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 paying attention. The platforms 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, based on what evidence, 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, and a good agency will use several of them on purpose. 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 your ads are actually matching or where they are actually showing is the measurement step 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 distorts 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. A vague answer every time is the signal.
6. Whether the optimization score is being chased for its own sake. Google Ads nudges every account toward accepting more recommendations to raise its score. 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 a change history with identifiable human decisions in it, an operator who started wide with automation when the account needed data and then tightened deliberately once real numbers came in, 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, roughly $100 to $250 a month depending on the product and account size, which tells you some of this work can be tooled. What tooling cannot do is decide 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. Start wide with automation if you need the data, then hold yourself to the same six checks on a schedule. If nobody, agency or otherwise, is doing them, the automation is running the account, not the person whose name is on the login.

If you would rather have someone run this checklist against your account and act on what it finds, agency-audit and hands-on account management (Google Ads and Meta) is what The Discoverability Company's advertising service does, at a public price: $350 a month or 10% of ad spend, whichever is greater, no setup fee, no contract minimum. See the advertising management page.