Before you fire your agency or pull Google Ads in-house, spend 30 minutes checking the account yourself. Most advertisers never look past the dashboard their agency sends them. That dashboard shows spend and conversions — it doesn't show whether the account is actually being managed or just left on autopilot. This checklist separates genuine negligence from the normal volatility every account has. Pull these five reports and you'll know which one it is.
1. Search Terms Report: Where the Money Actually Went
Go to Campaigns > Insights and reports > Search terms, set the date range to 90 days, and sort by cost. This is the single most revealing report in the account. You're looking for irrelevant queries that burned budget — a B2B SaaS account paying for "free" or "jobs" searches, an ecommerce account paying for a competitor's brand name with no relevant landing page. A well-run account has a tight, boring search terms report. A neglected one reads like a random word generator.
- Sort by cost descending — check the top 30 terms for obvious irrelevance
- Check the negative keyword list count — under 50 negatives after a year of spend is a red flag
- Look for the same wasteful term appearing month after month — that means nobody's reviewing this report regularly
2. Campaign Structure: Built for Control or Built for Volume Fees
Open the campaign list. One catch-all campaign with broad match keywords dumped into a single ad group is a structure built to hit a monthly spend target with minimum labor, not to maximize your return. You want to see campaigns segmented by intent, product line, or funnel stage — something that reflects how your business actually sells, not a generic template applied to every client the agency has.
- Count campaigns and ad groups — fewer than 3 campaigns for a business with multiple products or services is a warning sign
- Check ad group size — anything over 20-30 keywords per ad group signals a lazy setup, not a strategic one
- Look at whether Performance Max is the only campaign type running — it can work, but it shouldn't be the entire account by default
3. Conversion Tracking: If This Is Broken, Nothing Else Matters
Go to Goals > Conversions and check each action's status and recent count. Cross-reference conversion numbers against your CRM or actual sales data for the same period. It's common to find duplicate conversion actions inflating numbers, a conversion still tracking a form that was redesigned six months ago, or enhanced conversions never configured. If tracking is broken, every optimization decision built on top of it — bidding, budgets, keyword cuts — has been guesswork dressed up as strategy.
If tracking has been silently broken for months and nobody caught it, that's not bad luck — that's the one thing an agency is supposed to check monthly, minimum.
4. Wasted Spend by Match Type
Segment performance by keyword match type under the Keywords view. Broad match keywords with no negative keyword hygiene and no Smart Bidding strategy attached are a classic waste pattern — broad match can work extremely well, but only paired with tight conversion tracking and active exclusion. If you see broad match keywords with high spend, low conversion rate, and a search terms report full of junk, that's the mismanagement showing up twice in two different reports — which is how you confirm it's real, not a one-off bad month.
5. Bid Strategy Fit
Check Settings > Bid strategy for each campaign against its conversion volume. Target CPA or Target ROAS strategies need a reasonable volume of conversions per month to have enough data to optimize — running them on a campaign with a handful of conversions a month means the algorithm is guessing, not learning. If a low-volume campaign is stuck on an automated strategy it can't support, that's a setup mismatch, not an execution problem, and it's fixable without changing agencies.
Run through all five checks and you'll land in one of two places. Either you find a pattern — broken tracking, a junk search terms report, a lazy structure, all pointing the same direction — which means the account has been neglected and it's time to make a change. Or you find an account that's reasonably tight with normal month-to-month noise, which means the real issue might be expectations, not execution. Either way, you'll walk into your next conversation — with your current agency or a new one — with facts instead of frustration.