How do I know if my Google Ads agency is doing a good job?

Ask them to show what counts as a conversion, how reported conversions reconcile with the inquiries your team received, what they changed last month and why, and when they last excluded wasted searches. A good manager answers with evidence and can point to times they recommended spending less.

Should we own our Google Ads and Meta ad accounts?

Yes. The accounts hold your conversion history, audiences and performance data, and that value should stay with your organization if a supplier or employee leaves. Ensure a current staff member has administrator access and that billing is in your organization’s name.

How often should a paid media account be audited?

A leadership-level review once a year is a sensible minimum, plus whenever the person or agency managing the account changes. The search terms and placement reviews described here should happen far more often, as part of routine management.

What is the biggest sign of wasted ad spend?

A large gap between the conversions the platforms report and the inquiries that actually reach your sales team. It usually means the account is counting actions that are not real leads, which also means the platform is optimizing toward the wrong thing.

Paid Media Audit Checklist for Leadership Teams

Why leadership should audit paid media

Paid media is one of the few marketing costs that can grow quietly every month, managed by people whose reports are written in the platforms' own vocabulary. Many executives approve the spend, receive a report full of impressions and click-through rates, and have no practical way to tell whether the money is working.

A technical audit (bid strategies, keyword match types, audience settings) is a specialist job. This is not that. It is the set of questions a leadership team can ask in plain language, with the evidence to request for each, that will reveal most serious problems. If the answers are good, you have confirmed the account is in good hands. If they are vague, you have found where to dig.

Use it for an annual check, before renewing an agency contract, when a new marketing lead joins, or when results feel off and nobody can say why. If the issue is specifically that clicks look fine and inquiries do not, read why paid ads fail even when clicks look good alongside this.

1. Ownership and access

This comes first because it is the one problem that gets worse the longer it is left. If your ad accounts belong to a former employee, a freelancer or an agency, your history, audiences and conversion data belong to them too.

Who owns each ad account? Google Ads, Meta Business assets, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, and any others. Ask to see the owner or administrator listed in each.
Does someone inside the organization have administrator access? A named, current employee, not a shared login.
Whose payment method is on file? Billing in your organization's name is a good sign that the account is yours.
Who owns the tracking? The analytics property, tag manager container, pixels and call tracking numbers. If an agency set them up in its own accounts, ask for ownership to be transferred.
Who has access who should not? Former staff and former suppliers often still do.

Red flag: a supplier who is reluctant to give you administrator access to an account you pay for. There are occasional legitimate reasons for agency-owned set-ups, but you should still be able to leave with your data.

2. What counts as a conversion

Every ad platform optimizes toward the actions you tell it to count. This is the single most important setting in any account, and the one leadership is most entitled to understand.

Ask for a written list, per platform, of every action counted as a conversion. Then ask of each one: is this a real business outcome?

Good: completed inquiry forms, calls above a minimum length, booked appointments, purchases, qualified leads imported from the CRM.
Questionable: clicks on a phone number or email link (intent, not contact), downloads, newsletter sign-ups counted alongside sales inquiries.
Not a conversion: page views, time on site, scroll depth, visits to the contact page.

Then the reconciliation test, which takes an afternoon. Take last month's reported conversions from each platform and compare them with the inquiries that actually reached your inbox, phones and CRM. They will never match exactly, because of consent, attribution windows and phone calls. But they should be in the same neighbourhood. If the platforms report many more than sales received, something is being counted that should not be, or counted twice.

For the deeper version of this, see how to measure lead quality from paid campaigns.

3. Attribution and the single source of truth

Google, Meta and LinkedIn each report their own results using their own rules, and each gives itself credit generously. A buyer who saw a LinkedIn ad, later clicked a Google ad and then called you may be counted as a conversion by both platforms.

Questions to ask:

Is there one report that shows all paid channels against the same outcome, rather than three platform reports stapled together?
Does that report use your CRM or sales records as the source, or only the platforms' own numbers?
Is branded search (people searching your name) reported separately from everything else? It converts well because those people already knew you, and it can make the whole account look better than it is.
Can the team say, roughly, what share of new clients came from paid channels last quarter, and how they know?

Perfect attribution does not exist and anyone who claims it is selling something. What you want is honest, consistent attribution with its limits stated. What an executive marketing dashboard should show describes the report worth asking for.

4. Search terms and placements

On Google, you choose keywords, but your ads show for searches Google considers related, which can be broader than you would like. The search terms report shows the actual searches that triggered your ads and what each one cost.

Ask for last month's search terms report, sorted by cost, and read the top of it yourself. You do not need to be technical to spot problems:

Searches for jobs, careers, salaries or training in your field.
Searches for free versions, do-it-yourself instructions or definitions.
Searches for a competitor you would not want to pay for, or places you do not serve.
Searches for something with a similar name that is not what you sell.

Then ask: how often is this report reviewed, and where is the list of excluded terms? A well-run account has a growing list of negative keywords and someone who adds to it regularly.

For display, video and social campaigns, the equivalent is placements: the websites, apps and videos where ads appeared. Ask whether anyone reviews them and excludes the poor ones. For automated campaign types that show less detail, ask what controls are in place and how the team judges whether the spend is productive.

5. The usual sources of wasted spend

Most accounts leak in a few predictable places. Ask about each:

Geography. Are ads shown to people in your service area, or to people anywhere who show interest in it? The second setting suits tourism; for a local service business it often wastes money. Ask for a report of where clicks actually came from.
Language. In New Brunswick especially, are French searchers reaching French ads and French pages?
Schedule. If nobody answers the phone at night or on weekends, are call-focused ads running then anyway?
Own brand. How much is spent on people searching your company name, and is that deliberate?
Dormant campaigns. Old campaigns still spending small amounts nobody watches.
Landing pages. Is any ad sending traffic to the homepage, a broken page or a page that does not match the ad?
Frequency. On social and LinkedIn, are the same people seeing the same ad over and over with falling response?

6. Reporting rhythm and decision log

Good paid media management leaves a trail of decisions. Ask to see it.

What changed in the account last month, and why?
What tests are running, what are they testing, and when will they be judged?
What was paused or cut recently, and on what evidence?
What is the target cost per qualified inquiry, and how does each campaign compare with it?
When did the manager last recommend spending less somewhere?

A report that only ever contains good news, or that changes its headline metric from month to month, is a warning sign. So is a manager who cannot explain a result in plain language.

What to do with the findings

Sort what you find into three groups:

Fix immediately: ownership and access problems, conversions counting the wrong thing, obvious geographic or search term waste. These cost money every day they continue.
Fix this quarter: a single source of truth for reporting, CRM outcomes connected to the ad platforms, landing pages for each campaign.
Decide: the questions only leadership can answer, such as the target cost per customer and which channels are worth testing. How much an established business should spend on paid ads gives a framework for that conversation.

Repeat the audit annually, or whenever the people managing the account change. If you would rather have an outside view, an independent account review is a standard first step in our paid advertising work, and the free visibility report is a lighter starting point for the wider picture.