Your PPC agency sends a report every month. It's full of graphs, impressions and click-through rates. Whether any of it is working, genuinely in terms of leads and revenue, is a different question, and one the report usually doesn't answer directly.
← Back to InsightsBefore you look at another monthly report, ask your agency these five questions. The answers, and how quickly they arrive, will tell you more than any dashboard.
What is my cost per lead, not cost per click, over the last 90 days? Clicks are a vanity metric. Leads are what the campaign is for. If your agency can't give you a cost per lead figure within 24 hours, they either aren't tracking conversions correctly or they know the number and don't want to share it.
What negative keywords have been added in the last 30 days? An agency that isn't actively building negative keyword lists is not actively managing the campaign. They're letting it run. Negative keyword expansion is the most consistent, highest-leverage activity in PPC management. If it's not happening monthly, you're paying for irrelevant searches.
Show me the search terms report from last month. This shows every actual search query that triggered your ads, not the keywords you're targeting, but what real people typed into Google that caused your ad to show. If you see irrelevant searches (job seekers, students, people looking for something completely unrelated to your product) budget is being wasted, and it's been wasting while the monthly report talked about impressions.
What changes were made to the account last month? A campaign that runs untouched for 30 days is not being managed. It's being monitored. There's a difference. Management means intervening: adjusting bids, testing new ad copy, adding negatives, pausing underperforming ad groups. Monitoring means watching a live feed and hoping for the best. Ask for the change history. It exists in every Google Ads account. If the list is short or vague, that's your answer.
What is the conversion rate on the landing pages you're sending traffic to? If they don't know, they're not looking at the right metrics. An agency managing your PPC spend should be watching landing page conversion rate closely, because it directly determines your cost per lead. Clicks without conversion data is spend without accountability.
Monthly reports can be constructed to look impressive while communicating very little about whether the campaign is actually working. Here's what to watch for.
Impressions as a headline metric. The number of people who saw your ad is almost entirely irrelevant to business performance. Who enquired? Who converted? Who called? If impressions appear prominently in the executive summary, ask yourself what that figure is meant to tell you, and whether the agency is leading with it because the lead data is weaker.
CTR without context. A 4% click-through rate on a terrible keyword is worse than a 1% CTR on a perfect one. Click-through rate tells you how often people clicked. It says nothing about whether those clicks were from the right people, or whether any of them turned into customers. CTR is a diagnostic tool, not a performance summary.
"Optimisation score" improvements. Google's optimisation score is a metric Google invented to measure how closely your account follows Google's recommendations. Many of those recommendations are designed to increase your spend: broader targeting, automated bidding strategies, Performance Max campaigns. An agency that reports optimisation score as evidence of good management should be pressed on which specific recommendations they accepted and why. A lower optimisation score with a lower cost per lead is a better outcome every time.
Branded search performance in the same graph as non-branded. These are completely different economics. People searching your brand name already know you exist. They would likely have found you anyway. Non-branded search is where PPC is actually being tested against competition. Combining both in the same conversion graph inflates the numbers and obscures what the campaign is genuinely delivering.
If you ask your agency what they did last month and the answer is "we optimised the campaign," that's not an answer. Good PPC management has a specific activity set that should be happening consistently.
Negative keyword expansion from the search terms report, ideally weekly and at minimum monthly. Bid adjustments based on device, time of day and geographic performance data. Not set-and-forget, but active decisions: reducing mobile bids if mobile traffic converts at half the rate of desktop, cutting spend on regions that are generating clicks but no leads. At least one ad copy test running at all times: a proper A/B test with a control and a challenger, not just multiple live ads without a hypothesis. Landing page conversion rate monitoring and, where performance drops, communication with whoever manages the site. Quality Score optimisation, because a higher Quality Score reduces your cost per click for the same ad position. Search impression share analysis, so you understand what share of available searches you're actually reaching.
If your agency can't describe what they did last month in specific, concrete terms (not "we optimised bids" but "we added 47 negative keywords, reduced mobile bids by 15% based on conversion data and launched two new ad variations against the existing control") they're not managing your account properly. They're holding it.
This is the one that matters most if you're thinking about switching.
Do you have access to your own Google Ads account? You should. Full admin access, not a read-only view. If your PPC agency set up the account and you can only see it through their reports or a shared dashboard they control, you need to understand what happens to that account if you end the relationship.
The correct structure: your Google Ads account is created in your name, under your email address, linked to your billing details. The agency is added as a linked manager account. They can see and manage the account, but they do not own it. You can remove their access at any time without losing anything.
The problematic structure: the agency created the account under their manager account, and you were given viewer access as a courtesy. In this scenario, your campaign history, conversion data, audience lists, Quality Scores and keyword performance data belong to them, not you. If you leave, you may be starting from scratch.
Ask for this to be clarified in writing before any other conversation. If the account is under their ownership and they're unwilling to transfer it, that's important information about how they intend the relationship to work.
Not every PPC agency that produces an imperfect report is failing you. Here's an honest framework for making the call.
Stay if: you have full access to the account, cost per lead is within an acceptable range for your sector and is either stable or improving, specific changes are being made to the account each month and your agency can describe them clearly, and when you ask the five questions from section one you get direct, specific answers within a reasonable timeframe. Imperfect reporting with strong underlying performance is a cosmetic problem. Fix the reporting.
Switch if: cost per lead is unknown, or it's known and consistently worsening without a credible explanation. You don't have account access or you've been told access isn't something you can have. The monthly report focuses on impressions and CTR with little or no lead data. No substantive changes have been made to the account in the last 60 days. The agency cannot answer the five questions from section one, or takes more than a week to answer them after being asked directly. Or if the account is under their ownership and they won't commit to transferring it.
The question isn't whether your agency is a good agency in general. It's whether they're managing your account with the specificity and accountability your budget deserves.
If you're not sure whether your current PPC is performing, we'll review the account and tell you honestly what we see.
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