11 signs your Google Ads agency isn't working

You suspect your Google Ads agency isn’t doing a good job, but you don’t know how to check without relying on what the agency itself tells you. It’s an awkward spot: the monthly report says things are going reasonably well, sales or leads aren’t following, and you have no way to tell a bad patch from an account nobody is looking after.

Almost everything you need to know sits inside your account, visible to anyone with access. You don’t need to know how to run Google Ads to audit whoever runs it: you just need to know where to look. This post covers the 11 checks I run when a business asks me for a second opinion on its agency, and the opposite too: things that look like bad news but say nothing about the quality of the work.

If you’re still deciding between an agency and a freelancer, I cover that in Google Ads consultant vs agency: which one fits. Here I’m assuming you already have a provider and want to know whether they’re delivering.

In 30 seconds:

• Start with ownership: the account should be in your company’s name and you should have admin access. Google requires agencies to give you your customer ID when you ask.
• Google’s policy says the agency must report Google’s cost separately from its own fee, and disclose that fee on every invoice.
• Change history keeps two years and shows who made each change. Weeks with no human changes, or nearly everything signed by “system”, are a red flag.
• Check what counts as a conversion: a “contact page” visit or a phone click set as primary inflates the report.
• A dip after a bidding change, or in the middle of the low season, isn’t on its own a sign of bad management.

Quick map: what to check and where

Before the detail, here’s the full list. You can work through it in an afternoon with your account access and the agency’s invoices in front of you.

What you check	Where you see it	What’s normal	What’s a red flag
Ownership and access	Admin > Access and security	Account in your company’s name, with your email as admin	You don’t have admin access, or the account belongs to the agency
Real cost vs fee	Agency invoices and Billing in Google Ads	Account spend matches what you’re invoiced as media, with the fee shown separately	You can’t separate what Google charges from what the agency charges
Activity	Change history	Changes signed by people, spread across the month	Weeks with no human changes, or almost everything done by the system
Recommendations	Recommendations > Auto-apply	Every type that’s switched on has a reason the agency can explain	Bids, keywords or targeting changing on their own with nobody explaining why
Google Partner badge	A meeting with the agency	They can tell you which recommendations they applied and why	The badge is offered as proof your account is doing well
Conversions	Goals > Conversions	Primary = real sales or leads, with leads counted as “One”	Micro-actions set as primary, or leads counted as “Every”
Search terms	Search terms report	Negatives added regularly	Repeated spend on searches that have nothing to do with your business
Networks	Campaign settings > Networks	Display or search partners switched on for a reason, with data behind it	Display switched on in Search without anyone deciding it
Brand	PMax settings and Auction insights	Brand exclusions set up, or a clear reason not to have them	Performance Max picking up your brand searches with no controls
Tests	Experiments page	At least one current or recent test	No experiments and no written hypothesis for months
Reporting	The monthly report you receive	CPA or ROAS against a target tied to your margin	Impressions, CTR, clicks or optimization score as the headline

Is the Google Ads account in your name?

It’s the first question and the most important, because every other check depends on you being able to get in and look.

Google Ads has five access levels: email only, billing, read only, standard and admin. Only admin can grant and remove access, change access levels, and accept or reject links with manager accounts (Google Ads Help). If your agency has given you read-only access “so you can see the data”, you can look, but you can’t decide anything.

Then there’s ownership. If the agency created the account from its manager account (MCC), that MCC is listed as the owner, because a client account can only have one owner. The next line on that same page is the one that protects you: the client account still owns its data and can remove ownership access by unlinking the MCC, something users of the client account can always do (Google Ads Help).

The case that really worries me is a different one: your ads running from an account that belongs to the agency, where you’re little more than a name on a campaign. The day you leave, the history, the audiences and the bidding data stay with them. How to avoid that before you sign is in how to choose a PPC agency or freelancer without getting locked in.

There’s a quick check that doesn’t even need you to log in. Google’s third-party policy says the agency must give you the customer IDs for your Google Ads accounts when you ask (Google Ads Policy). Ask in writing. If the answer is evasive, that’s your first sign.

Do you know how much goes to Google and how much to the agency?

It sounds obvious, but in my experience it’s common for a business not to know. It gets one invoice with a single figure, “management and media”, and can’t split ad spend from what the agency keeps.

Google regulates this for anyone managing accounts on behalf of others. Its transparency requirements say that when an agency shares cost data with a client, it must report the exact amount charged by Google, excluding any fees it charges. And if it charges a separate management fee, it has to tell new clients in writing before their first purchase and show that fee on every invoice (Google Ads Policy). The general policy adds that third parties should be honest and transparent about their services, costs and expected results (Google Ads Policy).

The check is simple: compare the spend you see in Google Ads for a closed month with what the agency invoiced you as ad spend for that month. They should match. If the agency pays Google on its own card and re-bills you, why wouldn’t it show you Google’s invoice? A margin on media isn’t illegal, but it has to be disclosed. If it isn’t, the problem is no longer performance. It’s trust. What reasonable pricing looks like is in my post on Google Ads consultant pricing.

What does the change history say?

If you could only run one check, I’d recommend this one. Change history is the record of everything touched in the account, campaigns and ad groups over the past two years. The User column shows the email address of whoever made the change through the interface, and automated changes appear under names like “Google Ads system” or “Google Ads API” (Google Ads Help).

You’ll find it under Tools, or by searching “change history” in the top bar. I filter the last 90 days and look at rhythm first. A managed account has changes spread across the month: negatives added, ads adjusted, budgets reviewed. Do you see a burst of changes right before each monthly meeting and silence in between? Then you know when your account gets worked on.

Next I look at who’s signing. An email that changes every few months isn’t a failure in itself, but every handover costs context, and that usually shows up as weeks without clear direction. It’s worse when almost everything shows up as system: the account is running itself.

The type of change matters too. Several bid strategy changes in a few weeks worry me more than a quiet month, because each one sends the strategy back into learning, as I explain further down.

Watch out for the opposite conclusion, though. Few changes doesn’t mean bad work. A stable account that performs may not need much. What counts is whether the changes that are there make sense, and for that it helps to know which tasks should happen every week, which I go through in what Google Ads management includes.

Who’s applying Google’s recommendations?

Google Ads lets certain recommendations be applied automatically, without anyone approving them one by one (Google Ads Help). The ones that can auto-apply include adjusting CPA and ROAS targets, changing bid strategy, adding keywords and broad match, expanding to search partners and turning on targeting expansion. In other words: your bids, your keywords and where your ads show.

In the Recommendations section you’ll see whether auto-apply is on and for which types. It isn’t necessarily bad practice; I leave a few on myself where I consider them harmless. The red flag is different: bid or keyword changes applying automatically and nobody at the agency being able to tell you which ones or why.

This is where a metric some agencies show off comes in: optimization score. Google defines it as an estimate of how well your account is set to perform, from 0 to 100%, and says you reach 100% by applying or dismissing all recommendations (Google Ads Help). Think about what that means: you can hit 100% by dismissing everything, and you can sit at 95% with an account that’s losing money. My reading is that optimization score measures how much attention has been paid to Google’s suggestions, not how many customers the account has brought you. A report that leads with that figure instead of your sales or leads is showing you the thing that doesn’t matter.

Does the Google Partner badge guarantee anything?

It guarantees the agency meets some minimums as a company, not that your account is well managed. The programme has three requirements: a minimum 70% optimization score on the registered manager account, $10,000 USD of spend over 90 days across all managed accounts, and at least half of account strategists certified in Google Ads (Google Ads Help).

All three are measured across the agency as a whole. None measures the results in your account. And there’s an incentive worth knowing about: since optimization score counts towards keeping the badge, a Partner agency has a reason to apply recommendations that doesn’t always line up with yours. I’m not saying they all do. I’m saying it’s a fair question in a meeting: “Which recommendations did you apply this quarter, and why?”

What counts as a conversion in your account?

This is where I most often find reports that look good on businesses that aren’t growing. How can cost per conversion fall month after month without more customers coming in? Nearly always because the account is counting things that aren’t customers.

Under Goals > Conversions, every action is either primary or secondary. Primary actions go into the Conversions column and are used for bid optimization; secondary actions only appear in All conversions and aren’t used for bidding (Google Ads Help). If a contact page visit, a phone click or a “scroll” event imported from GA4 is marked primary alongside the sale or the form, two things happen. The report’s CPA drops artificially, and the algorithm learns to chase those micro-actions because they’re cheaper than a customer.

Check how each action is counted too. Google offers two options: “Every”, which counts every conversion after an ad interaction, and “One”, which counts only one per click. For leads, Google’s own help points to “One” as the right choice when what you care about is whether a lead was generated, not how many times the form was sent (Google Ads Help). A contact form counted as “Every” can turn one impatient person who submits three times into three leads.

The definitive test is the one I suggest in why your Google Ads isn’t converting: compare a month’s conversions with what your CRM or your store recorded. If the gap is large and nobody at the agency has explained it, the problem isn’t the bidding.

When did anyone last look at the search terms?

The search terms report shows the actual searches that triggered your ads, as long as a significant number of people used them. Google leaves out low-volume terms for privacy reasons (Google Ads Help), so you’ll never see 100%, but you’ll see enough.

When I review someone else’s account, I open the last 30 days, sort by cost and read the top 50 rows. You can do the same. You don’t need to be an expert to spot searches that have nothing to do with what you sell: jobs, free training, a competitor’s brand you don’t want to pay for, products you don’t stock. An odd search now and then is normal, and I find them in well-run accounts too. But do you see the same irrelevant searches, with spend, month after month? Then nobody is adding negatives. It’s the most basic weekly task in account management, and the easiest to check. The full method is in my post on the search terms report.

Are your Search campaigns showing on networks nobody chose?

A Search campaign can also serve on the Display Network if “Include Google Display Network” is selected in its network settings (Google Ads Help). Google used to pitch it as a way to spend on Display the budget a campaign couldn’t use on Search. It’s now moving the feature to a channel prioritization model, and according to that same page, Search campaigns with Display expansion will switch over from February 2027. The option is still there, so it’s worth knowing who turned it on.

Does it pay off? It depends on the account, which is exactly why it should be a decision and not a default. Seer Interactive ran two tests in November 2021. In the US one, cost rose 100%, conversions 32% and cost per lead 51%. In the UK one, cost rose 89%, conversions fell 33% and cost per lead jumped 184% (Seer Interactive). They’re two old tests, measured after two weeks, so don’t treat them as a rule. What they do show is that this one setting can make your leads noticeably more expensive.

Check the network settings on each Search campaign and segment the report by network. Display expansion is also one of the recommendations that can auto-apply (Google Ads Help), so cross-check it against what you found under Recommendations. If Display or search partners are on, ask the agency what data it used to decide. “It came like that” isn’t an answer.

Is Performance Max taking your brand traffic?

This check is more technical, and in my view it’s the one most often missed in accounts running Performance Max. If a PMax campaign picks up searches for your own brand, it’ll show very cheap conversions you’d largely have got anyway. The report improves and the business gains nothing.

Google offers brand exclusions for PMax, which apply to Search, Shopping and YouTube search inventory (Google Ads Help). Ask your agency whether they’re set up and, if not, why. There may be a good reason, for example no separate brand campaign. What there shouldn’t be is silence.

Auction insights fills in the picture. It shows your impression share against other advertisers, how often you appear in the same auction and how often you rank above them (Google Ads Help). If your impression share on your own brand searches is low and a competitor keeps showing up, someone should have told you.

Is anything being tested?

The accounts that improve are the ones where someone tests things. Google Ads has an Experiments page for managing ad variations and custom experiments, which are mostly used to test Smart Bidding, keyword match types, landing pages, audiences and ad groups (Google Ads Help).

Open it. If it’s empty, or the last experiment is more than a year old, ask what has been tested and how. The agency may test another way, with dated changes and a before-and-after comparison you can trace in change history, and that’s fine if they can show you. What doesn’t count is “we optimise continuously” without a single written hypothesis. Could you say what your agency has learned about your account in the last six months?

Does the report talk about your business or about the platform?

We’ve already seen that optimization score isn’t a result. The rest of the report deserves the same scrutiny: platform metrics (impressions, CTR, clicks, average CPC) help with diagnosis, but they don’t tell you whether the money comes back. A report can be long, good-looking and answer nothing.

What I expect from any monthly Google Ads report comes down to three things:

• Cost per primary conversion or ROAS, compared against a target tied to your margin.
• What changed in the account that month, and why.
• What’s going to be tested next month.

If the report opens with “impressions are up 20%” and says nothing about sales or leads, ask for it to be reordered. If it stays the same after you’ve asked, that’s a sign. And if you ask why performance dropped in a given month and the answer is “seasonality”, with no data behind it, that’s another. Seasonality is real, as you’ll see in the next section, but it’s shown by comparing with the same period last year, not just named.

What isn’t a sign your agency is failing?

This part matters as much as the rest, because switching agency for the wrong reason is expensive. A badly handled transition can wipe out months of learning, as I explain in the 14-day plan for an account handed over by an agency.

The most common false alarm is a drop right after a bidding change. Google documents that after a bid strategy change there can be fluctuations while it optimizes, and suggests not measuring performance until learning is over (Google Ads Help). Recalibration typically takes one or two conversion cycles (Google Ads Help). If your cycle is two weeks, judging the change after five days isn’t fair.

Nor is a new account that hasn’t performed yet: the first months have their own pace, which I cover in how long Google Ads takes to work. Nor are the last few days’ conversions, which often arrive some time after the click. Comparing last week with a closed month nearly always shows a drop that later disappears.

Does your sector dip every August? Then a dip in August says nothing about the agency. Always compare with the same period last year.

And there’s one people sometimes read the wrong way round. An agency that advises you not to raise the budget, or not to launch a campaign that doesn’t make sense, isn’t slacking. Usually it’s doing exactly what you pay it for.

What is a sign, in all these cases, is the lack of an explanation. Performance dropping can be normal. Performance dropping and nobody having a hypothesis isn’t.

I’ve found several signs: now what?

Don’t tear up the contract tomorrow. What I usually advise is to ask first, in writing, for an explanation of what you’ve found: why those conversions are primary, why those searches still have no negatives, what’s been changed this quarter. A good agency answers in detail and is usually glad the client is engaged. One that isn’t working the account gets defensive or promises changes without specifics.

If the answers don’t convince you, the next step is an external audit. You can run it yourself using the guide to auditing your Google Ads account, or hand it to someone with no stake in the outcome. That’s a big part of what I do as an independent Google Ads consultant: review the account with admin access and tell you what’s right, what’s wrong and what’s just noise, without the conclusion having to be “hire me”.

And if you decide to switch, secure access and measurement first, and leave unlinking the MCC until last. The order matters more than it looks.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know if my Google Ads agency is actually working on my account?

Open change history and filter the last 90 days. You’ll see every change, when it was made and the email of whoever made it. If there are whole weeks with no human changes, or almost every change is signed by the system, the account isn’t being actively managed.

Do I have a right to see my Google Ads account if an agency manages it?

Google’s third-party policy requires the agency to give you the customer IDs for your accounts when you ask, and to report Google’s real cost separately from its fee. I’d go further: the account should be in your company’s name, with admin access for you on a company email address.

Does a high optimization score mean the account is doing well?

No. Google defines it as an estimate of how well the account is set up, and you reach 100% by applying or dismissing all recommendations. It measures how Google’s suggestions have been handled, not sales or leads. Judge the account on real cost per customer, not on that number.

What should I ask the agency for before deciding whether to switch?

Three things, in writing: admin access for a company email address, the list of primary conversion actions with the reason for each one, and a summary of what’s been tested in the last six months. With that, you can compare what they tell you with what the account shows.

How long should I give a new agency before judging it?

It depends on conversion volume and sales cycle, but the first two or three months are rarely representative. What you can expect from month one is correct measurement, up-to-date negatives and clear explanations of every change.

Is it a bad sign if my agency is a Google Partner and I still don’t see results?

It’s not a contradiction. Google Partner requirements are measured across the agency’s accounts as a whole: total spend, certifications and optimization score. None of them guarantees results in a specific account.

The question that sums it up

All these checks come back to one idea: an agency that’s working can explain anything you find in your account. Does everything have to go well? No, nobody manages that all the time, me included. What they do need to know is what’s in your account, why it’s there and what they plan to change next month.

If you’ve looked through your account and aren’t sure whether what you’re seeing is normal, book a 30-minute call. We’ll go through it with the account open and I’ll tell you what deserves a conversation with your agency and what doesn’t.

Sources

1. Google Ads Help. About access levels in your Google Ads account. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9978556
2. Google Ads Help. Manager Accounts (MCC): About ownership of client accounts. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7456532
3. Google Ads Policy. Transparency requirements. support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/16489093
4. Google Ads Policy. Third-party partner policy. support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6086450
5. Google Ads Help. About change history. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/19888
6. Google Ads Help. About applying recommendations automatically. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10279006
7. Google Ads Help. About optimization score. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9061546
8. Google Ads Help. Google Partners program requirements. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9702452
9. Google Ads Help. Manage conversion goals from the conversions summary. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10993988
10. Google Ads Help. About conversion counting options. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/3438531
11. Google Ads Help. About the search terms report. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2472708
12. Google Ads Help. About Display Expansion on Search campaigns. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7193800
13. Seer Interactive (November 2021). We Tested Display Expansion for Search & Here’s What We Found. seerinteractive.com
14. Google Ads Help. About brand exclusions. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/14505308
15. Google Ads Help. About auction insights. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2579754
16. Google Ads Help. About the “Experiments” page. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10682377
17. Google Ads Help. About bid strategy statuses. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6263057
18. Google Ads Help. Duration of the learning period for campaigns and what affects it. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/13020501