the actual account, because it is not really yours. It lives inside their walls.

This is not a convenience issue. It is a hostage situation dressed up as a service. If your account lives inside the agency’s manager account and you leave them, you can lose everything: your campaign history, your conversion data, your years of accumulated learning about what works, your negative keyword lists, all of it. You walk away with nothing and have to rebuild from scratch, which is exactly the outcome that keeps unhappy clients from leaving.

How to check, right now:

1. Go to ads.google.com and try to sign in with your own email, the one that should be the account owner.
2. If you have never logged in directly, that itself is a warning sign. Ask your agency for admin access to your Google Ads account today.
3. When you are in, click the tools icon, then look under Account access or Access and security. You should see the list of everyone who has access, and your own email should be listed as Admin or Owner.

What good looks like: the account is yours. Your email is the admin. The agency has access as a manager or a user you granted, access you can revoke with one click. Your ability to remove them, rather than the reverse, is the tell.

What bad looks like: you cannot get direct access at all. The agency “handles all of that.” The account is inside their MCC and there is no path for you to control it. Everything is filtered through their dashboard.

What to say if it is bad: “I’d like admin access to our own Google Ads account, and I want the account to be owned by us with you added as a manager. Can you set that up this week?” A good agency does this without friction, because they never relied on lock-in to keep you. An agency that resists, delays, or explains why it is not possible has just told you something important about why they think you stay.

If you cannot see your account, none of the rest of this guide is possible, so fix this first. Once you are in, the real diagnosis begins.

Part 3: The five-minute test, is anyone actually working on your account?

This is the fastest, bluntest check available, and it is the first thing any professional auditor looks at. It answers a simple question: is your agency actively managing your account, or just collecting your fee?

Google records every single change anyone makes to your account, with a timestamp and a name. It is called the change history, and the agency cannot hide it or fake it. It is the closest thing to a security camera you have.

How to pull it:

1. In Google Ads, click Tools (the wrench icon).
2. Under the “Troubleshooting” or “Tracking” area, find Change history.
3. Set the date range to the last 30 days.
4. If your agency logs in with their own email, you can filter by user to see exactly what they did versus automated system changes.

Now read what you see. You are looking for evidence of a human doing thoughtful work: new keywords added, poor performers paused, negative keywords added, bids and budgets adjusted, ad copy changed, audiences tweaked.

What good looks like: a healthy, actively managed account typically shows somewhere between 30 and 150 changes a month, spread across different types of work. Not 150 changes to one setting, but a mix, the fingerprint of someone genuinely tending the account.

What bad looks like: fewer than 10 changes a month is a warning. Zero changes for 60 days or more is not management, it is billing. If your agency has been “optimising” your account and the change history is a flat line, they have not been optimising anything. They have been logging in to generate the report and logging out.

One important caveat, so you do not misread this. Change volume is not the same as change quality. An account can show 200 changes a month and still be badly run if those changes are thrashing, constant restructuring that never lets anything stabilise. And a genuinely mature, well-tuned account may sensibly need fewer changes in a quiet month. So do not treat this as the whole story. Treat it as the smoke alarm. A flat change history almost always means a neglected account. A busy one means someone is at least present, and the rest of this guide tells you whether their presence is doing any good.

What to say if it is bad: “I pulled our change history for the last two months and I’m seeing very little activity. Can you walk me through what optimisation work has actually been done in that time, and what’s planned for the next 30 days?” Watch whether you get specifics or a fog of reassurance. We will come back to how to read that answer.

Part 4: The check that finds the most wasted money, your search terms report

If Part 3 tells you whether anyone is home, this tells you whether they are doing the most basic, most important job of all. And it is where I most often find money pouring out of accounts.

Here is the concept in plain English. When you run search ads, you bid on keywords, the terms you want to show up for. But Google also shows your ads for related searches it decides are close enough. The search terms report shows the actual things real people typed that triggered your ads. Not what you targeted, what you actually appeared for and paid for.

This is where waste lives. A plumber bidding on “emergency plumber” might be paying for clicks on “plumber salary,” “how to become a plumber,” and “plumbing school,” none of which will ever become a customer. Every one of those clicks costs money. The job of catching them and blocking them (with something called negative keywords) is one of the most fundamental, ongoing tasks in Google Ads management. A diligent agency does it constantly. A lazy one never does.

How to check:

1. In Google Ads, go to the Search terms report (under “Insights and reports,” or the “Keywords” section, then “Search terms”).
2. Set the date range to the last 30 to 90 days.
3. Sort by Cost, highest first.
4. Read down the list of actual search terms and ask a simple question about each: would this person plausibly become my customer?

You do not need any technical knowledge for this. You know your business better than any agency ever will. You can tell instantly whether “cheap [your service] jobs” or “[your product] complaints” or “[competitor] reviews” is a real buyer or wasted money.

What good looks like: the terms you are paying for are overwhelmingly relevant. People searching for what you actually sell, with buying intent. A little irrelevant traffic always slips through, that is normal, but the expensive terms are the right ones.

What bad looks like: you are spending real money on obviously irrelevant searches. Job seekers. Students. People looking for free versions. People researching salaries. Searches for “how to do [your service] yourself.” If you see significant spend on terms that could never convert, and especially if the same irrelevant terms keep appearing month after month, your agency is not doing search term management. That is money you are simply handing to Google for nothing.

The specific tell: it is not the presence of one or two junk terms. It is the pattern. If you can scroll your own search terms report for ten minutes and find hundreds of dollars of obvious waste that any competent manager should have caught, the question answers itself.

What to say if it is bad: “I went through our search terms report and found significant spend on terms like [name two or three specific ones]. These don’t look like potential customers to me. How often is the search terms report being reviewed, and can we add negatives for these?” A good agency will be slightly embarrassed and fix it immediately. A bad one will explain why those terms are actually valuable, which is almost always nonsense.

Independent audits back up how common this is. One analysis of 60-plus accounts found that 25 to 40% of budget was being wasted due to poor conversion signals and untended targeting. Another review across 184 accounts found the same foundational problems in 81% of them: broken tracking, search term waste, bidding mismatches, and mismatched landing pages. If you find waste, you are not unlucky. You are normal, which is precisely the problem with the industry.

Part 5: The deepest check, is your agency even measuring the right thing?

This one is more technical, so I am going to walk it slowly, because it is the single most important thing in your entire account and the thing bad agencies get wrong most often.

Everything a modern Google Ads account does, all the automated bidding, all the optimisation, depends on one thing being correct: conversion tracking. A conversion is the action you actually care about, a purchase, a phone call, a form submission, a booking. Google’s automated systems try to get you more of whatever you have told them counts as a conversion. They optimise toward that signal relentlessly.

Which means: if the signal is wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong. The agency can be working hard, making smart-looking changes, and still driving your account confidently in the wrong direction, because the thing they are optimising toward is not actually a customer.

Here is the failure I see most, and it is startlingly common. Many accounts count a phone number click as a conversion. Someone taps your phone number on their mobile, and Google records a “conversion”, even though they may never have actually placed the call, or called and hung up, or called to ask a question and never became a customer. Google’s own documentation is explicit that this feature tracks the tap, not the call. But it is often set as a primary conversion by default, and nobody goes back to check.

The result is an account that looks like it is generating hundreds of “leads” while your phone is barely ringing. The agency reports glorious conversion numbers. Your actual sales do not move. And because the reported numbers look great, nobody investigates.

I am not describing a hypothetical. When we studied our own accounts and published the results, we found that a single misconfigured conversion action, a phone tap set as a primary conversion in one account, distorted a headline performance figure by five times. Five times. That is the difference between a campaign that looks like a triumph and one that is quietly losing money, and it came down to one setting nobody had verified.

How to check, at the level a non-expert can manage:

1. In Google Ads, go to Goals, then Conversions, then Summary.
2. Look at the list of conversion actions and specifically the column that says “Conversion action optimisation” or marks each one as Primary or Secondary.
3. Read the names of the conversions marked Primary. Those are the ones driving your bidding.

Now ask the crucial question: do the primary conversions represent real business, or just website behaviour?

What good looks like: your primary conversions are genuine outcomes. Actual purchases with real revenue attached. Qualified form submissions. Phone calls that lasted long enough to be real enquiries (Google can require a minimum call duration, which filters out wrong numbers and hang-ups). The thing counted as success is a thing that makes you money.

What bad looks like: the primary conversions are soft signals. A phone number click rather than a completed call. A “page view” of your contact page. A click on an email link. “Form started” rather than “form submitted.” These are not customers. They are hints of possible interest, and optimising toward them teaches Google to find you more people who hint rather than more people who buy.

The single most powerful check you can run: compare the numbers. Take last month’s conversion count from Google Ads, and compare it to how many actual leads or sales you know you got, from your own records, your CRM, your phone log, your inbox, your till. If Google Ads claims 200 conversions and you know you had about 30 real enquiries, the tracking is measuring something that is not real, and every optimisation decision made on top of it is compromised. A good agency has done this reconciliation. Ask them when they last did.

What to say if it is bad: “Our primary conversion looks like it’s tracking phone clicks rather than actual calls, and the conversion count doesn’t match how many real leads we’re seeing. Can you reconcile the reported conversions against our actual enquiries, and make sure we’re only optimising toward real business outcomes?” This question alone will tell you enormous amounts, because a competent agency will know exactly what you mean and a weak one will get defensive or vague.

Part 6: The numbers that actually matter (and the ones designed to distract you)

Now we get to the reports themselves, and how to read them like someone who cannot be fooled.

Bad reporting is not usually a lie. It is misdirection. It leads with numbers that always look good and go up, while staying quiet about the numbers that reveal whether you are actually making money. The technical term for the flashy, meaningless numbers is vanity metrics.

The metrics designed to distract you:

• Impressions. How many times your ad was shown. This almost always goes up and tells you nothing about whether anyone bought.
• Clicks. How many people clicked. More clicks is not more customers. It can just be more wasted money.
• Click-through rate (CTR). The percentage of people who clicked. A perfectly healthy-sounding number that has no direct connection to revenue.

None of these are useless to a specialist, they matter as diagnostic signals. But when a report to the client leads with impressions and clicks and CTR and goes quiet on cost per conversion and revenue, you are being managed, not informed.

The metrics that actually tell you the truth:

• Cost per conversion (or cost per lead / cost per acquisition, CPA). How much you spend to get one real customer action. This is the number. Watch its trend over time.
• Conversion volume relative to spend. As you spend more, are you getting proportionally more real conversions, or just more clicks?
• Return on ad spend (ROAS), for ecommerce. Revenue divided by ad spend. Are the ads making more than they cost?
• Revenue or qualified leads. The actual business outcome. The reason you are doing any of this.

How to read the trend, which matters more than any single number:

Do not look at one week. Pull 90 days and look at the direction of travel.

What good looks like: cost per conversion is trending down, or holding steady while conversion volume climbs. That is the signature of genuine optimisation, the account getting more efficient, or scaling without getting more expensive per result.

What bad looks like: this specific, revealing pattern, impressions up, clicks up, CTR stable or up, but conversions flat and cost per conversion rising. This means the account is getting busier and more expensive while producing no more actual customers. It is the fingerprint of an account drifting into inefficiency while the surface-level numbers still look active. An agency reporting the top half of that pattern (impressions, clicks) and staying quiet about the bottom half (conversions, CPA) is not necessarily lying. They may just be focused on what looks good. Either way, you are the one paying for the gap.

What to say: “Going forward, I’d like every report to lead with cost per conversion, conversion volume, and revenue or qualified leads, and to show the 90-day trend, not just last month. Can we set the reporting up that way?” A confident agency welcomes this because it showcases good work. A nervous one resists it because it removes their cover.

Part 7: The budget conversation, and the tell hidden inside it

Here is a subtle one that reveals an agency’s incentives more clearly than almost anything else.

Watch what your agency recommends over time. Specifically, watch the balance between two kinds of recommendation:

• “Spend more” recommendations: increase the budget, expand into new campaigns, raise your daily cap.
• “Spend better” recommendations: cut waste, pause an underperformer, restructure something inefficient, improve a landing page, tighten targeting.

A genuinely good agency does both. It pushes you to invest more where the money is genuinely working, and it proactively finds and cuts waste even though cutting your spend can reduce their own fee if they charge a percentage of it.

The tell: if every conversation, every month, ends with “you should increase your budget,” and you cannot remember the last time they proactively told you to stop spending on something, that is a serious signal. It suggests they are optimising for their revenue, not yours.

The cleanest test of an agency’s integrity is this: has your agency ever recommended that you spend less? Has it ever told you a campaign was not working and should be paused? Has it ever proactively identified budget waste and cut it before you noticed? If in your entire relationship the answer is never, that silence is the answer.

Budget increases are often legitimate. If a campaign is genuinely limited by budget and performing well, spending more to capture more is exactly right. The red flag is not that they ever recommend spending more. It is when spending more is the only thing they ever recommend.

What to say: “What efficiency improvements have you made recently, things that cut waste rather than increased spend? And is there anything currently running that you’d actually recommend we pause or cut?” An agency that can immediately point to waste it has eliminated is managing your account. One that only ever wants to scale is managing your wallet.

Part 8: How to read them in a conversation, the questions that separate real from fake

You will not always be in the account. A lot of your read on an agency happens on calls and in emails, and there are specific questions that reliably separate genuine expertise from a well-rehearsed performance.

The underlying principle: a competent practitioner answers with specifics, conditions, and trade-offs. A weak one answers with confident vagueness. You are not judging whether the answer sounds good. You are judging whether it contains actual substance, a number, a named thing, an “it depends, because.”

Here are the questions, what a strong answer sounds like, and what a dodge sounds like.

“What did you change in our account in the last 30 days, and why?” Strong: specific changes tied to specific reasons. “We added 40 negative keywords after the search term review, paused two underperforming ad groups, and tested a new headline that lifted click-through on the main campaign.” A real agency answers this in about two minutes because they actually did the work. Dodge: “We’ve been monitoring performance and making ongoing optimisations.” That is a sentence engineered to sound like work while describing none.

“Who specifically works on our account, and how many accounts do they manage?” Strong: a name, a rough experience level, and a number. “Sarah manages your account, she’s been doing paid search for six years, and she handles about fifteen accounts.” The number matters. Someone juggling forty accounts cannot give yours real attention. Dodge: “We have a team of specialists working on your account.” This vagueness usually hides the fact that it is a junior with a few weeks of training, and no single person really owns it.

“What’s our target cost per lead, and how did you arrive at it?” Strong: a number derived from your business. “We’re targeting a $65 cost per lead, based on your average deal value and close rate, which gives you a comfortable margin.” They understand your economics, not just your account. Dodge: “We’re always working to lower your cost per lead.” Nice sentiment, no substance. A target has to come from somewhere real, usually your margin and close rate, which our break-even and lead-cost calculators can help you sanity-check.

“When would you tell us to stop spending, or that Google Ads wasn’t the right fit for something?” Strong: they have an answer. Real conditions under which they would recommend less spend or a different approach. It proves they will protect you, not just bill you. Dodge: they cannot imagine such a scenario, or they insist more spend is always the answer.

“Tell me about a time something in our account didn’t work, and what you did about it.” Strong: a specific, honest example. Everyone who genuinely manages accounts has broken or misjudged something. Willingness to name it is one of the strongest trust signals you can get. Dodge: “Everything’s been going really well.” Either they are not paying close enough attention to notice problems, or they are not being straight with you.

You do not need to run these as an interrogation. Drop one or two into a normal call. The quality of the answers, specific and substantive versus smooth and empty, tells you most of what you need to know.

Part 9: The complete red flag list

Everything above, distilled into signals. None of these is automatically damning on its own, most accounts have one or two rough edges, but three or more together means it is time for a serious conversation or a serious change.

Structural red flags (the serious ones):

• You do not have admin access to your own account, or the account is owned by the agency’s manager account.
• The agency resists giving you access or ownership when you ask.
• They cannot or will not show you raw data, only their own dashboards.

Effort red flags:

• Fewer than 10 changes a month in your change history, or long flat stretches of nothing.
• The same irrelevant search terms draining budget month after month.
• No negative keywords being added over long periods.
• No testing of ad copy, landing pages, or targeting.

Measurement red flags:

• Primary conversions that track soft signals (phone clicks, page views) rather than real outcomes.
• Reported conversions that wildly exceed the number of real leads or sales you actually experience.
• Nobody has ever reconciled the account’s conversions against your real business results.

Reporting red flags:

• Reports lead with impressions, clicks, and CTR, and go quiet on cost per conversion and revenue.
• You feel more confused after a report, not less.
• Success is never clearly defined, so it can never be clearly failed.

Relationship red flags:

• Every recommendation is “spend more,” and never “spend better.”
• They have never once recommended pausing or cutting anything.
• Vague, jargon-heavy answers that avoid specifics.
• “Our team” instead of a named person.
• Guaranteed results (nobody credible guarantees specific outcomes before seeing the account).
• Long lock-in contracts with no reasonable exit.
• You manage them more than they manage you.

Part 10: You found problems. Now what?

Suppose you have run these checks and found real issues. Before you fire anyone, work through this, because the goal is a well-run account, not just a different logo on the invoice.

Step 1: Separate “not their fault” from “their fault.” Some accounts genuinely underperform for reasons the agency cannot control: a weak offer, an uncompetitive price, a tiny budget that cannot reach the volume automated bidding needs, a brutal market. The checks in this guide, change history, search term waste, conversion tracking, budget behaviour, are specifically about whether the agency is doing its job. A rising cost per lead in a savagely competitive market with a thin budget may not be their failure. A flat change history and phone-tap conversions absolutely are.

Step 2: Have the direct conversation. Do not fire on suspicion. Raise what you found, specifically, using the exact scripts throughout this guide. A good agency that has been coasting will often snap back into gear when a client clearly knows what they are looking at, because they now understand you cannot be fobbed off. Give them one clear, specific, written list of concerns and a reasonable window to respond. How they react is itself diagnostic: a real agency engages with specifics and fixes things; a weak one gets defensive, vague, or offended.

Step 3: Get an independent look if you are still unsure. This is where the information asymmetry finally breaks. An independent audit, from someone who is not the agency being assessed, gives you a second opinion from a party with no incentive to protect the status quo. Yes, most agencies offering these audits (us included) hope you will hire them, which is a bias you should hold in mind. But an audit that shows you specific evidence in your own account, with screenshots and numbers you can verify yourself, is checkable regardless of who produced it. The findings either exist in your account or they do not.

Step 4: If you switch, protect yourself on the way out. Before you announce anything, confirm you have admin access and ownership of the account, export your historical data, and make sure nothing critical (conversion tracking, scripts, feeds) lives inside the departing agency’s own systems. The single worst position is discovering, after you have given notice, that you cannot actually take your account with you. Which brings the whole guide back to where it started: own your account. Everything else is recoverable. That is the one thing that, if you get it wrong, can trap you.

Part 11: What genuinely good management actually looks like

It is worth ending on the positive picture, so you know what you are aiming for rather than only what to avoid. A genuinely well-run Google Ads account, whoever runs it, has these characteristics, and they map closely to our 9 pillars of a profitable account:

• You own it, fully, and can see everything. Access is never a question.
• Conversion tracking measures real business outcomes, verified against your actual results, not website behaviour.
• The search terms report is reviewed regularly and waste is caught quickly, weekly for higher-spend accounts.
• Reporting connects spend to revenue or qualified leads, in plain language, with honest 90-day trends.
• Both efficiency and growth are on the table. They cut waste and they scale what works.
• A named person knows your account and can speak to it specifically.
• They tell you the truth, including when something is not working and what they are doing about it.
• Cost per real conversion trends down over time, or holds while volume grows.
• They set expectations before changes, so a temporary dip during a fix is understood in advance, not explained away after.

If most of that describes your current agency, you are in good hands, and you can stop worrying. If little of it does, you now know exactly what to ask for, and exactly what to do if you do not get it.

You do not have to become a Google Ads expert to hold your agency accountable. You just have to know where to look, and now you do.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know if my Google Ads agency is doing a good job? Do not rely on their reports, which are self-assessment. Check the raw evidence in your own account: pull the change history to see if real work is happening, review the search terms report for wasted spend, confirm your conversions track real outcomes rather than phone clicks or page views, and look at whether cost per conversion is trending down over 90 days. A good agency also reports on revenue and cost per conversion rather than leading with vanity metrics like impressions and clicks.

Should I have access to my own Google Ads account? Yes, always, as the admin and owner. The account should belong to you or your business, with the agency added as a manager you can remove. If your agency runs everything inside their own manager account and will not give you direct access, that is the most serious red flag in the industry, because it can trap you if you ever try to leave.

How many changes should my agency make to my account each month? A healthy, actively managed account typically shows roughly 30 to 150 changes a month across different types of work. Fewer than 10, or long stretches of zero changes, usually signals a neglected account. But volume is not everything, constant thrashing is also bad, and a mature account may need fewer changes in a quiet month. Treat a flat change history as a warning to investigate, not a final verdict.

What conversion actions should my Google Ads be tracking? Real business outcomes: actual purchases with revenue, qualified form submissions, and phone calls of a meaningful duration. Be wary if your primary conversion is a phone number click (a tap, not a completed call), a page view, or a “form started” event, because optimising toward those teaches Google to find people who show interest rather than people who buy. Reconcile the reported conversion count against your real leads or sales; if they are wildly different, the tracking is wrong.

What metrics should I look at to judge performance? Cost per conversion (or cost per lead), conversion volume relative to spend, return on ad spend for ecommerce, and actual revenue or qualified leads. Look at the 90-day trend, not a single week. Be suspicious of reports that lead with impressions, clicks, and click-through rate, which almost always look good and tell you little about whether you are making money.

My agency always says to increase the budget. Is that bad? Not always, spending more on something genuinely working is legitimate. It becomes a red flag when “spend more” is the only recommendation you ever get. A good agency also proactively cuts waste and pauses underperformers, even when doing so reduces the budget and their own fee. If they have never once recommended spending less on anything, that silence is telling.

How do I find wasted spend myself? Open your search terms report, set it to the last 30 to 90 days, sort by cost, and read the actual terms people typed to trigger your ads. You know your business, so you can spot terms that will never convert (job seekers, students, free-version hunters, competitor research). Significant spend on obviously irrelevant terms, especially the same ones recurring monthly, means your agency is not managing negatives properly.

Should I switch agencies if I find problems? Not automatically. First separate issues the agency controls (neglect, waste, bad tracking) from issues they may not (weak offer, tiny budget, brutal market). Then raise your specific findings directly and give them a chance to fix them, a coasting agency often improves fast once a client clearly knows what they are looking at. If you still switch, secure account ownership and export your data before giving notice.

Is it worth getting an independent audit? It can be, because it breaks the information asymmetry by giving you a second opinion from someone with no stake in defending the current setup. Keep in mind most agencies offering free audits hope to win your business, so weigh the recommendations accordingly, but an audit that shows specific, verifiable evidence in your own account is checkable regardless of who produced it.

About The Author