How to Check Whether Your Agency Runs Google Ads Well

Jakub Pytlik | April 23, 2026 | 6 min read

A short disclaimer: I'm a freelancer, so I may be biased. But what I write here applies to any vendor — agency, freelancer or in-house. If anyone working on your account doesn't meet these criteria, you have a problem regardless of their employment form.

Five signals that the agency works well

1. Reports have conclusions, not just numbers. A good monthly report isn't a table with bars — it's context: "CTR dropped 12% because we tested new headlines, two performed better, one worse, this week we're turning off the weaker one". Numbers plus interpretation plus a concrete next step.
2. You talk about strategy, not just results. At least once a quarter the agency asks about your business: new products, planned seasonality, margins. If for 6 months no one asked you what you want to achieve — the agency runs the account "in a vacuum".
3. Results grow over time. Not linearly (seasonality) — but on a visible trend: customer acquisition cost falling, ROAS rising, conversion rate improving. Stagnation for 6+ months without explanation is a red flag.
4. You have direct contact with the person running the account. Not an account manager passing messages — but email/Slack/Teams to the specialist who looks at your campaigns daily.
5. You know exactly how much goes to Google and how much to the agency. The invoice or contract separates ad budget from management. If you only see one "all-in 5,000 PLN" line — you don't know if 4,000 PLN goes to Google or 1,500 PLN.

Five warning signs

1. Stagnation of results for several months without an attempt to change. Same campaigns, same keywords, same ads. No A/B tests, no new headlines, no optimization. The account "works" but doesn't grow.
2. Reports are nothing but tables and charts. Without a single sentence of comment, without conclusions, without a plan for the next month. You receive a dashboard instead of intellectual work.
3. Broad match dominates the account. Go to Keywords → Match type. If 70%+ is broad match, the agency is usually greedily catching traffic (mostly irrelevant) instead of targeting precisely. Exception: if the agency uses broad match deliberately with audience lists and supervision (a strategy for larger accounts) — ask for the rationale. No answer = a problem.
4. Questions go unanswered or end with "I'll check and get back". You come back, they don't. The question "why did CPC rise 40% this month?" should have an answer within a day, not after two weeks.
5. "All-in" price with no split between budget and management. Same as when picking a new agency — if you don't know how much actually reaches Google, you don't know what your campaigns can afford.

What to check inside the Google Ads panel in 30 minutes

Log in to your account (read-only access is enough). Five things to look at:

1. Keywords → Match type. What percentage is broad match? Above 50% — ask the agency why.
2. Search Terms → last 30 days. Do you see queries completely outside your business (e.g. "free", "jobs", competitors, unrelated products)? They should be in the negatives. If they aren't — the agency isn't working on the negatives list.
3. Tools → Conversions. The conversions list should be sensible: purchase, form, phone — flagged as "primary". If you only see "page view" or "30 seconds on page" as primary conversions — the algorithm is learning the wrong things.
4. Trends → last 90 days. Are results going up, down, or flat? Stagnation is a sign of no optimization.
5. Change history (Tools → Change History). Check how many changes have been made in the last month. Below 5–10 — the agency is doing almost nothing. A typical active manager makes 30–80 changes per month, but caveat: on a stabilized account (especially PMax) fewer changes can be intentional — what counts is whether changes make sense, not their count. Look at the nature of the changes (ad tests, adding negatives, bid optimization) rather than the counter alone.

What to do if you see problems

Three step-by-step steps:

1. Show specifics and ask for a reaction. Send an email with a list of observations: "I see 70% broad match, 3 changes in the panel in March, and conversion stagnation since January. What are we going to do about it?". Give them 2 weeks for a concrete answer and an action plan.
2. After 2 weeks — check whether anything changed. Open the change history. If the answer was "we're working on it" and the panel is still silent — that's a sign the problem is systemic.
3. If nothing changes — change the vendor. Important: make sure the Google Ads account is registered to your details. If it isn't, first recover the historical data (export reports, export conversion lists) before you give notice. Without that you start from zero.

What I see after 11 years

• B2B client — for 14 months the agency reported "stable results". I took over the account, the first analysis: 78% of keywords on broad match, 0 negatives added in 8 months, a search terms report with 200+ obviously irrelevant queries. After two months of work: customer acquisition cost dropped from 920 PLN to 410 PLN.
• E-commerce — the agency took 12% commission on the ad budget. The higher the budget — the higher the commission, regardless of results. An account with ROAS 1.8 (a loss for the client) was "normally" managed for 9 months. After moving to a flat fee + low percentage model: ROAS 4.1 in 4 months. The commission-on-budget model isn't bad by definition — many specialists use it and do great. The problem here was that the agency had no incentive in quality, only in scale, and didn't change that despite weak results.
• Local service — every month the agency sent a report-table without a single note. The client noticed on their own that average CPC had doubled in 6 months. They asked — the answer: "the market is more expensive". After checking, it turned out the agency had enabled Google's auto-recommendations, which expanded targeting and broad match. Autopilot.

About the sources: The article is based on observations from 11 years of running Google Ads campaigns at JP Ads + dozens of audits of accounts taken over from other vendors. Numbers from my own practice are flagged "from my experience" — distinguish them from hard market research.