By Prakhar KirsaliPublished Topic: Google Ads
Short answer
A well-run PPC account shows its evidence in the account, not just the report. Conversions are tracked once, on real success signals, and match what your CRM receives. Search terms are reviewed at least fortnightly and negatives added. Budget has visibly moved toward campaigns that produce leads. Tests have documented outcomes, including failures. Reports answer whether the month was worth it — leads, cost per lead, lead quality — not clicks and click-through rate. Ask your provider for a walkthrough of the nine areas below. Whoever is genuinely doing the work will welcome it; it takes about forty-five minutes.
Most businesses judge their PPC provider on the monthly report, which is a problem: the report is written by the party being evaluated. A polished deck can make an expensive month look like progress, and a plain email can undersell genuinely good work.
The good news is that good PPC management leaves evidence everywhere — in the conversion settings, the search term history, the budget distribution, the test log. You don't need to be an expert to evaluate it. Knowing what to expect from a PPC agency comes down to knowing what to look at and what to ask, which is what this article gives you: nine areas, the questions for each, and a checklist to work through in one sitting.
This is written to be fair to providers, not to catch them out. Some of what looks like underperformance is a business-side problem — slow lead response, no feedback on lead quality, a weak offer. The framework accounts for that. And at the end, if the evaluation does point at the provider, it covers three legitimate next steps, including changing the engagement model rather than just the logo on the invoice.
Judge the work in the account, not the report in your inbox
The single change that makes evaluating a PPC provider easier: ask for a live walkthrough of the account itself — a screen share where they drive and explain. A report summarises; the account is the record. Conversion settings, search term history, change history and budget distribution can't be retro-fitted to look good.
This isn't an accusation, and you shouldn't frame it as one. Providers doing good work almost always welcome a walkthrough, because their work survives scrutiny. Ask for it the way you'd ask an accountant to walk you through the books. Nine areas, forty-five minutes, once or twice a year — that's a reasonable request from anyone spending money on ads.
One caveat before the list: if you don't have admin access to your own Google Ads account, GA4 property and tag container, get that first and treat resistance to it as its own finding. You own those assets regardless of who manages them; this is true whether you work with a large agency, a boutique, a freelancer or an in-house hire.
The nine areas that separate good PPC management from expensive activity
Each area below describes what good looks like, the question to ask, and what the answer tells you. None of them require specialist knowledge — they require the provider to explain, which is itself part of the test.
1. Strategy: can they say what the account is trying to achieve, and why?
Ask: "What did you change last month, and what did you expect it to do?" A good answer names a specific problem, a specific change and an expected effect — "brand terms were absorbing budget from the service campaign, so we separated them; we expect the service campaign's cost per lead to fall within three weeks". A weak answer is a list of platform activities with no expected outcome attached.
Strategy also shows up as selectivity. Accounts accumulate campaigns, keywords and features; good management prunes. If everything that was running a year ago is still running, plus more, ask what has been turned off and why.
2. Tracking: are conversions counted once, on real outcomes?
This is the foundation everything else sits on, because automated bidding learns from whatever number it's fed. Ask the provider to open the conversion actions page and show you: what counts as a conversion, how it's counted (once per click or every), and when each action was last validated against reality.
The specific failure to check: tags firing on page loads rather than actual form submissions, which inflates conversions and teaches the algorithm to chase people who never enquire. If your CRM shows fewer leads than the platform reports, and the gap is large, either tracking is double counting or leads are going unrecorded — conversion tracking is the area to probe first, before judging any performance numbers.
3. Search terms: reviewed, and acted on
The search terms report is where budget quietly leaks. Ask to see the last ninety days of search terms and how they were treated. In a well-run account, there's a visible pattern: irrelevant queries added as negatives, high-intent queries promoted to keywords, and a review happening at least every couple of weeks.
Ask directly: "When did you last review search terms, and what did you change?" If the answer is vague, the account is being left to drift on broad match. The bucketing method — what to keep, exclude and watch — is covered in our guide to reducing wasted Google Ads spend.
4. Budget allocation: has money moved toward what works?
Ask the provider to explain the current budget split and why it looks the way it does. In a healthy account, the split traces to results: campaigns producing leads at acceptable cost get more, campaigns that can't be made to work get less or get closed.
The failure pattern to watch for is inertia — the budget split frozen from the day the account was set up, with the best-performing campaign capped and unable to spend while a stale campaign keeps its allocation. Budget allocation decisions should be revisited at least monthly, and the reasoning should be explainable in two sentences.
5. Testing: structured, documented, including the failures
Ask what the current tests are and what the last three concluded. Good testing is structured: one variable at a time, a stated hypothesis, a defined period, and a written outcome — including outcomes that went nowhere. "We tested a landing page variant in September; it converted 30% worse, so we reverted" is a sign of a provider that learns.
Two failure patterns sit at opposite ends. No tests at all means the account is coasting on its initial setup. Constant wholesale restructuring means nothing ever runs long enough to learn from. You want a steady rhythm of small, readable experiments.
6. Lead quality: do they ask what happened to the leads?
A provider optimising to form fills can produce plenty of them while the sales team complains that none are worth calling. The fix requires information only you have: which leads were qualified, which closed, and why the rest didn't. A good provider asks for this; some build it in formally through CRM feedback or offline conversion imports.
Ask: "Which of our leads last quarter would you call qualified, and how do you know?" If the provider has never asked what happened after the form fill, they've been optimising blind — and the account is likely drifting toward cheap, low-intent leads. Our piece on Google Ads lead quality covers what to look for in the balance between lead volume and lead intent.
7. Reporting: business numbers, in plain language
A useful report answers one question quickly: was this month worth what it cost? That means leads, cost per lead, qualified leads where known, and revenue where the business shares it — with context on what changed and why. Clicks, impressions and click-through rate are diagnostics, not results; a report consisting mainly of them is describing activity, not outcomes.
Test your current reports: time how long it takes to find the answer to "was this month worth it?" If it takes more than a minute, or the answer isn't there at all, that's a reporting gap worth raising — politely. Most providers will restructure a report when asked what decision each section is supposed to support.
8. Attribution: do the reported numbers come with honest caveats?
Platform-reported conversions overstate reality — that's not misconduct, it's how the attribution models work, and it's true of every ad platform. What varies is whether the provider tells you. Good reporting reconciles platform numbers against GA4 and the CRM, explains the gap, and treats the platform number as what it is: the signal the bidding algorithm optimises to, not the revenue that landed.
If a report presents platform conversions as banked business with no reconciliation anywhere, that's worth a direct question. Our explainer on why Google Ads and GA4 numbers disagree gives you the vocabulary to have that conversation.
9. Communication: proactive, fast, and honest about bad news
The behavioural signals are simple. Do they tell you about problems before you notice them? Do they say what they need from you — and do they actually need things? A provider who never asks for lead feedback, sales updates or landing page changes is either working with everything they need (rare) or working around you (common).
Response time matters too: send one genuine question and see how long a substantive answer takes. And check the change history in the account — a record of regular, dated, describable changes is the signature of an account that's being actively worked, whoever is doing the working.
The ten-point evaluation checklist
Work through these in one sitting — most take minutes; the walkthrough takes forty-five. Score each honestly rather than generously.
- You hold admin access to the ad account, GA4 property and tag containerOwnership of your own assets is non-negotiable; resistance to granting it is a finding in itself, regardless of who manages them.
- Conversions are tracked once, on real success signalsAsk them to demonstrate the conversion actions and when each was last validated. Tags firing on page loads or double-counting invalidate every number downstream.
- Platform numbers are reconciled against GA4 or the CRMA large unexplained gap between platform conversions and real leads means either tracking is over-counting or leads are going unrecorded — find out which before judging performance.
- Search terms reviewed at least fortnightly, negatives visibly addedAsk to see the last ninety days of search terms and what was done about them. Drift on broad match is the most common quiet budget leak.
- Budget allocation traces to resultsThe split should be explainable in two sentences, revisited monthly, with the best performer uncapped or the cap flagged as a constraint.
- Tests are structured, documented, and include failuresAsk for the last three test outcomes. No tests means coasting; constant restructuring means nothing ever learns.
- They ask what happened to the leadsWithout qualification and outcome feedback, the account optimises to form fills, which drifts toward cheap, low-intent volume.
- The report answers 'was this month worth it?' in under a minuteLeads, cost per lead and lead quality up front; clicks and CTR as supporting diagnostics, not the headline.
- They raised a problem with you before you noticed itProactive bad news is one of the strongest signals of a provider worth keeping. If nothing has ever gone wrong in months of reports, that itself is unusual.
- They can explain last month's changes and their expected effect"We changed X because Y; we expect Z within three weeks." Activities without expected outcomes are motion, not management.
How to run the evaluation without damaging a good relationship
Frame it as information, not interrogation. "We're reviewing all our spend this quarter — can you walk us through the account and the reasoning behind the current setup?" is a normal request that any confident provider takes in stride. What you're really testing is whether the work survives being explained; good work usually does.
Give the provider room to name their own gaps. An honest "search term reviews slipped during your site migration, here's the catch-up plan" is a better sign than a flawless narrative that doesn't match the change history. You're looking for a professional relationship that can absorb scrutiny, because every long one eventually needs to.
Also weigh the factors outside the provider's control before concluding the work is poor: seasonality, a competitor entering the auction, a landing page the business won't let change, leads sitting unanswered over a weekend. A fair evaluation separates what the provider controls from what they don't — the same discipline you'd want applied to your own team.
If the evaluation says the work isn't good enough: three legitimate next steps
First, fix the inputs. A meaningful share of underperforming accounts are limited by things the provider can see but not control: leads sitting for days, no feedback on which leads were worth having, an offer that asks more than the market will give. Before changing providers, make sure you're not the bottleneck — it's cheaper and it makes the next relationship work better too.
Second, change provider. If tracking is broken and unrepaired, search terms drift for months, and reports describe activity rather than results, you have your answer. Take your accounts with you — you own them, which is exactly why point one of the checklist exists — and read our pre-hiring audit guide so the next engagement starts from a verified baseline rather than a sales deck.
Third, change the engagement model. The standard agency arrangement trades seniority and directness for scale and cover — and that trade is genuinely right when you need many channels coordinated under one roof. But it isn't the only way to buy PPC work. A direct-specialist arrangement — you working with the person who actually manages the account, week to week — shortens the feedback loop and removes the account-management layer, at the cost of less built-in continuity and narrower channel coverage. We compared both honestly in Google Ads agency vs freelancer, including where each model is the wrong choice. LiveLeadsLane works on the direct-specialist model: clients work directly with me, and the nine areas above are the standard I hold that work to. It's one legitimate alternative, not the only one — pick the model that matches what your account actually needs.
A second opinion, if you want one
If you'd rather have the nine areas checked by someone who isn't the current provider, that's what a paid media account audit is for: the same checks worked through in the account, documented, with fixes ranked by expected impact. It's a one-time engagement — $299 — and useful whether you keep your current provider or not.
If the evaluation points toward changing how the work gets done, Google Ads management starts at $399/month on the direct-specialist model described above. Neither option is the cheapest on the market, and that's not the pitch; the pitch is that the work gets done properly and explained plainly. If you'd rather just talk it through, book a 30-minute call and bring your current report — we can usually tell within the conversation whether the account is being genuinely worked.
Frequently asked questions
- How long before I can fairly judge a PPC agency's work?
- Give any new provider or major restructure two to three months before judging outcomes — automated bidding needs time to exit its learning phase and accumulate data. But you can evaluate the quality of the work much sooner: tracking verified, search terms being reviewed, and changes made with stated reasoning are all visible within the first few weeks.
- What should I expect to see in a PPC report?
- Leads, cost per lead, and lead quality as the headline numbers, with revenue where the business shares it; what changed during the period and why; what's planned next; and platform numbers presented with honest caveats about attribution. Clicks, impressions and click-through rate are useful diagnostics but shouldn't be the story.
- Should I have admin access to my own Google Ads account?
- Yes — the account, the GA4 property and the tag container should be owned by you, with the provider working through access you grant and can revoke. Any provider that resists this, or that built the accounts under their own ownership, is creating a switching cost you'll pay for later.
- Is a drop in performance always the agency's fault?
- No. Seasonality, a competitor entering the auction, rising click costs, a landing page the business won't change, leads sitting unanswered, or an offer the market has moved past can all depress results independently of how well the account is managed. A fair evaluation separates what the provider controls from what it doesn't — and a good provider will help you do exactly that.
- How often should my PPC provider review search terms and add negatives?
- At least every two weeks for an active account, and weekly while spend is high or a campaign is new. The review should produce visible actions — negatives added, high-intent queries promoted — not just a glance at the report.
- When is it fair to switch PPC providers?
- When the evaluation shows the fundamentals aren't being done: tracking broken and unrepaired, search terms drifting, budget frozen regardless of results, and reporting that can't answer whether the month was worth it. Switch after you own your accounts and have a verified baseline of the current state, so the next provider starts from facts rather than from the previous provider's summary.