Seven signs your PPC agency is underperforming (and how to check each one yourself)
Most owners who suspect their PPC agency isn't performing have the same problem: the monthly report looks fine and the phone doesn't. You don't need to be a Google Ads expert to settle it. Below are seven signs that an agency is coasting, each with a check you can run yourself in about five minutes, most of them inside your own Google Ads account. After that, what a good month's report actually looks like, so you've got something to hold yours up against.
Before you start: can you get into the account?
Five of the seven checks happen inside Google Ads, so first find out whether you can sign in at ads.google.com with your own email and see the account. If you can't, skip straight to sign 3. You'll also want last month's report and, if you have one, the contract you signed. That's everything.
your login · last month's report · the contract
The seven signs, each with its check
None of these on its own proves an agency is bad. What you're looking for is a pattern, and the checks are quick enough to run all seven.
1. The report leads with clicks, impressions and click-through rate
Clicks are what Google sells you. Enquiries are what you're buying.
A report whose first page is impressions, clicks and click-through rate is telling you how much of Google's product you consumed, not what you got for it. That isn't always deliberate. It's the default layout of most reporting tools. But if nobody's changed it in six months, nobody's asked which number you care about.
The check: open last month's report and find the first place it states cost per enquiry (it may say cost per lead or cost per conversion). If it's on page one, good. If it's buried, or the only conversions figure is a count with no cost beside it, that's the tell. Then count the enquiries you actually got from ads last month, from your inbox or call log, and compare with the report's conversion count. A big gap either way takes you to sign 2.
check — where does cost per enquiry appear, and does the count match your inbox?
2. Conversion tracking is silently broken
Enquiries you know happened don't show up in the account.
This is the most common thing we find in audits, and it quietly wrecks every other number. When tracking stops recording, spend carries on, the conversion column drops, and the cost per lead in the report shoots up. It looks like the ads got expensive when really the measurement stopped. We see it often enough that tracking is the first of the ten checks on our free PPC audit page, and our DPF cleaning case study started the same way: a £10,000-a-month account where tracking was set up so poorly that nobody could trust the numbers.
The check: in Google Ads, open the conversions summary and read the status against each conversion action. Then send yourself a test enquiry through your own website, and if calls are meant to count, ring the number on the ad. Allow up to a day, because reporting isn't instant. If your test never appears, tracking is broken and your agency either hasn't noticed or hasn't told you. The full ten-step version is in why Google Ads gets clicks but no conversions.
check — submit your own enquiry, wait a day, look for it
3. The Google Ads account is in their name
Your campaign history and conversion data belong to whoever owns the account.
The account should be yours: your login with admin access, your billing details, with the agency working through a manager account they link to it. When it sits in the agency's name instead, everything the account has learned is theirs, and stays theirs if you leave. It's a known industry trap, and the one sign here that matters even when performance is fine, because it's what makes leaving expensive.
The check: sign in at ads.google.com with your own email. Can you see the account at all? If so, open the access and security settings and confirm your email has admin access, then check the payments profile is in your company's name. If you can only see performance through the agency's own dashboard, or your access is read-only, or you've never had a login, that's the sign. It costs nothing to ask for admin access, and the answer tells you a lot on its own.
check — your login, your billing, their manager access
4. Nobody is working the search terms report
Budget is leaking to searches you'd never have paid for on purpose.
Google matches your keywords to real searches loosely, and on broad match very loosely. What you actually paid for last month is in the search terms report, and every irrelevant query that got a click came out of your budget. Adding negative keywords is the fix, and it's routine monthly work. When nobody's doing it, the leakage builds up. It's the second check on our audit list for that reason.
The check: open the search terms report for the last 30 days and sort by cost, highest first. Read the top 50 with an owner's eye: would you pay a pound to have that person on your site? Job seekers, DIY questions, “free”, towns you don't serve, competitor names you didn't ask for. Then open change history, filter to negative keywords, and see when one was last added. If the answers are “a lot of these are junk” and “months ago”, budget is leaking and nobody's watching it.
check — search terms by cost, top 50, and when a negative was last added
5. Every ad points at the homepage
The page is nobody's job, so the ad buys clicks the page then loses.
Sending paid clicks to the homepage makes every visitor navigate to what they already searched for, and plenty won't bother. One page per service or intent, with a headline that repeats what the ad promised, is the basic arrangement. It's also the biggest scope gap between cheap and expensive quotes: plenty of agencies don't do landing pages at all, so the account gets judged on a page nobody built for it. That's why our management fee includes at least one dedicated landing page, and why landing page design is a service page here rather than a footnote.
The check: in the ads table inside Google Ads, find the Final URL column and scan it. If every ad in every ad group lands on the same page, or on the homepage, that's the sign. Then load that page on your phone, on mobile data, and read the first screen: does it say what the ad said? For the conversion rate a page needs to reach for your click prices to work, see what a good landing page conversion rate looks like in the UK.
check — Final URL column, then load the page on a phone
6. The fee, or what it covers, isn't written down
If you can't say from a document what you pay for, you can't judge value.
When we crawled ten UK agency websites in our own market research, two published their pricing, one published it partially and seven published nothing. Not publishing isn't a sign of a bad agency by itself. But if you're paying one now and can't say, from a piece of paper, whether the fee is flat or a percentage of spend, whether landing pages and conversion tracking are in scope, and how much notice either side has to give, you've no way of knowing whether the fee is working. A percentage-of-spend fee also earns more when you spend more, whether or not the enquiries follow, which is worth remembering when the agency keeps recommending a bigger budget.
The check: find the contract or proposal and look for three things: the fee model, the scope (account build, search-term and negative work, landing pages, conversion tracking, reporting against a cost-per-lead target) and the notice period. If any of the three isn't in writing, ask for it in writing this week. The fee models are compared at how much PPC agencies charge in the UK, and ours are on the published pricing page: a flat monthly fee from £750, landing page included, and you own the account.
check — fee model, scope, notice period: all three on paper?
7. The same report arrives every month and nothing changed underneath
A managed account leaves a trail. An unmanaged one doesn't.
Negatives added, bids adjusted, ads tested, budgets moved between campaigns: Google records all of it in change history, with a timestamp and the name of the user who did it. Some months genuinely need little. But an account that produces the same report month after month with nothing in change history is being watched at best, and change history is the one place that can't be dressed up for the report.
The check: open change history for the last 30 days, then the last 90. Look at who made changes and what kind. Automated rules and budget top-ups don't count as management. If it's near-empty, or the only entries are your own, the fee is buying a report rather than an account manager. While you're there, read the “what we did this month” section of the report against change history. They should match.
check — change history, last 90 days, filtered to the agency's users
What a good month's report looks like
This is the shape we work to, and what the pricing page means by “monthly reporting against cost per lead”.
| what's in it | why it's there |
|---|---|
| enquiries and cost per enquiry, against the agreed target | Page one, first thing. It's the number you're paying for. |
| spend, and where it went by campaign | So you can see what each part of the account cost and produced. |
| tracking verified this month, and how | One line confirming a test enquiry was sent and recorded. Without it, nothing else in the report can be trusted. |
| negatives added, and what they excluded | Proof the search terms report was read and the leak was plugged. |
| what changed in the account, and what it's expected to do | Bids, ads, pages, budgets. Should match change history line for line. |
| what's being tested next | A managed account always has a next thing. |
| clicks, impressions, click-through rate | Present, further down, as diagnostics. Useful for explaining a change, not as the result. |
If your report has the first three rows on page one, most of the other signs take care of themselves.
Scoring what you found
- Sign 3 on its own is worth fixing now, however the rest went. Get admin access, or an account in your name, before anything else.
- Sign 2 on its own means every other number you've been shown is unreliable, including the ones that looked fine. Fix the measurement before judging the marketing.
- Signs 1, 4, 5 and 7 together describe an account that's being reported on rather than managed. That's a conversation to have in writing, with what you found attached, and a month to see it change.
Be fair about timing. A new account needs a run of weeks before there's enough conversion data to judge, and one slow month doesn't prove much. See how long Google Ads takes to work. But patience only makes sense when tracking is verified and change history shows work. Without those, time isn't the ingredient that's missing.
The structured version: the 10-point audit checklist
The seven signs are the quick version. The full version is the checklist we publish on the free PPC audit page, which works through an account in a fixed order: tracking, search terms, match types, structure, keywords, ads, bidding, budget, landing pages and measurement. Sign 2 is the first check on that list, sign 4 the second and third, sign 5 the ninth and sign 1 the tenth. The middle checks are where Google Ads experience earns its keep, and they're the hardest to run in five minutes.
Run it yourself, since it's published so you can. Or we'll run it: read-only viewer access granted from inside your own account, never a password, and the findings in writing whether or not anything follows. If your current agency turns out to be doing a decent job, that's what the report will say.
10 checks · read-only access · findings in writing either way
What to do next
Give the current agency the findings first, in an email, and give it a month. A decent agency that's drifted will fix it and you'll have saved yourself a move. One that argues with change history won't.
If it comes to leaving, sort account ownership before you give notice, because everything else depends on keeping the history. How to move without losing the account, the tracking or the data is in how to switch PPC agency without losing your account, and the questions for whoever comes next are in how to choose a PPC agency. Whether it should be an agency at all is covered in PPC agency vs freelancer.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if my PPC agency is any good?
Judge the account, not the report. Log into Google Ads yourself and check four things: that conversion tracking records a test enquiry you send, that the search terms report isn't full of irrelevant queries, that ads land on dedicated pages rather than the homepage, and that change history shows real work over the last 90 days. Then check the report leads with enquiries and cost per enquiry rather than clicks. An agency that passes those checks is doing the job. One that fails two or three of them is coasting, whatever the report says.
What should a PPC agency report every month?
Enquiries and cost per enquiry against an agreed target, on page one. Then spend and where it went, confirmation that conversion tracking was verified that month, the negative keywords added and why, what changed in the account and what it's expected to do, and what's being tested next. Clicks, impressions and click-through rate belong in the report as diagnostics further down, not as the headline. If the report's account of what changed doesn't match the account's own change history, ask why.
Should my Google Ads account be in the agency's name?
No. The account should be yours: your login with admin access, your billing details, with the agency working through a manager account they link to it. When the account sits in the agency's name, your campaign history and conversion data belong to them and stay with them if you leave. It's a known industry trap and it's worth fixing even when performance is fine, because it's what makes leaving expensive. Ask for admin access this week. The answer tells you a lot on its own.
My agency says results take time. How do I tell patience from excuses?
Ask what they're measuring while you wait. A new account genuinely needs a run of weeks to accumulate enough conversion data to judge, and a month of slightly worse numbers proves little. But waiting only makes sense when tracking is verified, the search terms report is being cleaned up and the account's change history shows work. If those three are true, give it time. If tracking has never been tested, or change history is empty, time isn't the ingredient that's missing.
Get the seven signs checked properly, free
Read-only access to your account, the published 10-point checklist run in order, and the findings in writing whether or not anything follows. If your current agency is doing a decent job, the report will say so.
- A written audit — yours to keep, whether or not you work with us
- Real UK click costs for your services, not a generic template
- No obligation, no hard sell — we'll call when it suits you
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