What a PPC agency actually changes in your ad account

Open the search terms report first

This report shows the actual phrases people typed before they clicked your ad, as opposed to the keywords somebody chose. It is the single most revealing screen in the account, and in neglected accounts it is full of money leaving the building.

The usual offenders are job seekers searching "plumber salary" or "HVAC apprenticeship," people looking for instructions rather than a contractor, searches for brands you do not carry, and competitor names. Each of those clicks was paid for at full price. An account being managed has a negative keyword list that has grown every month since launch. An account being billed for has a negative list of eleven terms added on day one.

One caution about this screen. Google withholds a portion of search terms for privacy reasons, so the report will never account for every click you paid for, and in some accounts the unlisted share is substantial. It is still the most useful view you have, but read the totals as a sample rather than a complete ledger, and be suspicious of anyone who presents it as one.

Check what is being counted as a conversion

In Google Ads, each conversion action is marked either primary or secondary, and only the primary ones are used by automated bidding. If a page view, a click on the contact page, or a newsletter signup is sitting in the primary column, the system is optimizing toward browsing, and it will become very good at buying it.

For phone-driven trades there is also a call length threshold. The default counts a call as a conversion after a short number of seconds, which means wrong numbers and hangups get recorded as leads. Set it to sixty seconds and the numbers get less flattering and far more useful.

Performance Max is where the spend hides

Performance Max campaigns report less detail than search campaigns do, which makes them a comfortable place for an underworked account to sit. The specific thing to ask about is brand exclusions. Without a brand exclusion list, the campaign will happily serve against people searching your own business name, take credit for customers who were already coming to you, and show a return on ad spend that looks excellent and means nothing.

Ask whether brand exclusions are on. If nobody knows what you are referring to, you have your answer.

Read the change history

Google Ads keeps a dated log of every edit made to the account, under the tools menu. It cannot be faked, and it takes two minutes to read.

You are not looking for constant activity. Accounts that are edited daily usually perform worse, because automated bidding needs a stable period to learn. You are looking for evidence of deliberate work: negatives added, budget shifted between campaigns, ad copy tested, a landing page swapped. Three months of nothing followed by a flurry the week before a renewal call is a pattern you will recognize on sight.

Make sure you own the account

This is the one that costs people most and gets asked about least. If the agency built your campaigns inside their own manager account rather than an account registered to you, then the conversion history, the learning the bidding has accumulated, and every negative keyword list can walk out the door when the relationship ends.

You want your own Google Ads customer ID with your billing on it, and the agency added as a manager. Same for Analytics and the Business Profile. Ask for admin access in writing while everyone is still getting along.

What no agency can fix

Your offer, your prices, your review profile, and how quickly your office answers the phone. We have run accounts in New Jersey with a good cost per call where the client still lost money, because calls after four in the afternoon went to voicemail and were returned the next day, by which point the customer had booked someone else.

Capacity is the other one. If you are already booked three weeks out, more leads make you slower to respond rather than more profitable. That is a conversation about pricing, not about bidding.

What the reporting should look like

One page a month. Cost per call, cost per booked job, and the trend on both. Everything else, impressions, click-through rate, quality score, is diagnostic detail that belongs in the account rather than in your inbox.

If the report has forty charts and you cannot find what a customer cost, it was built to look like work. Ask for the two numbers instead, and expect an explanation when they move in the wrong direction rather than a longer report. That is the standard we hold ourselves to on the accounts we manage, and it is a fair thing to ask of anyone.

Ask as well for one quarterly review held inside the live account on a screen share, rather than in a slide deck. Ten minutes watching somebody move around their own campaigns tells you more about how well the account is understood than any document will, and it is an uncomfortable thing to fake.