TL;DR: You do not need a consultant to check your Google Ads agency. You need 30 minutes and Admin access. Google Ads change history goes back two years, so every edit is on record. Six checks inside that half hour tell you whether your account is actively managed or quietly parked.
Why mid-contract reviews almost never happen
Most companies review their Google Ads agency exactly twice. Once before signing. Once after deciding to fire them.
The 10 months in between run on a monthly PDF and a standing call. That gap is where the money leaks.
The timing problem is structural. Month one is onboarding, so nobody expects results. Months two through four are “give it time to learn.” By month six the relationship is comfortable, and comfort is not a performance metric. Most annual contracts auto-renew before anyone opens the account.
A mid-contract review is not an accusation. It is a scheduled check that the account still matches what you bought. A good agency passes it in half an hour and asks for a copy of your notes. A weak one stalls on the access request for a week.
Here is the 30-minute version. You need Admin access to your own Google Ads account. No spreadsheet, no analyst, no meeting.
Minutes 0 to 4: Confirm you own the account
You cannot review what you cannot open.
Google Ads assigns every user an access level. The options are Admin, Standard, Read only, Email only, and Billing. Google’s own documentation draws the line clearly: users with Admin access can invite new users into the account, and Standard users cannot.
Go to Admin, then Access and security. Check two things:
- Is the Google Ads account under your billing profile, or your agency’s?
- Does your work email hold Admin access, or did you get Read only?
If the answer to either question is “the agency,” pause the review and fix that first. Everything downstream depends on it.
Agencies that build campaigns inside their own account and rent them back to you are not rare. The setup is legal and it is quietly expensive. You lose the change history, the conversion data, and the bidding algorithm’s accumulated learning the day you leave. A new agency then starts from zero on your dime. Account ownership is the most expensive term to renegotiate after a relationship ends, which is why it sits at the top of our PPC agency buyer’s checklist.
Also check the manager account link. A linked manager account is standard practice and completely fine. Your agency logging in through a shared password on an account they registered is not.
Minutes 4 to 9: Read the change history
This is the fastest lie detector in Google Ads.
Open Tools, then Change history. Google Ads Help describes it as “a tool that lists the changes made to your account, campaigns, and ad groups during the past 2 years.” The User column shows the email address of whoever made each edit through the interface. Automated changes appear under labels like “Google Ads system” or “Google Ads API.”
Set the range to the last 90 days. Then read for three things.
Frequency
Real management leaves a visible trail: negative keywords added, budgets moved between campaigns, bid strategy targets adjusted, ad variants launched and paused. An account spending $20,000 a month generates dozens of human edits per quarter. That is not busywork, it is the job.
Who
Look at the User column, not the entry count. If every change in 90 days traces back to a system account, nobody is working on your account. Google is. You are paying a management fee for automation that runs whether you hire anyone or not.
Auto-apply recommendations
Google Ads can apply its own recommendations on your behalf, including budget and keyword changes. That is a real feature with real spend consequences. Google states you “can confirm who enrolled your account, and when, through the account’s change history.” If your agency switched auto-apply on and never mentioned it, the log will say so, with a date and an email address.
Minutes 9 to 14: Check what actually counts as a conversion
Every performance claim you have ever been shown rests on one screen.
Open Goals, then Conversions, then Summary. Look at three columns.
- Which actions are Primary. Primary actions feed Smart Bidding. If a page view, a PDF download, or a “contact us” page visit is set to Primary, the algorithm is optimizing toward noise and spending your budget to find more of it.
- Counting method. “Every” counts repeat actions from the same click. On a lead form that inflates your totals with duplicates. Lead actions should be set to “One.”
- Call length threshold. A call counted at 15 seconds is usually a wrong number or a hangup. For services businesses, 60 seconds is the floor.
Here is the tell most buyers miss. Across iClick-managed accounts, our 2026 Google Search conversion rate benchmark is 3.48%. Search Engine Land, reporting WordStream by LocaliQ data from more than 16,000 campaigns in May 2026, put the 2025 all-industry average at 8.18%. Those two numbers are not in conflict. They are counting different events. A reported conversion rate far above your category norm almost always means the definition got loose, not that the campaigns got good.
Then ask your agency one question: what share of last month’s reported conversions became qualified opportunities? If nobody can answer, the reporting is decorative.
Minutes 14 to 21: Find the wasted spend
Open the Search terms report. Set the range to the last 90 days. Sort by cost, descending. Filter for conversions equal to zero.
You are hunting two patterns.
Money on terms that never convert
A handful of expensive, zero-conversion search terms is normal in any account. Broad match and Smart Bidding need room to explore. Pages of them, with no matching negative keywords anywhere in the change history, is a different story. Look specifically for job seekers, students, competitor brand names, and “free” or “DIY” modifiers. Those are the four buckets that eat budget in almost every account we take over.
Campaign types eating each other
For eCommerce accounts, check whether Performance Max is absorbing traffic that Standard Shopping was already winning at a lower cost. In iClick’s own benchmark data, Performance Max cannibalizes Shopping in more than 80% of accounts. The same data shows a 12% feed disapproval rate in unmanaged accounts, which silently pulls products out of the auction while spend continues elsewhere.
Neither problem is exotic. Both take an afternoon to fix. A full quarter with no fix tells you exactly what your retainer buys. The complete version of this pass is in our 47-point Google Ads audit checklist.
Minutes 21 to 26: Compare against a benchmark, not against last month
Month over month comparisons flatter everyone. Costs move for reasons that have nothing to do with the person managing your account.
Search Engine Land reported in May 2026 that the average Google Ads cost per click reached $5.42 in 2025, up 16.3% from $4.66 the year before, with 87% of industries seeing an increase. Average cost per lead rose more slowly, to $70.11, up 5.13%.
Read that carefully, because it cuts both ways. A 12% cost per click increase in your account is not evidence your agency slipped. Rising cost alongside a flat clickthrough rate and a flat conversion rate is.
Then compare against your category. Blended averages are useless at this level. The table below is iClick’s 2026 benchmark data, drawn from accounts we manage between 2024 and 2025, not from an industry survey.
| Category | Avg CPC | Avg conversion rate |
|---|---|---|
| Legal (personal injury) | $6.75 | 6.98% |
| SaaS and B2B software | $4.88 | 3.80% |
| Home services | $3.60 | 5.20% |
| eCommerce (health and beauty) | $1.42 | 2.55% |
| eCommerce (fashion) | $1.15 | 2.10% |
| Music and entertainment | $0.80 | 1.90% |
A $6.75 cost per click looks alarming next to a $0.80 one until you notice one buys a catastrophic injury case inquiry and the other buys a tour merchandise sale. Judge the account against its own category and its own margin, nothing else.
Minutes 26 to 30: Reconcile the report against the account
Open last month’s agency report. Open Google Ads. Set the identical date range. Compare three numbers: total spend, total conversions, and cost per conversion.
They should match. When they do not, ask before assuming the worst. Attribution windows, imported offline conversions, and cross-platform blending create honest gaps. An agency that can explain the gap in one sentence is fine. One that cannot is guessing.
While you are there, look at what the report leads with. If the headline metric is optimization score, be careful. Google defines it as “an estimate of how well your Google Ads account is set to perform,” scored from 0 to 100%, and states plainly that it “is not used by your Quality Score.” Google’s own marketing claims advertisers who raised their account optimization score by 10 points saw a median 14% increase in conversions.
That may hold on average. It is still Google’s measure of how closely you follow Google’s recommendations. It is not a measure of your profit. A report that opens with optimization score, impressions, and clicks is a report engineered to postpone the cost per acquisition conversation.
Score what you found
| Signal | Healthy | Investigate | Red flag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Change history, last 90 days | Human edits most weeks | Sporadic monthly bursts | System entries only |
| Account ownership | You hold Admin | You hold Standard only | Account is in the agency’s name |
| Primary conversion actions | Revenue or qualified leads only | Mixed with micro actions | Page views counted |
| Wasted spend | Negatives added, terms pruned | Growing zero-conversion list | No negatives in 90 days |
| Reporting | Cost per acquisition first | Blended platform metrics | Optimization score first |
Two or more items landing in the red column is not a communication problem. It is a delivery problem.
What this review cannot tell you
Be honest about the limits. Thirty minutes will not tell you whether the ad copy is good, whether the landing pages convert, or whether the bidding strategy is right for your sales cycle. Those questions need account structure analysis, and a serious version takes several hours.
What this review does tell you is whether anyone is home. That is the question worth answering first, because no amount of strategy discussion fixes an account nobody has opened since onboarding.
What to do next
If it is fixable, fix it in place
Send your findings in writing, not on a call. Ask for a dated remediation plan with named owners. Give it one full billing cycle, then re-run this same 30-minute review and compare. Switching agencies costs you 60 to 90 days of conversion learning data, so a fixable problem is genuinely worth fixing.
If it is not, leave cleanly
Secure Admin access on your own account before you give notice, not after. Export the change history and the last 24 months of performance data. Then start your search with a written question list instead of a discovery call. Our 23 questions that separate PPC pros from pretenders covers that conversation, and our breakdown of what PPC agencies actually charge in 2026 tells you whether a replacement quote is fair.
The three numbers that decide it
Strip everything else away. A Google Ads agency is doing its job if three numbers move.
- Cost per qualified lead, or blended ROAS. Qualified, not raw conversions.
- The 90-day trend line. Direction beats any single month.
- Share of spend landing on search terms that convert. The cleanest available proxy for real management.
What that looks like when it works: McEldrew Purtell, a catastrophic injury firm, cut cost per acquisition 53% and lifted conversions 697% in 90 days. Georgia Probate Law Group dropped cost per signed case 40% while raising qualified intakes 85%. Zager Guitars scaled from $300,000 to $1.5 million per month at an 8.4 blended ROAS. Across $61 million in managed spend and 250 clients since 2017, our portfolio average conversion goal lift is 41%.
Those are not review results. They are what the review is for.
Get a second opinion, in writing
If this review turned up two or more red flags, the next step is not a sales call. It is documentation you can hand to your current agency or your next one.
We run a 47-point written Google Ads audit and deliver it as a PDF in 5 business days. No pitch meeting, no call required. You get the findings whether or not you ever talk to us. Request your free written Google Ads audit. If you would rather walk through your findings with someone first, book a call.
Related on iClick
Sources
- Google Ads Help, About change history (accessed September 2026)
- Google Ads Help, About access levels in your Google Ads account (accessed September 2026)
- Google Ads Help, About optimization score (accessed September 2026)
- Google Ads, Recommendations for campaign optimization (median 14% conversion lift claim, accessed September 2026)
- Search Engine Land, Google Ads costs keep rising, but conversion rates improved in 2025 (May 18, 2026, WordStream by LocaliQ data, 16,000+ campaigns)
- iClick 2026 PPC Benchmarks, from iClick-managed accounts 2024 to 2025
- iClick client case studies (McEldrew Purtell, Georgia Probate Law Group, Zager Guitars)
Frequently asked questions
How often should I run this review on my Google Ads agency?
Every 90 days, and always in the month before your contract auto-renews. Quarterly matches how long a real optimization takes to show results, and it is short enough that problems stay cheap. Put it on the calendar as a recurring task so it survives busy quarters.
Should I tell my agency I am auditing the account?
Yes. Frame it as a standing quarterly check, not a threat. A confident agency will offer to walk you through the change history themselves. If announcing a review triggers defensiveness or a sudden burst of account activity, that reaction is itself a finding worth recording.
What if my agency will not give me Admin access to my own account?
Treat it as a red flag and escalate in writing. Google Ads supports manager account linking, so an agency can manage your campaigns without owning the account. There is no operational reason to withhold Admin from the client paying the invoices. Get this resolved before your contract renews.
Is a rising cost per click my agency’s fault?
Usually not on its own. Search Engine Land reported average Google Ads cost per click rose 16.3% in 2025, with 87% of industries seeing an increase. Rising cost is market-wide. What matters is whether your clickthrough rate, conversion rate, and cost per qualified lead moved in the right direction alongside it.
How long should I give a struggling agency before switching?
One full billing cycle after you deliver written findings and they deliver a dated remediation plan. Then re-run this review. Switching costs you 60 to 90 days of conversion learning data, so give a fixable account one honest chance. Two consecutive failed reviews is your answer.
