A client called me a few years back, frustrated. She was paying a well-known agency $4,500 a month to manage her Google Ads. She'd asked her account manager a simple question: "What did you change in my account this week?" The response she got was a link to her monthly dashboard and a vague mention of "ongoing optimization." That was it. No specifics, no changes logged, nothing.
When I got access to audit her account, the last meaningful change anyone had made was six weeks earlier. The search terms report was a disaster. She was showing up for completely irrelevant queries, burning through budget on clicks that had zero chance of converting. The agency was collecting $4,500 a month to do almost nothing.
This is more common than the industry wants to admit. So let's talk about what a Google Ads agency is actually supposed to do all day, what they're often doing instead, and how to tell the difference before you're six months deep into a contract that's eating your budget.
The Honest Answer Most Agencies Won't Give You
A Google Ads agency's job is to make your paid search campaigns generate more revenue than they cost to run. That's it. Everything else, all the buzzwords, the dashboards, the strategy calls, is supposed to serve that one outcome.
The actual day-to-day work breaks into a few categories. There's the setup work that happens at the start of an engagement. There's the ongoing optimization work that should happen weekly. There's the reporting and strategy work that happens monthly. And then there's the reactive work that pops up when something breaks or an opportunity appears.
The problem is that most agencies front-load effort into the setup phase, then coast. You get a flurry of activity in month one, a solid-looking month two, and then by month three the account is essentially on autopilot while your agency collects the fee.
I've audited hundreds of accounts taken over from other agencies. The pattern is almost always the same.
What Should Happen in Month One
The first month of any Google Ads engagement is legitimately the busiest. This is when a real agency is building the foundation everything else runs on. Done right, it takes serious time and expertise. Here's what that actually looks like.
Account and conversion tracking audit. Before anyone touches the campaigns, you need to know what you're measuring. Is conversion tracking set up correctly? Are the right actions being tracked? I've seen accounts where the main conversion event was tracking page views instead of purchases. Everything the agency had reported for months was fiction. This has to be the first thing verified, not the last.
Keyword research and campaign structure. Real keyword research isn't typing terms into the Google Keyword Planner and grabbing whatever comes back. It's understanding buyer intent at different stages, mapping keywords to specific landing pages, figuring out which terms signal someone ready to buy versus someone still browsing. A proper campaign structure built around intent tiers is the difference between a 3% conversion rate and a 12% one.
Negative keyword foundation. Before a campaign goes live, there should already be a negative keyword list running. I'm talking hundreds of terms blocking irrelevant traffic from day one. No agency should be launching campaigns without this in place. It's not optional.
Ad copy creation and testing framework. This isn't writing one ad and calling it a day. It's building a testing framework with multiple headline variations and clear hypotheses about what's being tested and why. The goal is to have enough variables to actually learn something, not just run ads and hope.
Bidding strategy setup. Choosing the right bid strategy for the account's goals and conversion data volume matters more than most people realize. An account with limited conversion history should not be on Target ROAS bidding. An account with strong conversion data probably shouldn't be on manual CPC. Getting this wrong in month one sets the tone for everything that follows.
What Ongoing Monthly Management Actually Looks Like
This is where most agencies fall apart. Monthly management isn't checking a dashboard once a week and sending a report. According to industry data, a mid-size Google Ads account requires 5 to 10 hours of management work per week to perform well. Larger accounts with significant spend can require 15 to 20 hours weekly. That's real work, every week, not just at the start of the month.
Here's what that work actually involves.
Weekly Tasks That Should Happen Without You Asking
The search terms report review is the most important thing a Google Ads manager does regularly. Every week, you should be pulling this report, identifying new search queries that triggered your ads, and doing two things: adding high-intent terms as keywords and blocking irrelevant ones as negatives. This isn't glamorous work, but over half of small businesses have no proper conversion tracking or negative keyword management in place. The agencies managing those accounts aren't doing this work. Your money is telling you the truth even when the reports don't.
Bid adjustments and budget pacing also need weekly attention. Are campaigns burning through budget too fast and going dark by midday? Are there days of the week or times of day where you're overspending relative to conversions? These adjustments add up to real money over the course of a month. A good manager is in there making these calls regularly, not waiting for the monthly strategy call to notice something's off.
Ad performance monitoring. Which ads are winning? Which ones are dragging Quality Score down? Ads need to be rotated, losers paused, and new test variations launched regularly. If your agency isn't touching your ad copy at least twice a month, something is wrong.
Quality Score monitoring matters more than agencies typically let on because it directly affects how much you're paying per click. A Quality Score of 3 can cost you two to three times more per click than a Quality Score of 8 for the exact same keyword. Good agencies watch this number and make structural changes when it drops.
Monthly Strategy Work
Beyond the weekly maintenance, there should be deeper strategic work happening every month. This includes analyzing which campaigns, ad groups, and keywords are actually driving revenue versus just driving traffic. It means looking at landing page performance and making recommendations when a page has high traffic but low conversions. It means testing new audience targeting, reviewing competitor activity, and adjusting strategy based on what the data is showing.
And then there's reporting. A real monthly report tells you three things clearly: how much you spent, what that spend generated in revenue or leads, and what's being done next month to improve the numbers. Everything else in a report is supporting context. If your report is 20 slides of impressions, reach, and engagement scores with no clear revenue tie-in, that report is hiding something.
The Account Manager Problem Nobody Talks About
Here's the thing that explains a lot of what goes wrong at agencies. Most decent-sized agencies have account managers handling way too many clients. Industry surveys show that more than 10% of agencies have account managers handling 15 or more clients each. Some push that number even higher.
Do the math. If your account manager has 20 clients and works a standard 40-hour week, that's 2 hours per client per week before meetings, reporting, and internal stuff eat into that time. Your account might be getting 60 to 90 minutes of actual attention weekly. On a $20,000-a-month account, that's not enough. On a $5,000-a-month account, it's definitely not enough.
The reality is that a focused account manager doing real work, handling both the campaign side and client communication, should top out at 4 to 8 accounts max, according to agency management consultants who track this stuff. Once you get past 10 accounts per person, something is getting short-changed. Usually it's your account.
This is why I keep client loads small on purpose. I'm not running 50 accounts and hoping the automation carries us. I'm managing a focused book of business where I actually know what's happening in every account every week.
"If your account manager can't tell you off the top of their head what changed in your account last week, they're managing too many accounts. That's your budget being neglected."
What Agencies Do Instead of Real Work
I want to be honest about what the other side of this looks like because I've seen it in hundreds of audits. When agencies aren't doing real optimization work, they're often doing one of these things instead.
Applying Google's automated recommendations. Google's platform constantly suggests things like "expand to broad match," "increase your budget," and "add these recommended keywords." These suggestions are designed to increase Google's revenue. Some of them are genuinely useful. Most of them aren't. Agencies that don't have time to do real analysis will often just click "apply all" on Google's recommendations and report that they've been "actively optimizing" the account. I've seen this wreck accounts. Broad match eating through a tightly structured campaign in two weeks. Budget recommendations that tripled spend with no corresponding increase in conversions.
Reporting activity instead of results. There's a big difference between an agency that's busy and an agency that's effective. Some agencies are very good at looking busy. Long reports, lots of graphs, weekly email updates that reference "improvements being implemented." None of it connects to actual revenue performance. The activity is the theater, not the work.
Set-and-forget campaign management. Once a campaign is live and stable, some agencies essentially stop touching it unless something breaks. The campaigns run, the fees collect, and the account manager checks in once or twice a month to confirm nothing's on fire. This isn't management. It's supervision.
The Tasks That Signal a Good Agency
When I'm evaluating whether a team is doing real work on an account, I look for specific evidence. These aren't vague statements about strategy. They're concrete actions with timestamps.
In the change history of a well-managed Google Ads account, you should see entries multiple times per week. New negative keywords added. Bid adjustments made by day, time, or device. Ad variations launched. Underperforming keywords paused. Audience bid modifiers adjusted. If the change history looks sparse, the account isn't being managed. It's being watched.
A good agency also proactively brings issues to you. Not because you asked, not because something catastrophic happened. Just because they were in the account, saw something, and flagged it before it became a problem. I tell clients about issues they haven't noticed yet all the time. That's what you're paying for when you pay a management fee.
The landing page conversation is another tell. Your ads are only half the equation. If someone clicks your ad and lands on a page that doesn't convert, the ad spend is wasted. A real Google Ads agency talks about landing page performance regularly and makes specific recommendations about what to change and why. If your agency has never once mentioned your landing pages, that's a gap.
How to Audit What Your Agency Is Actually Doing
You don't have to take anyone's word for it. Here's how to check the work yourself in under an hour.
- Pull the change history. In your Google Ads account, go to Tools and then Change History. Look at the last 30 days. How many changes were made? What were they? If you're seeing fewer than 20 to 30 meaningful changes in a month on an active account, not enough is happening.
- Look at the search terms report. Go to Keywords, then Search Terms. Filter for the last 30 days. Do you see irrelevant queries still spending money? Are there obvious negative keywords that should have been added months ago? This report tells you more about the quality of account management than any dashboard your agency builds you.
- Check the negative keyword lists. A well-managed account has extensive negative keyword lists built and regularly updated. If your negatives list has fewer than 100 terms after six months of management, that's a problem.
- Review the ad testing history. How many ad variations have been tested in the last 90 days? Are there clear winners and losers? Are losing ads being paused? If every ad group still has the same ads that launched on day one, no one's testing anything.
- Ask for a conversion tracking verification. Ask your agency to confirm that every conversion action in the account is tracking correctly and matches your actual backend data. If they can't answer this question within 24 hours with actual proof, you've got a problem.
What You're Actually Paying For
When you pay a Google Ads agency, you're paying for expertise applied consistently over time. You're paying for someone who knows the platform deeply enough to make good decisions fast. You're paying for proactive management that catches issues before they cost you money. And you're paying for honest reporting that tells you whether you're winning or losing.
That's worth paying for. But what a lot of businesses are actually getting is a junior account manager with too many clients, running on autopilot between monthly reports, and sending you a dashboard full of numbers that don't connect to revenue.
After managing over $550 million in ad spend across 400 clients over 12 years, I can tell you this: the gap between what good management produces and what average management produces is massive. I've taken over accounts from agencies and doubled conversion volume in 60 days without increasing budget. Not because I'm magic, but because the previous management wasn't doing the actual work.
The question isn't just "what is my agency doing?" It's "are the results telling me they're doing it right?" If you're not getting the answers you need from your current team, you should be asking harder questions or looking for someone who can show you exactly what's happening in your account every single week.
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