How to know if your Google Ads agency is actually doing a good job

What "good" looks like operationally. A good agency makes specific changes to the account on a weekly cadence, documents what changed and why, hits or beats the cost-per-booked-job target on a 90-day rolling window, and surfaces strategic decisions (budget changes, campaign-structure shifts) BEFORE making them, not in the monthly report after the fact. Everything below is a check against one of those four dimensions.

The vibes problem. Polished monthly reports and responsive email cadence are necessary but not sufficient. Agencies that fail on substance often have the polish dialed in; that is why most operators do not catch the failure mode until they fire the agency and discover the account was on autopilot for 6 months. The 13-point checklist below is built to bypass the polish and check the substance directly.

The cadence question. A managed account should show change-history activity at least weekly (Google Ads > Tools > Change history). If the change-log is empty for 30+ days, the agency is not touching the account; the bidder is doing all the work and you are paying a retainer for the bidder. This is the single highest-leverage check; most failing agencies fail it.

The transparency question. The agency should be willing to share the account directly (read-only access at minimum, admin access on the manager account ideally) without making it awkward. If sharing access is treated as unusual, that is signal. You are paying for the account; you should be able to look at it.

The audit serves as the objective check on the 13-point list. The prospect can run the list themselves (most items are checkable in under 15 minutes from inside Google Ads), but the audit produces the evidence base in writing: which items pass, which fail, with the specific finding for each failure.

For an operator deciding whether to fire their current agency, the audit produces three useful artifacts: (1) the pass/fail status on each of the 13 items, (2) the specific evidence behind each failure (e.g., "negative-keyword list has 23 terms; no additions in the last 47 days; search-term report shows 8 wrong-service queries in the top 50 by cost"), and (3) the prioritized fix list the next agency (or a self-managed account) should run in the first 30 days.

The audit's job is not to recommend firing the agency. The audit's job is to make the substance visible. Operators who run the audit and find their agency passes 12 of 13 items often keep the agency with a tighter scope; operators who find the agency passes 4 of 13 items have the evidence base for a firing conversation.