Most people judging an ad agency are looking at the wrong artefact. The monthly report shows impressions, clicks, maybe a cost-per-lead — all of which move on their own, whether or not anybody touched the account. A quiet month and a busy month produce reports that look identical.
So ask for the other thing instead. One email, one sentence:
“Could you send me the last ten changes you made to the account, and what each one did?”
It is a reasonable request, politely phrased, and impossible to answer vaguely. Everything you need to know is in how it comes back.
What a good answer looks like
Ten specific things, each with a date, a target and a reason. “14 Aug — added 11 search terms as negatives on Brand Exact; they had cost ₹4,380 over 90 days with no conversions.” You do not have to understand every line. You are checking that the lines exist, that they name a thing in your account, and that somebody can say why.
What a bad answer sounds like
“We’ve been optimising the campaigns and monitoring performance closely.” “The algorithm needs more data.” “We refreshed the ad copy and adjusted bids.” None of these name anything. If a fortnight of work cannot produce ten sentences with a noun in them, it is worth finding out what the fee bought.
The other bad answer is silence followed by a burst of activity in your account three days later. That one is easy to spot, because Google records it — which is the next section.
Check it yourself in fifteen minutes
You have read access to your own account. Every one of these is a built-in report, no tools required.
Read the change history
Tools → Change history → last 90 days
This is the honest record: who changed what, when. Filter by user to separate your agency’s work from Google’s automatic changes — and note that “Google Ads” as the user means nobody did it.
Look at search terms with cost and no conversions
Keywords → Search terms → sort by Cost, add Conversions
Money going to searches nobody would have chosen is the most common and most fixable leak. If the same term has been costing you for months, nobody is reading this report.
Check the network settings
Campaign → Settings → Networks
Search Partners and Display are ticked by default on new search campaigns. Still ticked, months in, usually means the campaign was created and left.
Check what counts as a conversion
Goals → Conversions → Summary
If page views, or every button on the site, are set as primary conversions, then the cost-per-conversion in your report is describing nothing. This is the single most common way a report flatters an account.
Check the tag is actually on your site
Goals → Conversions → your action → Tag status
“No recent conversions” or “Tag inactive” on an account that is spending means the numbers in every report you have received are clicks wearing a different name.
0 of 5 checked
What to do with the answer
If the change history is full and the reasons are sound, you have a good agency and a cheap fifteen minutes of reassurance. If it is empty, the conversation is not “are you doing your job” — it is “here are five things I found, what would you like to do about them?” A good agency will be relieved you asked. A bad one will explain why the reports you are reading are the wrong ones.
And if you are the one running the account, run the same five checks on yourself. The list does not care who is at fault.
Admiral keeps that ten-change list automatically — every change, what it cost or saved, and a one-click undo, whether the change came from you, from a rule, or from us. Connect an account read-only and the audit runs before you pay anything.