Judge your agency on profit and honesty, not activity. Five checks: are the numbers that matter (revenue, ROAS vs break-even, CPA, new-customer share) moving the right way; does the reporting explain why; is a senior person actually on the account; are they proactive; and, the real test, do they ever tell you to spend less? A long list of “optimisations” is not evidence of a good agency.
It is a genuinely hard thing to judge from the outside. The reports look busy, the charts go up and down, and unless you live in the account you cannot easily tell competence from motion. So here is a framework you can apply without being a Google Ads expert yourself, built around outcomes and behaviour rather than jargon.
1. Judge outcomes, not activity
The most common trick, often unintentional, is to report activity as if it were results: “we made 47 optimisations, added 200 keywords, refreshed the ads.” None of that tells you whether the business made more money. A good agency leads with outcomes and treats the activity as the footnote. If the headline of every report is how busy they were, you are being sold effort, not performance.
2. The five numbers to actually look at
You do not need to read the whole account. These are the money metrics:
| Metric | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Revenue & profit from ads | Growing, or holding while efficiency improves. |
| ROAS vs break-even | Comfortably above your break-even ROAS, with a buffer. |
| CPA (cost to acquire a customer) | Stable or falling relative to what a customer is worth. |
| New vs returning customers | Bringing in new customers, not just buying back people who would have returned anyway. |
| Efficiency as you scale | Spend can grow while staying profitable, not just spend growing. |
Impressions, clicks and click-through rate are useful diagnostics for the person running the account, but they are not the scoreboard. If they are the headline, be suspicious.
3. Does the reporting explain why?
Anyone can send a dashboard. The value is in the interpretation. A good report tells you why the numbers moved (“ROAS dipped because we scaled into non-brand, and here is why that is still profitable”) and what they are doing about it. If your reports are a wall of numbers with no narrative, you are not getting the expensive part of the service.
4. Who is actually on your account?
This is the quiet one that decides everything. Many agencies sell you a senior name and hand the day-to-day to a junior learning on your budget. Ask directly: who makes the daily decisions on my account, and how many other accounts do they run? You want the person touching the bids and the feed to have run accounts like yours before. It is one of the main reasons some people choose a senior freelancer or solo operator over a traditional agency.
5. Are they proactive, or just reactive?
A good partner brings you ideas: a new market to test, a feed problem they spotted, a structure change worth trying. A weak one only responds when you chase, and only reports what already happened. If every improvement in the last year was something you suggested, you are paying for a pair of hands, not expertise.
The real test: do they ever tell you to spend less?
This is the single most revealing question, and it is why the pricing model matters. An agency paid a percentage of your spend has a quiet incentive to keep spend high. The ones worth keeping will, at some point, tell you to pull back, that a channel is over-invested, that you are past your profitable ceiling, that this month the right move is to spend less. An agency that has never once advised restraint is either very lucky or not really optimising for your profit.
Red flags, in one list
- Reports built on impressions, clicks and “optimisations made.”
- You do not own, or cannot fully see, your own Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts.
- A senior name sold you the account; a junior runs it.
- Long lock-in contracts with heavy exit penalties.
- A fee that scales up with spend but never down.
- They have never once told you to pull back or that something is not working.
Still not sure?
If you have read this and genuinely cannot tell whether your account is in good hands, that uncertainty is itself worth resolving. A second opinion from someone with no stake in your current setup is the fastest way to know. A free audit looks at your actual account and tells you plainly what is being done well, what is being missed, and whether the results justify the fee, no obligation to switch.
