Part of our guide: Paid media revenue leaks: where ad budgets actually go missing →
Look beyond reported ROAS. Ask for the search terms report (what queries your ads are showing for), the negative keyword list (how many terms they've excluded), the campaign change history (how often they're making optimisations), and a breakdown of spend by campaign and match type. Good agencies are transparent with all of this.
The uncomfortable truth about the Google Ads agency market: most underperformance is invisible from the outside. Your agency sends a monthly report showing improving CTR, respectable ROAS, and a graph that trends upward. Meanwhile, 35% of your budget is funding irrelevant clicks, your competitors are bidding smarter, and your ROAS is held together by branded search terms your customers would have found anyway.
Here are five specific, checkable signs that your Google Ads agency is burning your budget — and the exact questions to ask about each one.
Your Search Terms Report Is Full of Irrelevant Queries
Open your Google Ads account, go to Keywords → Search Terms, and filter for the last 30 days. If you're seeing queries like "free [your product]," "[your product] jobs," "[competitor name] review," or completely unrelated searches — those are clicks you paid for that will never convert.
A well-managed account in its second month should have an extensive negative keyword list preventing this bleed. If you see dozens of irrelevant queries and no corresponding negative keyword additions in the change history, your agency isn't doing the basic work.
We audited a travel comparison platform where 41% of Search spend was going to informational queries (Wikipedia-style "what is X" searches) with zero purchase intent. CPA was at 1.02× ROAS. After a proper negative keyword programme and audience intent restructure, ROAS recovered to 2.08× — a direct recovery of $40K+/month that had been silently wasting.
Every Report Leads with CTR and Impressions, Not Revenue
CTR is a vanity metric. Impressions are a vanity metric. The only numbers that matter for an e-commerce or lead generation account are ROAS (or CPA), conversion volume, and revenue contributed.
Agencies that lead with CTR and impression share are often doing so because revenue metrics are harder to defend. A 6% CTR on campaigns driving zero qualified conversions is a red flag, not an achievement.
Good agencies report on: revenue or conversion value generated, ROAS by campaign and ad group, CPA by campaign, spend by match type (to surface broad match bleed), and changes made in the period with their rationale. If you're not getting this breakdown, you're not getting managed — you're getting serviced.
Your Account Change History Is Thin
In Google Ads, go to Tools → Change History. Filter by the last 30 days. A well-managed account should show dozens of changes: negative keyword additions, bid adjustments, ad copy updates, audience exclusions, budget reallocation. If you see fewer than 15–20 changes in a month, your account is not being actively managed — it's being left to run.
Automated bidding doesn't eliminate the need for human optimisation. It eliminates the need for manual bid changes — but strategy, structure, creative, and audience decisions still require a human making intentional changes weekly.
Branded Search Is Inflating Your ROAS
This is the most common way agencies manufacture good-looking ROAS numbers: by including branded search campaigns (people searching your brand name directly) in the overall ROAS calculation. Branded search almost always converts at 8–15× ROAS — because the person already knows you and has already decided to find you. It has almost nothing to do with the agency's work.
When you separate branded from non-branded, the non-branded ROAS (which represents actual performance marketing) often looks very different. We've seen accounts where the headline ROAS was 6×, but non-branded ROAS was 1.8×. The agency was essentially billing $4,000/month to manage campaigns that were coasting on brand equity.
You're Running Broad Match Without Audience Layers
Broad match has become more powerful with Smart Bidding in recent years — Google's algorithm can find relevant matches across a wider query range. But broad match without proper audience layering is budget bleed in disguise. Without telling Google who your customer is (via customer match lists, in-market audiences, and demographic overlays), broad match will find clicks — just not necessarily the right ones.
A DTC e-commerce brand we inherited was running 70% of budget on broad match with zero audience layers and no negative keyword programme. Average CPC was $2.80. After rebuilding the account with phrase/exact for proven intent queries, broad match only for new keyword discovery (heavily audience-layered), and a proper negative keyword programme — average CPC dropped to $1.94 and ROAS improved from 2.3× to 3.8× without increasing budget.
Free resource: The Demand Engine Audit — use it to run your own account health check across bid strategy, match type distribution, audience quality, and negative keyword coverage.
Get Case Study →
What to Do If You See These Signs
First: don't panic, and don't immediately fire your agency. Some of these issues are fixable with a direct conversation. Request a structured account review — ask for the search terms report, the change history, and a branded/non-branded ROAS split. Give the agency two weeks to respond with an action plan.
If the response is defensive rather than analytical, or if they can't explain the rationale behind specific decisions, that's a clearer signal. A good agency welcomes scrutiny — it's how they prove their value.
If you'd like an independent second opinion, we offer a free 30-minute account review. We'll look at your search terms, change history, match type distribution, and ROAS breakdown — and give you an honest assessment, not a sales pitch.
Further Reading
Frequently Asked Questions
-
Look beyond reported ROAS. Ask for the search terms report, the negative keyword list, the campaign change history, and a breakdown of spend by campaign and match type. Good agencies are transparent with all of this and can explain the rationale behind every major decision.
-
A healthy Google Shopping ROAS for e-commerce is typically 3–6× depending on your margin and category. If you're below 3× with a margin above 50%, you likely have a structural problem — campaign architecture, audience targeting, or bid strategy. Above 8× usually indicates under-spend rather than exceptional performance.
-
Yes — this is non-negotiable. Without GA4 access, they can't see post-click behaviour and they're optimising for clicks, not outcomes. Any agency operating only in the Google Ads interface is working with half the data.
-
Active management means weekly negative keyword reviews, bi-weekly bid adjustments, monthly structural reviews, and ad copy testing every 30–45 days. If your account has fewer than 20 changes per month in the change history, it's being under-managed.
Want an honest second opinion on your account?
Book a free 30-minute Google Ads audit. We'll look at your search terms, change history, and ROAS split — and tell you exactly what we find.
Book a free audit →