Is my agency actually working?

The report is not the work

A monthly PDF with a chart, a paragraph of commentary, and a few green arrows is the easiest part of ad management to produce and the least useful part for judging whether anyone is actually paying attention. The platforms themselves generate most of that automatically now. The question worth asking is not "does the report look good," it is "what did a human being decide this month, and why."

Six things to ask for that are hard to fake

1. The change history, not a summary of it. Every platform keeps a log of what changed and when. Ask to see it directly, or ask for read-only access so you can pull it yourself. A quiet month with almost no changes on a growing budget is a real answer worth getting, one way or the other.
2. What is turned on that you did not explicitly approve. Performance Max, Advantage+, auto-apply recommendations, broad match expansion. None of these are automatically wrong, but someone managing your account should be able to tell you which ones are active and why, not just that "the algorithm handles that now."
3. A recent search terms or placement review, not just a bid report. Bids move on their own under automated bidding. A human reviewing what is actually matching your ads or where your ads are actually showing is a different kind of work, and it is the kind that catches waste an algorithm will not flag on its own.
4. A straight answer on conversion tracking health. Ask when it was last checked against your CRM or order system, not just whether the pixel is "firing." A tracking gap quietly breaks every automated decision built on top of it.
5. Their reasoning for a specific decision, in plain language. Not "we optimized the campaign." Which lever, why that one, what they expected to happen, and what actually happened. If the answer is vague every time, that is the signal.
6. Whether the optimization score is being chased for its own sake. Google Ads assigns every account a percentage score and nudges toward accepting more recommendations to raise it. A score going up is not the same thing as your account getting better for your specific business. Someone managing the account should know the difference and be able to explain which recommendations they rejected and why.

What good management actually looks like, mechanically

It looks like fewer platform-driven surprises over time, a change history with identifiable human decisions in it, and someone who can explain a tradeoff instead of reciting a metric. It does not require a huge retainer. PPC-focused audit and automation software exists at a range of price points, from roughly $100 to $250 a month depending on the product and account size, which tells you that some of this work can be tooled rather than fully manual. What it cannot do is replace a person deciding whether a recommendation is right for your specific business.

If you manage it yourself

Everything above applies just as much to a self-managed account. The platforms do not treat an in-house marketer differently than an agency. If nobody, agency or otherwise, is doing the six things above on a schedule, the automation is running the account, not the person whose name is on the login.

For a rough sense of what that gap might be costing in dollars, run your numbers through the wasted ad spend calculator.