How to audit the agency running your ads
You do not need to understand Google Ads to run this. You need access and a willingness to ask questions until the answers stop being vague.
Run it before you decide anything. An agency that fails these checks may still be worth keeping if they fix them; one that resists giving you the access is answering the question already.
On this page
Before anything: own your accounts
The Google Ads account, the Analytics property, the Tag Manager container and the Business Profile should be owned by your business, with the agency granted access.
If any of them sits inside the agency's own account and you have no admin rights, that is the first finding and it outranks everything else on this page. It means your history, your conversion data and your remarketing audiences leave with them.
Ask for admin access in writing today. The response time and the tone of it are diagnostic.
Twelve checks
Each one is a specific question with a specific place to look.
- What counts as a conversion? Open Goals → Conversions. Read every action and what triggers it. A "conversion" that fires on a page view or a 15-second call is not a lead.
- How many are modeled? Compare "All conversions" to observed. A large modeled share means the CRM will never reconcile, and nobody should pretend otherwise.
- Do those conversions exist in your CRM? Take last month's number and ask your intake team to find them. This single check finds more problems than the other eleven combined.
- What is the call conversion threshold? Usually 60 seconds. Wrong numbers and vendors clear that bar.
- What share of spend is brand? Filter for campaigns containing your own name. See the next section.
- How much goes to Performance Max? And what does the asset group report actually show you about where it went.
- When was the last search terms review? Ask for the negative keyword list with dates. An empty or stale list means nobody is watching the money.
- What changed last month? Tools → Change history. If it is quiet, you are paying a retainer for a screensaver.
- Who is doing the work? Ask for the name of the person in the account, not the account manager. Ask how many other accounts they run.
- What is the cost per closed customer? Not per lead. If they cannot answer, they are not measuring the thing you are buying.
- Where does the reporting come from? A dashboard that pulls only from Google Ads can never contradict Google Ads.
- What would they cut first? Ask what part of your spend they would kill if the budget dropped 30%. Good answers are specific and slightly uncomfortable.
The brand-spend question
Filter for campaigns bidding on your own clinic name and look at what share of the budget and the reported conversions they account for.
Brand campaigns are not automatically waste. They defend against competitors bidding on your name, and they are cheap. The problem is attribution: someone searching your clinic by name had already decided to contact you, and the click that intercepts them gets recorded as an acquisition.
Two follow-ups. Ask what performance looks like with brand excluded — that is the real number for whether your advertising creates demand or harvests it. And ask what happened the last time brand was paused for a week, because if nobody has ever tested it, nobody knows what it is worth.
Performance Max makes this harder by absorbing brand queries into a campaign that reports them as generic acquisition. Ask specifically whether brand exclusions are applied.
Answers that should worry you
Not because they prove bad faith, but because each one means a decision is being made without evidence.
| What you hear | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| "You don't need admin access, we handle it." | Your account history is not yours. Fix this first. |
| "CTR and impressions are way up." | The metrics that improved are the ones that do not pay staff. |
| "The algorithm handles that now." | Sometimes true. Ask what signal the algorithm is optimizing toward — if it is form fills, it is optimizing toward the wrong thing. |
| "We'd need a bigger budget to see results." | Reasonable only if they can show what the current budget produces per closed customer. |
| "Your CRM data isn't accurate." | Occasionally true, and also the standard deflection. Ask them to prove it with specific records. |
| Change history shows nothing for six weeks | You are paying for maintenance that is not happening. |
What to do with the findings
Fire nobody on the strength of a checklist. Take the findings to a meeting and watch how they are handled.
An agency worth keeping will recognize most of these, explain the ones that are deliberate trade-offs, and commit to fixing the rest with dates. Plenty of accounts are structured badly because the client asked for lead volume and the agency delivered exactly that.
An agency worth replacing will explain why cost per closed customer is the wrong thing to measure. That is the tell — not defensiveness about the account, but resistance to being measured on the outcome you actually buy.
Either way, fix the measurement layer before you change anything else. Switching agencies without closing the attribution loop just changes who is guessing.
VERIFIED EXAMPLE · When I inherited a wasteful account at a luxury US healthcare clinic, the audit found the account bidding on form fills while the business sold admissions. Rebuilding around CRM-verified outcomes took approved patients up ~9× per month.
Questions owners ask
Should I tell my agency I'm auditing them?
Yes. You need access to run most of these checks anyway, and a request for admin access is normal client behavior. How they respond is itself part of the audit — reluctance to hand over rights to accounts you paid for is the finding.
What if I don't have admin access to my own account?
Make that your first and only priority. Until the Google Ads account, Analytics property and Tag Manager container are owned by your business, your data and your remarketing audiences leave with the agency. Everything else on this list can wait a week; that cannot.
Is a high cost per lead automatically bad?
No, and treating it that way causes real damage. A $400 lead that closes at 30% is far better than a $40 lead that closes at 1%. The only number that settles it is cost per closed customer, which is why an agency that cannot produce it is not measuring the right thing.
How often should this be run?
Properly once a year, plus a lighter version quarterly — conversion definitions, brand share, change history, and a CRM reconciliation of last month. Most accounts degrade gradually rather than suddenly, so the value is in noticing drift early.
Can I do this myself or do I need someone independent?
Most of it yourself in an afternoon; the checklist is written for owners rather than marketers. An independent pair of eyes helps mainly where the answer is technical — attribution setup, Performance Max structure, tracking configuration — and where you want the findings priced.