How To Tell Whether Your Google Ads Agency Is Doing Anything
Ask for five specific things: the search terms report, the negative keyword list, landing page performance by page, call/form tracking data, and the month-over-month trend in cost per qualified lead. A real agency can hand you all five within a day, because producing them is what managing an account actually involves. An agency that stalls, gets vague, or sends you a screenshot of "impressions went up" instead is telling you something important.
Why this is hard to tell from the outside
Google Ads management looks like a black box on purpose, sometimes — dashboards full of metrics that sound important (impressions, click-through rate, Quality Score) but don't actually tell you whether the phone is ringing with real jobs. It's entirely possible for an account to look "healthy" on a report while quietly wasting a third of its budget on searches that were never going to become customers. The only way to know the difference is to ask for the specific artifacts that a competently managed account always produces.
1. The search terms report
This shows the actual words and phrases people typed before your ad showed up — not the keywords you're bidding on, but what real searches triggered them. If an agency can't pull this report in minutes, they haven't been looking at it, and it's the single most important document for catching wasted spend. Look for whether irrelevant terms (job-seekers, DIY searches, unrelated services) are still showing up after months of management — if so, nobody's been reviewing it.
2. The negative keyword list
This is the list of terms explicitly excluded from triggering your ads. A new account should already have a starter list on day one, built for your specific trade. An account that's been running for six months with a short or generic negative list is a sign the search terms report from item 1 isn't being acted on.
3. Landing page performance, by page
If different services or campaigns point to different landing pages, ask which pages convert clicks into calls or form submissions, and which don't. An agency that only ever talks about the ad account and never mentions the page the ad sends people to is missing half of what actually decides whether a click becomes a customer.
4. Call and form tracking data
Every legitimate home-service ad account should have call tracking and form attribution wired up — meaning every lead can be traced back to the specific keyword and ad that produced it. If your agency can't show you this, they don't actually know which parts of your account are working, and neither do you. Just as important: this tracking should live in accounts you own, not the agency's — ask who has access if you were to switch or cancel tomorrow.
5. Cost per qualified lead, trended month over month
Not cost per click. Not click-through rate. Cost per lead that your business actually considered worth following up on, tracked over time. This is the number that should be the subject of every monthly conversation with whoever manages your account — if the conversation is about anything else, the reporting is optimized to look good rather than to help you make a decision.
What good and bad answers sound like
A good answer to "can I see the search terms report" is the report, usually within the same conversation. A bad answer is "we handle that on our end" with no further detail, or a delay measured in days for something that takes minutes to export. The same test applies to all five items — the pattern to watch for isn't one missing report, it's a consistent unwillingness to show the underlying work.
This is a genuinely useful checklist whether or not you ever work with DaveWays — the goal here is to help you evaluate any agency, including us.