Most businesses that are getting burned by a bad PPC agency don't know they're getting burned until it's too late. The agency sends monthly reports with impressive-looking metrics, the account manager talks about "optimizations in progress," and the client keeps paying — not realizing that the numbers in the report have no relationship to their actual business results.
Here's a 14-point checklist you can run on your own account right now. Pull up your Google Ads account alongside this list. If you see multiple red flags, you have a real problem.
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1. You Don't Have Admin Access to Your Own Account
This is the first and most important check. You — the business owner or marketing director — should have owner-level access to your own Google Ads account. Not view-only. Not shared access through your agency's MCC. Your own account.
If your agency manages the account from their own Google Ads Manager Account (MCC) and you only have access through their login, they own your account data and your conversion history. If you leave, you lose everything.
Red flag: Agency is "managing your account" but you can't log in independently.
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2. You're Paying a Percentage-of-Spend Management Fee
The percentage-of-spend fee model is the single most misaligned incentive structure in digital advertising. If your agency earns 15% of whatever you spend, they have a financial incentive to increase your spend regardless of whether it improves your results.
Flat retainer or flat fee + performance bonus structures align your agency's incentives with your outcomes. Percentage of spend does not.
Red flag: Your agency charges 15-20% of ad spend as their management fee.
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3. The Reports Lead With Impressions and Clicks, Not Conversions
Impressions and clicks are activity metrics. They tell you what happened in your account, not what that activity produced for your business.
If your monthly reports lead with "impressions increased 23%" and "CTR improved to 4.2%" without clearly tying those metrics to leads generated, cost per lead, revenue generated, or cost per customer acquired — your agency is hiding behind vanity metrics.
Red flag: Reports don't show conversions, cost per conversion, or ROAS as the primary KPIs.
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4. Your Conversion Tracking Is Sloppy
Pull up your account's conversion actions. What is the account optimizing toward? If you see page views, time-on-site, or generic events listed as primary conversion actions, something is wrong. Those aren't leads or sales — they're noise.
Good conversion tracking for a service business should include: form submissions, phone calls (with call duration filter to exclude hang-ups), and appointment bookings. E-commerce should include purchases, not just add-to-cart events.
Red flag: Conversion actions include vanity events that don't represent actual business value.
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5. Search Terms Report Is Ignored
Download your search terms report (not keywords — the actual search queries that triggered your ads). Look at the last 90 days. How many of those searches are completely irrelevant to your business?
If you're a plumber in Henderson, are your ads showing up for searches related to plumbing jobs in Los Angeles? DIY plumbing tutorials? Plumbing supplies for contractors? These searches waste money. Preventing them requires active negative keyword management.
If the search terms report is full of irrelevant queries and there's no evidence of systematic negative keyword additions, your agency isn't doing one of the most basic optimization tasks.
Red flag: Many irrelevant search terms, no recent negative keyword additions in the change history.
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6. There Are No A/B Tests Running
Paid search is a continuous improvement discipline. Ad copy, landing pages, bidding strategies, audience targeting — all of these should be subject to ongoing testing.
Pull up your account's change history. How many experiments or tests have been run in the last 90 days? Zero is a bad sign. One or two minor copy tests is better but not impressive. A consistent cadence of meaningful tests is what good performance management looks like.
Red flag: No tests in the change history in the past 90 days.
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7. Your Landing Pages Haven't Been Touched
Ad quality is only half the conversion equation. Landing page quality matters as much as the ad itself. Is your agency making recommendations about landing page improvements? Are they running landing page tests?
Agencies that only manage the Google Ads account and have no visibility into or accountability for landing page performance are managing half the system.
Red flag: Same landing pages for 12+ months, no conversion rate testing.
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8. Quality Scores Are Low
Check the Quality Score column for your most important keywords. Quality Scores below 5/10 on high-value keywords indicate that your ads, landing pages, or both are poorly aligned with user intent. Low Quality Scores mean you're paying more per click than your competitors with better scores.
Good agencies watch and improve Quality Scores because they directly affect cost efficiency. Ignored Quality Scores mean higher CPCs and worse ad positions for the same budget.
Red flag: Multiple important keywords with Quality Scores of 4/10 or below.
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9. Brand Campaign Is Mixed With Non-Brand
Your branded keywords (people searching for your company name) and your non-brand keywords (people searching for services you offer) should be in separate campaigns. Brand searches are high-intent, low-competition, and cheap. Non-brand searches are competitive and expensive.
Mixing them inflates the apparent performance of your non-brand campaigns (because brand searches are easy conversions) and makes it impossible to accurately assess the ROI of your conquest campaigns.
Red flag: Brand and non-brand keywords in the same campaigns.
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10. Broad Match Keywords Are Dominant
Keyword match types matter. Broad match (which lets Google match your keyword to a wide range of related searches) can be useful with smart bidding — but it requires aggressive negative keyword management. If your account is full of broad match keywords and the negative keyword list is sparse, you're almost certainly wasting budget on irrelevant searches.
Pull up your keyword list and check the match types. If broad match accounts for more than 30-40% of your keyword portfolio and negative keywords are thin, this needs attention.
Red flag: High proportion of broad match keywords with minimal negative keyword list.
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11. Your Ad Copy Is Years Old
Ad copy ages. Competitive messaging changes. New features launch. Your own business evolves. Ad copy that was written two years ago is almost certainly not as effective as copy that reflects your current value proposition.
When was the last time your agency wrote and tested new ad copy? Check the change history.
Red flag: Ad copy unchanged in 6+ months, no ad copy tests visible in change history.
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12. You Can't Get a Straight Answer About Results
Ask your account manager: "What was our cost per lead this month, and how does that compare to last month and 90 days ago?"
A good account manager answers this immediately and without hesitation. A bad one sends you a report filled with activity metrics and buries the performance numbers.
Red flag: Simple performance questions generate word salad instead of direct answers.
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13. They've Never Suggested Reducing Budget
If your agency has never once suggested that your budget might be better allocated elsewhere — testing a new channel, pausing a poor-performing campaign, reducing spend while improving conversion rates — they're not managing your account as a business investment. They're managing it as an income source.
Good agencies will tell you when you're spending money in the wrong place, even if that means recommending you spend less with them.
Red flag: Every quarterly review ends with a recommendation to increase budget.
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14. Monthly Meeting Is a Slide Deck Presentation, Not a Working Session
The best client-agency relationships involve real conversations about strategy — where is this going, what have we learned, what are we changing? Monthly meetings that are just slide deck reviews of the previous month's activity without strategic discussion are a sign that the agency is in reporting mode, not thinking mode.
Red flag: Monthly reviews cover only what happened, never why or what next.
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What to Do If You Flagged 4 or More
Four or more red flags is a strong signal that something is wrong. Your next step:
- Request owner-level access to your Google Ads account immediately.
- Pull 90 days of campaign data including search terms, conversion actions, and change history.
- Get a second opinion from another agency — most offer free audits.
If you flagged 7 or more, it's time to have a direct conversation with your agency about what you're seeing, or start the process of finding a replacement.
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