Start with the charitable version, because it is usually the true one: your agency is not hiding your leaks. It is being paid in a way that makes leaks invisible, reporting in a format that makes them look like results, and skipping the one tab that would show them — not because anyone decided to, but because nothing in the arrangement rewards looking. Three mechanisms. Each one is fixable, and the fix is the same whether the agency is good, bad, or you.
1. The fee is a percentage of the leak
Most established Indian agencies charge 15% of spend, and most retainers are set by spend band. Under either, an account that spends ₹2 lakh and wastes ₹60,000 of it pays the agency more than an account that spends ₹1.4 lakh with no waste — for the same results. Nobody has to be dishonest for that to shape behaviour. Cutting the leak cuts the invoice, and the agency’s “scale the budget” recommendation arrives on schedule.
What a good agency does: charges a flat fee, or a fee that falls when waste falls, and says so on the proposal. Ask.
2. The report is built on the number that always goes up
Impressions, clicks, CTR, and a cost-per-“conversion” where conversion means whatever was set as primary on day one — often a page view, a button, a scroll. These move on their own. A quiet month and a busy month produce reports that look identical, and a leaking account with a junk goal looks like a converting one. The report is not lying; it is describing nothing.
What a good agency does: reports on the conversion action you actually care about — leads, sales, sign-ups — and shows the search terms report beside it, including the rows that cost money and produced nothing.
3. The one tab nobody sends you
Google records every change to your account — who, what, when — under Tools → Change history. It is the honest record and it is almost never in a monthly report, because the honest record of a neglected account is empty. The agency that made forty changes last month has no reason to hide this tab. The one that made two has every reason not to mention it.
What a good agency does: sends the change log with the report, in plain English, with what each change cost or saved. We wrote the one-sentence email that gets it out of any agency in the ten-changes note.
Three reports that end the conversation
You have read access to your own account. Fifteen minutes, no tool, and you will know which of the three mechanisms is running.
Search terms with cost and no conversions, 90 days
Keywords → Search terms → sort by Cost → add Conversions
Sum the zero-conversion rows. If the same terms have been costing you for three months, nobody is reading this report — and 15% of that sum was the agency’s.
What counts as a conversion
Goals → Conversions → Summary → filter Primary
If a page view or a generic button is primary, every cost-per-conversion you have been sent is describing nothing. This is the single most common way a report flatters an account.
Change history, filtered by user
Tools → Change history → last 90 days → filter by user
Separate the agency’s changes from Google’s automatic ones — “Google Ads” as the user means nobody did it. Count the rest.
0 of 3 checked
What “receipt” means when the agency is us
We run accounts too, from ₹12,999 a month, so this applies to us as much as anyone. The arrangement is built so the three mechanisms cannot run: the fee is flat by spend band and published; the monthly report is generated from the change log, so its “what we changed” section is the log in plain English; and every change — ours, yours, or a rule’s — is a receipt with what it cost or saved and a one-click undo. You do not have to ask for the ten changes. They are the report.
And because a log the agency controls is only half a proof, the change sequence is also written to a hash-chained record outside Admiral — on Auditant, the same product our own AI agents run on. A client, or their auditor, can verify that nothing in the log was edited after the fact, offline, without an account with either of us. That is the standard we think “we made forty changes last month” should have to meet.
Connect the account read-only and Admiral runs the three checks above, and twenty-three more, before you pay anything — whoever is running it. If the answer is that your agency is doing fine, you have a cheap fifteen minutes of reassurance.