How to tell if your ads agency is doing a good job: five checks you can run yourself

You can tell whether your ads agency is doing a good job in about an hour, using five checks that need no marketing training, only your own records and the willingness to ask for two reports. In the Google Ads accounts I took over during 2026, the expensive problems were visible in standard reports the whole time, and nobody had looked.

One thing before the checks. Plenty of agency people do honest work while stretched across too many accounts, and these checks are just as good at confirming a solid agency as they are at catching a poor one. Run them as due diligence, and hold your conclusions until you have the evidence, because accusations travel faster than corrections.

Do I own my own Google Ads account?

Settle this before any of the checks below can mean anything. Sign in to Google Ads, go to Access and security in the Admin menu, and read the list of users next to their access levels. Google Ads has five levels, running from email-only and billing through read-only and standard up to admin, and somebody who works for you should be sitting on an admin row. If the agency holds admin and you hold nothing, or your only route in is a login they created and share with you, then everything you are paying for sits inside somebody else's asset.

Granting you admin takes an agency under a minute, because an existing admin invites your email address from that same page and you accept it with your own Google account. Refusal is itself the answer, and it usually arrives dressed as a technicality about how their manager account is arranged. Working through a manager account, the umbrella account agencies use to reach many clients from one login, is completely normal and does not require them to own your account: Google's own documentation says the client's users carry on signing in as usual and an administrator can unlink from the manager whenever they choose.

The reason to care is what happens on the day you leave. The account holds the change history, the conversion data, the audience lists and the billing record, so if it is yours, your next manager inherits all of it and picks up where the last one stopped. If it belonged to the agency, you start again on an empty account with bidding that has to learn your customers from scratch, which is an expensive way to change supplier.

Which searches is my money actually buying?

Ask for the search terms report for the last 30 days, exported as a spreadsheet. It lists the real phrases people typed before clicking your ad, which is a different thing from the keywords the agency chose to bid on, because Google matches loosely. Read the top 50 rows by cost and mark anything you would never want to pay for: another company's brand name, job seekers, students doing homework, products you do not sell. Every account collects some junk. A managed account should show that junk being added as negative keywords (exclusions, phrases the account refuses to pay for again) month after month. If the agency cannot produce the report within a day, or the top rows are full of rubbish that has plainly been running for months, you have your first answer.

Do the reported conversions match my own records?

Take last month's report, find the conversions number, and compare it to your own count of enquiries: the forms in your inbox, the calls your receptionist logged, the WhatsApp messages. Expect some drift between the two numbers, since attribution is imperfect, but they should land in the same neighbourhood. When an agency reports 60 conversions and you can find nine enquiries, one of those numbers is fiction, and it is rarely yours.

What does each conversion actually fire on?

Ask the agency one precise question: "For each conversion action in the account, what does a person have to do for it to count?" The only good answers describe things a real prospect does, such as submitting the enquiry form or tapping the phone number. In one account I took over in 2026, 75% of all clicks were being counted as conversions because the tag fired the moment the page loaded. Every visitor was a "lead", the reporting looked spectacular, and the business was getting almost nothing.

You can check part of this yourself without asking anyone. Right-click your own website, choose View Page Source, and search the text for gtag, GTM- and AW-. Those strings show which Google measurement is installed at all. Finding them proves the plumbing exists; the question above establishes whether it measures anything real.

Did my budget run on Search or on Display?

Search ads appear when someone actively looks for what you sell. Display ads are banners scattered across apps and websites, and for most service businesses they produce cheap clicks that go nowhere. Ask for spend split by network over the last 90 days. In takeovers I did in 2026, I found between 43% and 59% of total spend leaking to the Display network as junk traffic the client never asked for, usually because a default setting was left switched on. If most of your money sits on Search, that is the healthy pattern. If half of it sits on Display and nobody ever discussed that choice with you, you have found a leak you can raise today.

What did the agency test last month?

Ask "What did you test last month, and what was the result?" A managed account should always have at least two ads running against each other, and someone should be able to tell you which one won and what replaced the loser. A vague answer about ongoing optimisation usually means the account has been coasting. This check has a second edge: a good agency will answer it instantly and will enjoy being asked.

• Which searches is my money actually buying? · expect a straight answer

  A search terms export you can read. Refusal or a summary in its place is the answer.

• Do the reported conversions match my own records? · expect a straight answer

  The platform number and your inbox should tell the same story.

• What does each conversion actually fire on? · expect a straight answer

  A form submission is an answer. A page view is a problem.

• Did my budget run on Search or on Display? · where accounts usually fail

  Search campaigns quietly opted into Display is one of the most common leaks.

• What did you test last month? · where accounts usually fail

  No answer means the account is being watched rather than worked.

You are not auditing the campaigns here, you are auditing whether anyone can show you their working.

What does the change history tell me?

The change history is the one report an agency cannot dress up, because it records what was done rather than what was described. Open it under Change history in the Campaigns menu and set the date range to the last three months. Google keeps two years of it, shows the email address of whoever made each change when that change was made in the interface, and maps the changes against impressions, clicks, conversions and cost, so you can read the performance line and the human line side by side.

A worked account looks busy in an ordinary way, with keywords paused, negative keywords added, new ad copy going live, a budget moved and bids adjusted, week after week. An account on set-and-forget shows a burst of activity in the first month and then very little, while the monthly report keeps arriving on time throughout. One quiet month is a fair thing to ask about rather than a verdict, since work also happens on the landing page and in your Google Business Profile, but a quarter of silence next to a quarter of invoices is the check that ends most of these arguments.

What should their monthly report actually show?

Almost every monthly report I get shown opens with impressions, clicks and click-through rate. Those are inputs, and a report built on them can climb all month while the phone stays quiet. The first line of a useful report is the number of enquiries and what each one cost, set against the same figures for the month before, and the second line is how many of those enquiries turned into work, which only you can supply.

Ask for three things in one email: the conversions figure with a plain sentence about what each conversion action fires on, the spend split by campaign and by network, and the search terms report. A PDF with no numbers underneath it is a design exercise. If the conversions figure looks healthy while your inbox does not, the gap has a specific set of causes, which I have written up at Google Ads says you are getting conversions, but there are no leads.

What does good agency work look like?

Fairness matters here, because tracking is genuinely fiddly and suspicion is cheap. In one verification sweep I ran in 2026, 30 of 70 suspected tracking problems turned out to be false alarms once I checked inside the Google Tag Manager containers, the public files that hold a site's measurement setup. So treat any single red flag as a question to raise rather than a verdict to deliver.

Here is what a monthly fee should visibly buy: the search terms report gets reviewed and the junk gets negated, ads run against each other in live tests, the landing page loads fast and asks plainly for the enquiry, the conversion count roughly matches your own records, and the monthly report reads in five minutes without a glossary. On fees, percentage-of-spend arrangements commonly land somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of media budget. My standing rule is that below roughly R7,500 per month in media spend (about $400 to $500) you should not be paying a management fee at all, because the fee eats the budget that was supposed to buy customers.

If checks two and three worry you, I wrote a longer piece on the three pieces of evidence every advertiser should hold their reporting against, at /writing/the-three-receipts. I run paid media and rescue broken conversion tracking for a living, mostly in accounts exactly like the ones described above, so if a check turns up something ugly, you now know precisely what to ask whoever fixes it.