I'm going to be honest with you about something that might sting a little.
We audit a lot of Google Ads accounts. Not because we go around looking for problems to point out — but because, nine times out of ten, someone reaches out to us saying some version of the same thing: "Our agency says everything is going well, but the numbers don't feel right."
And they're almost always correct. Things aren't right. They're just not being told about it.
Look — most agencies aren't malicious. They're not sitting in a conference room rubbing their hands together while your ad budget burns. But there's a gap between what agencies know is happening in your account and what they tell you about during your monthly check-in. Sometimes it's because they're spread too thin. Sometimes it's because the person on the call isn't the person building the campaigns. And sometimes — I'll be real — it's because fixing the problem means admitting they should've caught it sooner.
Here are the five things we find almost every single time. If any of these sound familiar, it might be worth a second look.
1. Your Search Terms Report Is a Crime Scene
This one kills me every time. I mean it physically pains me.
You're paying for Google Ads. Google is matching your keywords to what people actually type. And somewhere between "what you think you're bidding on" and "what's actually triggering your ads," there's a gap the size of the Grand Canyon.
We audited an eCommerce account last year — mid-six-figures in annual spend — and found that roughly 23% of their search budget was going to queries that had nothing to do with their product. Not even close. We're talking informational queries, competitor brand names they weren't trying to target, and a handful of searches that were just... bizarre. (I won't share the weird ones, but trust me.)
The fix isn't complicated. You need someone reviewing search terms weekly — not monthly, not quarterly, weekly — and building out a real negative keyword strategy. Not just a dumping ground of random negatives, but organized lists tied to specific themes.
2. Nobody's Questioning Google's Recommendations
This is the one that's gotten worse over time, and it makes me a little spicy.
Google Ads has this "Optimization Score" — a number between 0 and 100% that's supposed to tell you how well your account is set up. Your agency probably mentions it occasionally. Maybe they even brag about keeping it above 90%.
Here's the dirty secret: Google's recommendations are designed to get you to spend more money on Google. That's it. That's the incentive structure. When Google suggests you "add broad match keywords" or "raise your budgets" or "turn on auto-apply for ad suggestions," they're not looking at your P&L. They're looking at theirs.
I've seen accounts where agencies auto-applied Google's recommendations to keep their optimization score high — because Google's Partner Program literally grades agencies on whether they follow the recommendations. Think about that for a second. The agency's partnership status with Google depends on them doing what Google suggests, and Google's suggestions are designed to increase Google's revenue.
One B2B SaaS account we picked up had been auto-applying broad match suggestions for six months. Their branded campaign CTR was a respectable 42%, but their generic campaign CPA had ballooned to almost $180 — up from $95 before the broad match expansion. Nobody told the client.
3. Your Conversion Tracking Is a House of Cards
I wish I could tell you this one's rare. It's not.
We see accounts every month where the conversion numbers in Google Ads don't match what's actually happening in the business. Leads are being double-counted. Phone calls are being tracked as form submissions. A "conversion" is firing on a page that has nothing to do with a sale. Or — my personal favorite — conversions are set to "every" instead of "one," so every time someone refreshes the thank-you page, that's another conversion in the report.
This matters because smart bidding strategies (Target CPA, Max Conversions, Target ROAS) eat this data for breakfast. They optimize toward whatever you tell them a conversion is. If your conversion data is inflated by 30%, your bidding strategy is optimizing toward garbage. And when it finds more garbage, it looks like it's performing.
We took over an eCommerce security account that was reporting 4x ROAS in their old agency's dashboard. When we reconciled with actual Shopify revenue? It was closer to 2.1x. They'd been making budget decisions — increasing spend, shifting budgets between campaigns — based on numbers that were nearly double reality. The gap was a combination of duplicate conversion tags and view-through conversions being counted alongside click-through.
After we cleaned up tracking and rebuilt the campaign structure around real numbers, that account hit a legitimate 4.5x blended ROAS across $1.5M+ in spend. The campaigns didn't need more budget — they needed honest data.
4. Your Campaign Structure Is from 2019
Google Ads in 2025 runs on machine learning. Smart bidding, Performance Max, broad match with audience signals — the whole thing is designed around giving Google's algorithm enough data to optimize.
But a lot of accounts are still structured like it's 2019. Dozens of campaigns each spending $15/day. SKAGs (single keyword ad groups) everywhere. Manual CPC bidding on campaigns that could be crushing it on Target ROAS if they just had enough conversion volume to learn.
The math is straightforward. Google's smart bidding needs roughly 30-50 conversions per month per campaign to really find its groove. If you've got your budget split across 15 campaigns and only 3 of them hit that threshold, the other 12 are basically guessing. Your agency built a pretty structure, but Google's algorithm is starving inside it.
We consolidated one eComm client's campaigns from 14 separate campaigns down to 5 core campaigns plus a Performance Max. Their Shopping ROAS went from 3.1x to 5.4x in the first 60 days. Not because we're geniuses — because we stopped splitting the budget into pieces too small for the algorithm to learn from.
Performance Max is a great example of where this gets tricky. We've seen PMax pull 7.2x ROAS for an artisan eCommerce brand on sub-$10K spend, and we've seen it waste $40K for a lead gen client because nobody set up the asset groups or audience signals properly. The campaign type isn't the problem. How it's built is.
5. They're Not Telling You What Isn't Working
This is the big one. And honestly, it's the reason a lot of agency-client relationships eventually fall apart — not because the agency was terrible, but because the reporting only ever tells one side of the story.
Monthly reports tend to lead with the wins. "Conversions are up 12%!" Great. "CTR improved across the board!" Wonderful. But what about the campaign that's been running for four months with a CPA three times your target? What about the ad group that's spending $800/month on zero conversions? What about the fact that 60% of your budget is going to one campaign and the rest are barely alive?
The best agencies I've seen — and I'm talking about ones we actually partner with through our white-label program — they lead with what isn't working. They say, "Here's the campaign we paused and why." They say, "We tested this and it didn't beat the control, so here's what we're trying next." They say, "Your CPA on non-brand went up 15% this month. Here's what we think is happening and what we're doing about it."
That kind of transparency is surprisingly rare. And the absence of it is what creates that nagging feeling — the one you probably had before you clicked on this article — that something's off but you can't quite put your finger on it.
So What Do You Actually Do About It?
I'm not here to tell you to fire your agency. (I mean, we're also an agency, so that would be a little too on-the-nose.) But I am here to tell you that you should be asking harder questions.
Pull your own search terms report. Ask for a conversion reconciliation. Ask about auto-apply. Ask how many campaigns are getting enough conversion volume for smart bidding to work. And — the simplest test of all — ask your agency to tell you what's not working.
If the answers come easily and transparently, you've probably got a good one. Hold onto them.
If there's a lot of hedging, a lot of "we'll look into it," a lot of deflecting to vanity metrics... well, at that point, you know. And that nagging feeling you had? It was right.
We do Google Ads audits for anyone who wants a second pair of eyes. We look at your account, tell you what we see — the good, the bad, and the stuff nobody's been flagging — and you decide what to do with it. Sometimes people hire us. Sometimes they take the audit back to their current agency and say, "Fix this." Either way, you'll know what's actually going on in there.
And honestly? That's all anyone deserves — to know what's actually going on with the money they're spending.