How to check if your Google Ads agency is working

Why you can check this yourself

You pay an agency to make decisions in your account. Google Ads writes down every edit, with a name and a date. So you can see the work for yourself, in about 15 minutes a month. You don't need to know how to run ads to do it.

A quiet month can be the right call too. The section on few changes explains when.

Open Change history and see who did what

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account. In the Campaigns menu, go to Change history. Google says this view shows the changes on all your campaigns.
2. Set the dates in the top right corner. Google says to review changes for a particular date range, select the dates in the upper right corner. Start with the last 30 to 60 days.
3. Add a filter for the person. Google's filter list has a User filter to filter by the user(s) who made changes. You can also filter by Change type, such as budgets or keywords.
4. Read the User column. For edits made in Google Ads itself, it shows the email address of the person who made the change. Edits sent in by software can show "Google Ads API" or a tool name. Your agency's staff will show up as their own emails or as their tool.
5. Look for Google's own entries. Google says its systems can show up under names like "ads-dartsearch-budget" or "Google Ads system". Those aren't your agency.

The list goes back a long way. Google says it lets you revisit the changes you've made to your campaign over the last 2 years.

One gap to know about. Google says not all account-level settings changes or changes made by Google representatives during consultations are listed. So a missing edit isn't proof nobody made it. Ask about it.

What real management looks like

Good work leaves a trail you can follow. Over a normal month, expect to see some of these:

• Bad searches blocked. The search terms report shows the words people typed before they clicked your ad. Google says you'll find it under "Search terms" within the "Insights and reports" sub-menu. An agency that reads it adds negative keywords, which are words you tell Google to skip. Google puts it simply: "Negative keywords let you exclude search terms from your campaigns". In Change history, these show as negative keywords added.
• Bids and targets moved for a reason. A target is the cost per sale, or the sales per $1 of ads, that you ask Google to aim for. Good edits follow results. A campaign that sells well gets more room. One that loses money gets a tighter target or less budget.
• Budget shifted to what sells. Money moves from campaigns and products that don't pay off to ones that do.
• New ads tested. New headlines or new ads go live. Weak ones get paused after they've had a fair run.
• Product data fixed. For a store, product titles, prices and images come from Merchant Center. Google calls it a free tool that helps millions of shoppers on Google discover, explore, and buy your products. Fixes there happen outside Google Ads, so they won't show in its Change history. Ask the agency to show you what they changed in Merchant Center.

Each edit should fit a reason you could say out loud. "Searches for free stuff were wasting money, so we blocked them" is a reason. Ask to see the searches they blocked last month.

Signs your agency may only be going through the motions

None of these proves anything alone. 2 or 3 together deserve a straight talk.

• Weeks of silence. No edits by anyone from the agency for 3 or 4 weeks, while results slide.
• A burst just before the report. Nothing for most of the month, then a pile of small edits in the 2 or 3 days before the monthly report. Renaming things, or nudging a bid by a few cents, makes the log look busy.
• Only Google's edits. Every entry is from Google's own systems or from auto-apply. Auto-apply is a setting that lets Google put its own suggestions live without asking. To see those, Google says you can review the "History" tab for a summary of recent applied recommendations. It's under Recommendations, then Auto-apply settings. Google also says you can confirm who enrolled your account, and when, through the account's change history. If auto-apply is doing all the work, you're paying a person for Google's defaults. Here's how to switch off the risky types.
• Lots of tiny bid edits that change nothing. Hundreds of small bid moves, often from a tool, with no change in sales.
• A report full of clicks and no profit. Impressions (times your ad was shown), clicks and click rate go up. Sales, return on ad spend (ROAS) and profit aren't in the report, or are buried.
• Sales that aren't sales. If add-to-cart or page views count as conversions (the actions Google counts as a result), ROAS in the report looks better than your bank account. Here's how to check what counts as a sale.
• Edits you can't get explained. You ask why a change was made and get a vague answer.

Here's how a clicks-first report can hide a loss. Say the report proudly shows clicks up 30%. Last month you spent $3,000 on ads and they brought $6,000 in sales. That's a ROAS of 200%, or $2 back for each $1. Your margin is 40%, so those sales left $2,400 to pay for ads. $2,400 minus $3,000 is a $600 loss. At a 40% margin you need 250% just to break even. You can find your own break-even number here.

If the change your agency blames for a drop came from Google, see Google Ads changed my campaign by itself.

A 15-minute monthly check

Do this on the same day each month, before you read the agency's report.

1. Open Change history for the last 30 days. Filter by user.
2. Count the agency's edits by week. Note any week with none.
3. Check where they fall. Are most of them in the last few days before the report?
4. Check the type. Filter by Change type. Look for negative keywords, budget and target edits, and new ads.
5. Check Google's share. How many entries came from Google's systems or auto-apply instead of a person?
6. Open the search terms report. Scan the top 20 searches by cost. Are there obvious misses that should have been blocked?
7. Compare money to money. Write down ad spend, sales and ROAS for the month. Check them against your break-even number.
8. Pick 3 edits. Email the agency and ask what each one was for and what it did.
9. Check who has access. Make sure you're still an admin (more below).
10. Keep notes. One line per month. After 3 months, you'll see the pattern.
11. Match the invoice to Google. In Google Ads, set the dates to last month and read the total cost. Google's rule for agencies is to "report the exact amount charged by Google, exclusive of any fees that you charge". So the ad spend on the invoice should be close to that cost, and any fee should be its own line. Credits from Google, for example for invalid clicks, and taxes can make the real bill a little different. To see the bill itself, click the Billing icon, then Billing activity. Google says it lets you "track costs and credits in sequence and reconcile with payments". If you pay by monthly invoice, use Transactions instead. Google notes that transactions are always shown in Pacific Standard Time (PST), so a day at the edge of the month can land in the next one.

Here's what a bad month can look like. Change history shows 64 entries. 40 are from the agency's email: 6 in week 1, 4 in week 2, none in week 3, and 30 in the 2 days before the report. The other 24 are from "Google Ads system" or auto-apply. Most of the 30 late edits are renamed ads and bids moved by a few cents. That's a quiet week, a burst before the report and a big Google share. 3 signs together, so it's time for that straight talk. If those 30 edits had been negative keywords from that month's searches, they'd be real work, just done late.

When few changes are the right call

Quiet isn't always lazy. Be fair before you judge.

• A stable account may need little. If sales and profit hold steady and the search terms look clean, a light touch can be correct.
• Big changes need time. When a bid strategy (the method Google uses to set your bids) changes, campaigns can show a "Learning" status. Google says you may see a "Learning" status in your account for up to 7 days. An agency that waits out that week is doing it right.
• Sales show up late. Google says some of the people who clicked your ad haven't converted yet (bought, in a store's case), and that conversions can be reported up to 90 days after the click. Last week's numbers look worse than they'll end up.
• Some work leaves no trail. Strategy calls, landing page advice and Merchant Center fixes don't show in Change history.

The fair test is simple. Can the agency tell you why it changed something, or why it chose to wait?

Make sure you own the account

The account should be yours. If you're an admin on it, you keep the account and its Change history when the agency leaves.

• See who has access. Google says to go to Access and security within the Admin menu. The "Access level" column shows each person's level.
• Ask for Admin. Admin is the top level. Google says it can give account access, change access levels, and cancel invitations from other users. Standard can edit campaigns but can't give other people working access or change their level. Read-only can view campaigns and use planning tools.
• Keep 2 admins. Google warns that if your account has only one administrator, you may lose access to your tags if that user becomes unavailable.
• Use a work email. Google is testing a rule where users accessing Google Ads via free domain email addresses, such as Gmail, are blocked from sensitive actions. Changing user access is one of them.
• Ask for your customer ID. Google has rules for agencies that run ads for others. It says "Google requires that you provide your customers with the customer IDs" when they ask. If the agency's terms with Google call for a monthly report, Google says "you must include data on costs, clicks, and impressions at the Google advertising account level". For fees, the rule is to "disclose the fee on all customer invoices".

If the agency won't give you Admin on an account you pay for, ask why in writing.

Questions to ask your agency

• What did you change this month, and why?
• Which searches did you block, and what did they cost before?
• What did you test, and what did you learn?
• Which changes came from Google's auto-apply, and do you approve of them?
• What's our break-even ROAS, and are we above it?
• Does the Performance Max return you report include searches for our own name? Here's why Performance Max buys your brand searches.

A good agency will be glad you asked. These are the questions it should be answering anyway.

How PerfoAds flags it

PerfoAds reads the same change history your agency writes to. Once monitoring is on, it checks the account every day and flags problems in plain English.

One check looks at who makes the edits. It flags the account when one login made 80% or more of the changes made in the Google Ads website or through the Google Ads API, and only once there are at least 50 of those. Google's own automated edits, automated rules and Google Ads Editor uploads don't count toward that share. It never names the login. The point is cover: if one person runs everything, the account depends on them. It's a note with no dollar figure, and it doesn't judge the quality of that person's work. With an agency, this note is normal: one agency login often makes most edits. PerfoAds doesn't grade your agency. It gives you the account's problems in dollars, so you can ask the agency about each one.

PerfoAds also flags auto-apply types left on and edits Google made itself. It reads change history through Google's API (the way software connects to Google Ads), which only reaches back 30 days. Google's rule is that the date range must be within the past 30 days. For older edits, use Change history in Google Ads.

Approving and undoing fixes from PerfoAds is in beta. Rollback covers most PerfoAds changes for 30 days. It costs $149 a month per Google Ads account. There's no free trial, and it covers Google Ads only.

Pawel Wilk built it. He has spent 10 years in ecommerce and performance marketing and has managed 100+ ad accounts, with millions of dollars in ad spend. If you write to support, Pawel answers himself.