Most business owners suspect they're being underserved long before they can prove it. The reports look busy, the calls are pleasant, and the invoices arrive on time — but the phone isn't ringing any more than it used to.
You don't need marketing expertise to check. Here are five things you can look at yourself, roughly in order of how damning they are.
1. You don't have direct access to your own ad accounts
This is the biggest one, and it's non-negotiable. You should be able to log into your own Google Ads and Meta Business Manager accounts, today, without asking anyone's permission.
Some agencies run client campaigns inside their own accounts. When you leave, everything goes with them: the campaign history, the conversion data, the audiences you paid to build, the negative keyword lists. You start again from zero with your next agency.
2. The report shows impressions and clicks but not leads
Impressions, reach, clicks and click-through rate are activity metrics. They tell you the campaign is running. They tell you nothing about whether it's working.
A report that leads with impressions is usually hiding an outcome nobody wants to discuss. The numbers that matter are simple: how many leads, what each one cost, how much you spent, and how that compares to last month.
- Green flags: cost per lead, lead volume, conversion rate, spend, month-over-month comparison.
- Red flags: reports leading with impressions or reach, “engagement” as a headline metric, no cost per lead anywhere.
- Serious red flag: metrics that change definition between months, so nothing is comparable.
3. Nobody has touched the account in weeks
In Google Ads you can check this yourself. Open the account, go to Tools, then Change History, and set the date range to the last 30 days.
A properly managed account shows regular activity — negative keywords added, bids adjusted, ad copy tested, budgets moved between campaigns. A neglected one shows a flurry of setup activity months ago and near silence since.
We audited an account paying $1,400 a month in management fees. The change history showed eleven days of setup activity, then nothing for seven months.
4. The search terms report is full of things you don't sell
This one is specific to Google and it's the fastest way to see whether anyone is minding the store. In your account, open Keywords, then Search Terms, and set the range to the last 30 days.
You'll see the actual phrases people typed before your ad appeared. Read them. If you're a roofing company and you see “roofing jobs hiring”, “how to fix a roof yourself” or “roofing supplies wholesale”, you are paying for clicks that will never become customers.
A small amount of this is unavoidable. Pages of it means nobody is adding negative keywords, which is the single highest-return maintenance task in any search account.
5. Conversion tracking is measuring the wrong thing
This is the subtlest failure and often the most expensive. Open your conversion actions and look at what's actually counted as a conversion.
- A visit to the contact page is not a conversion. Someone looked at a page and left.
- Any phone call, however short, is not a conversion. Set a minimum duration of 30–60 seconds so misdials don't count.
- Multiple conversion actions all set to “primary” inflate the numbers and let a report claim success that didn't happen.
This matters beyond reporting. Google and Meta optimise toward whatever you tell them a conversion is. Define it as a page view and the algorithm will find people who view pages and leave. You'll get a beautiful conversion count and a quiet phone.
What to do if you recognise several of these
Don't fire anyone on the strength of a blog post. Ask direct questions first and judge the answers.
- 1Ask for confirmation that you own your ad accounts, in writing, with the account IDs.
- 2Ask for last month's cost per lead and lead volume, and how they compare to the month before.
- 3Ask what changed in the account in the last 30 days and why.
- 4Ask how a conversion is defined and why that definition was chosen.
A competent agency will answer all four quickly and without defensiveness, because they already know the numbers. Vagueness, deflection or a sudden offer of a discount tells you what you need to know.