How to tell if your PPC agency is any good

by Harry Watts · 18 August 2026 · updated 16 September 2026 · 7 min read

You pay the invoice every month. The report says things are fine. And you have no idea whether they are. That's not you being slow — it's the arrangement: the person being judged writes the scorecard.

Having sat on the agency side, the in-house side and now the independent side of this exact relationship, here's the uncomfortable truth: most owners can find out in twenty minutes. The platform keeps receipts. You just need to know which drawers to open.

Is the account yours? If campaigns live in the agency's Google Ads account and you leave, the history (years of conversion data) stays with them. Ask directly: "Is the account under our billing, and do we keep it if we part ways?" A pause is an answer.
Can you log in right now? You should have at least read-only access, permanently. "We'll send you a report instead" is not access.
Do you know the split? How much went to Google last month, and how much to the agency? If one invoice bundles both into a single number, ask for the split. Refusal is a red flag with no innocent explanation.

Fee context while you're at it: UK management runs £200–£800 a month freelance, £500–£5,000+ agency-side, with a published median around £470. Those bands track account size, and complex accounts sit in the upper half of either column. Being at the top of that range isn't a problem. Being at the top of it with what you find below is.

The two-minute check that settles most cases

Google Ads records every edit anyone makes (every bid change, negative keyword, ad test, budget move) with a timestamp and a name. It's the one report the agency doesn't write.

What you want: steady, purposeful activity. A handful of considered changes most weeks: search-term exclusions, ad copy tests, budget adjustments with a pattern to them.

What you sometimes find: nothing. Weeks of it. Or only automated rules firing while no human has touched the account since onboarding. On an account billed hundreds a month for "active management", a silent change history is the clearest evidence of neglect you can gather. Screenshot it before your next review call.

The fifteen-minute money check

Next: Insights and reports → Search terms, last 90 days, sorted by cost, filtered to zero conversions. You're looking at the actual searches your money bought.

Some waste is normal: paid search is probabilistic. What shouldn't be there: obviously irrelevant queries with real spend against them. Job seekers. Free-version hunters. Other cities. Other industries. If the same junk terms have been drinking budget for months, nobody's reading this report, and it's typically 10–25% of spend in an unattended account.

Two more drawers while you're in:

Goals → Conversions. Only genuine outcomes (enquiries, purchases, calls of real length) should be marked Primary. Page views and button clicks counted as conversions make every number in the report flattering and false.
Brand vs non-brand. Ask what performance looks like with searches for your own company name stripped out. Brand clicks are cheap and would mostly have found you anyway; blending them in is how a mediocre quarter is dressed as a good one. An agency that reports the split unprompted is being straight with you.

Four questions for the next review call

Not gotchas: working questions a competent manager answers easily, in plain English. Jargon in response to any of them is itself information (a translation table, if you need one).

"What did you change last month, and why?" Should match the change history you just read.
"What's our cost per new customer, excluding brand?" The only number that connects ads to the P&L.
"Who actually works on our account, and how much time did we get?" You were probably sold by someone senior. Who has the login now?
"What would you do with 20% less budget?" A good answer names specific cuts. "Results would drop proportionally" means nobody knows where the margin is, or the fee's a percentage of spend and the incentive is showing.

What isn't their fault

Fair's fair. Some of what looks like agency failure isn't:

Your landing page. They can buy the right click; they can't make your site convert it. If they've flagged page problems in writing and nothing changed, that's on you.
Lead handling. Enquiries answered two days later die. No campaign fixes that.
Seasonality and market shifts. A competitor doubling bids moves your numbers with no one at fault. Auction insights show it plainly.
Tracking they warned you about. If broken measurement was raised and deferred, the fog is a decision you made.

The test isn't whether performance dipped. It's whether they told you why, in writing, before you asked.

Leave slowly over performance, quickly over silence

A new strategy fairly needs 60–90 days to prove itself, and a decent agency deserves the chance to answer what you've found: most of these problems are fixable by the incumbent, and switching has real costs.

But evidence of work should be visible from week one. If the change history is empty, the search terms are a landfill, and the answers to plain questions arrive wrapped in fog, the 90-day rule doesn't apply. It protects effort, not absence.

Quick answers

What does a good job look like?

Check evidence of work, not just results. In Google Ads, the change history shows every edit made in the last 90 days: a well-run account shows regular, purposeful changes; an abandoned one shows weeks of silence or only automated edits. Then check the search terms report for expensive irrelevant queries, confirm only real business outcomes are set as primary conversions, and ask for performance reported with brand campaigns separated from non-brand.

Where is last month's work recorded?

Google Ads records every edit under Change history (Campaigns → Change history). Filter to the last 30 or 90 days and look at the volume, the type of changes, and who made them. Weeks with no manual changes on an actively billed account are the single clearest sign of neglect. You need at least read-only access to look, and if you don't have that, request it today.

What belongs in a monthly report?

Conversions, cost per conversion or acquisition, and revenue or lead quality against target (with brand and non-brand separated), plus what was changed during the month, what the result was, and what's planned next. Impressions, clicks and click-through rate are diagnostics, not results. A report built mainly on those is describing activity, not performance.

What are the red flags?

The campaigns live in the agency's account rather than yours, so you lose the history if you leave. You can't log in. The invoice bundles ad spend and fee into one number. Reporting leads with impressions and clicks. The fee is a percentage of spend and the recommendation is always to spend more. Lock-in contracts of twelve months or longer. Any one of these is worth a conversation; several together are worth a second opinion.

How long before leaving?

Distinguish time-to-results from evidence-of-work. A new account fairly needs 60–90 days to prove itself. But evidence of work (regular changes in the change history, search terms being reviewed, questions answered plainly) should be visible from week one. Leave slowly over performance, quickly over silence.

If you'd rather have the receipts read professionally

This is exactly what the fixed-fee audit does: the checks above plus the structural ones, run across your whole account, findings ranked by what they cost you, in writing, and usable with your current agency, a new one, or in-house. It starts with a free intro call, and if the twenty-minute version above already answered your question, I'll tell you to keep your money.