How to Tell if Your Google Ads Agency Is Doing a Good Job

Start with the access test

Before you look at a single metric, try to log in to your Google Ads account. Not the agency’s dashboard, not a shared PDF, the actual account at ads.google.com. It should be registered to your business name, billed to your card, and you should hold admin access on it. Ask for the 10-digit Customer ID if you do not have it, and ask to be added as an admin if you are not one already. Granting that takes about 2 minutes.

This is the test that decides how much of the rest matters. If you cannot see the account, then every number you have ever been shown is unverifiable, and the campaign history, the conversion data and the machine learning built up over years belong to somebody else. A reasonable agency hands over access the same day and thinks nothing of it. Hesitation here is itself the finding.

A results report and an activity report are not the same thing

Most monthly reports that leave an owner uneasy are technically accurate and completely useless. They describe effort rather than outcome. The difference is easy to spot once you know what you are looking at.

The tell is the last one on the right. Anybody can present a good month. A report you can trust also tells you which test failed and what was done about it. If every report for a year has been positive, you are reading marketing, not reporting.

5 checks you can run inside the account yourself

None of these require experience. They require a login and a willingness to compare what the account says against what you were told.

1. The search terms report

Keywords are what your agency bids on. Search terms are what real people actually typed to trigger your ad, and the 2 are frequently miles apart. Open Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms, and set the range to the last 90 days. Sort by cost. Read the top 30 with your business owner hat on and ask a simple question of each one: is that person a customer? Some waste is normal and unavoidable. Pages of obviously irrelevant terms with real money against them, month after month, means nobody is reading this screen.

2. Your conversion actions, and whether they are real

Go to Goals, then Conversions, then Summary. You will see a list of the actions the account counts as a conversion. Read each one and decide whether it represents a human being contacting your business. A phone call, a submitted form and a tap on a phone link qualify. A page view, a scroll, a click on the menu, a 15-second session or “engaged sessions” do not, and any account counting those will report impressive numbers that mean nothing.

Then run the sanity check that beats any dashboard: compare the reported conversion count against how many people genuinely contacted you that month. If the report claims 60 and you fielded 12 enquiries, the tracking is measuring the wrong thing, or one person is being counted 3 times through an overlapping call, form and thank-you-page setup. Ask for that gap to be explained in writing.

3. The negative keyword list

Negatives are how an account stops paying for searches that will never buy: the free, the DIY, the jobs, the wrong suburb, the competitor names. Check Tools, then Shared library, then Negative keyword lists, and also look at the campaign-level negatives. An account that has been running for 6 months with an empty or near-empty negative list has not been maintained, no matter what the report says. This is the single cheapest form of waste to eliminate, which is why its absence is so telling.

4. Change history for the last 90 days

This is the most revealing screen in Google Ads and almost nobody outside the industry knows it exists. Tools, then Change history, then set the date range to the last 90 days. Every edit ever made is logged there, with the date and the account that made it. You do not need to understand the changes. You only need to see whether there are any.

Be fair about how you read it. A mature account performing well is sometimes best left alone, and constant fiddling can do more harm than good. But that is a decision an agency should be able to state plainly and back with performance data. “We left it stable because cost per enquiry has held under $80 for 5 months” is a real answer. Silence across 90 days while a retainer is being invoiced is not.

5. Where your money actually went

Open Billing, then Summary, and look at what Google charged for the month. Now compare it with what you were invoiced. You should be able to see 2 clearly separate numbers: the ad spend that went to Google, and the management fee that went to the agency. If you pay a single bundled amount and cannot see the split, ask for it in writing. Some arrangements quietly report a slice of your ad budget as part of the management fee, and the only way to know is to hold the invoice next to Google’s own billing screen.

The warning signs, in order of seriousness

None of these prove bad work on their own. Any 2 together are worth a direct conversation.

• You cannot access the account. Everything downstream is unverifiable, and you own none of the history.
• Reports show impressions and clicks only. Activity is being presented because outcomes are not being tracked, or are not good.
• The fee is a percentage of spend. The advice to increase your budget can never arrive free of self-interest.
• There is a lock-in contract. A 12-month term buys the agency time you did not agree to give it.
• Nobody can name what changed last month. If the person on the phone has to go and check, they are not running your account.
• Conversions do not match the phone. A reported number well above the enquiries you actually received is a tracking problem until proven otherwise.
• Every ad points at your homepage. Sending a specific search to a general page is the most common cause of a low conversion rate, and it is entirely fixable.

When the honest answer is that you do not need an agency

This is the part most pages like this leave out. There are situations where paying for management genuinely does not stack up, and knowing which one you are in is worth more than any audit.

If your ad budget is a few hundred dollars a month, a management fee can end up being most of what you spend, and there is rarely enough room left in the budget for that math to work. If almost nobody searches for what you sell, Google Ads is the wrong channel and no agency can conjure demand that is not there. And if you run a single service in a small radius, on an account that has already been built and tracked properly, the ongoing work can be light enough to keep in-house. Management earns its fee where there are multiple services, real competition in the auction, or enough spend that a few percent of waste costs more than the fee itself.

Equally, if your agency passed the 5 checks above, keep them. Switching resets the learning in the account and costs you a month or 2 of momentum, and that is a real price to pay for a change you did not need.

If the answers do not stack up

Secure admin access to the Google Ads account before you have any conversation about leaving. The account, its spend history and its conversion data are worth considerably more than the last 12 reports, and once you hold them, a change of provider costs you far less. Then put your questions in writing and give a reasonable deadline. The answers to “what changed last month, what did it do, and what is the plan for next month” will tell you what you need to know.

An account being neglected is not a lost cause. An Adelaide plumbing and gas client we manage, an interstate account rather than a Hobart one, had been through 5 agencies in 10 years before it reached us. New Google enquiries went from 13 a month to 41 a month, reaching 41 by the fourth month, on no extra budget. Nothing exotic did that. The campaigns were rebuilt around enquiries that convert rather than activity that reads well in a report.

If you want a second opinion on what you are looking at, that is what our free review of your account and your market is for. We go through the same checks on your account and tell you plainly whether the work is being done, including when the answer is that your current setup is fine and you should leave it alone. You can also read how we run Google Ads management for Hobart businesses, see the honest breakdown of what PPC management costs here, or call 1300 063 720 and ask.