Who this is for — and who it is not
Written for CMOs and growth leads accountable to revenue on large U.S. Google Ads accounts spending $50,000 to $500,000+ per month.
It is not written for impulse switchers with no admin access, or for buyers shopping for Meta or SEO. SalesX runs Google Ads only.
Red flags in reporting and accountability
The first category is not performance — it is whether you can see the account clearly enough to judge performance at all. At $50k+/month, opacity is the expensive failure.
- Read-only access to the Google Ads account is slow-walked, conditioned, or answered with a dashboard instead.
- Reporting is platform metrics only: impression share, CTR, and a blended CPA with no line back to revenue or qualified pipeline.
- Conversion actions cannot be explained — nobody can say which ones are counted in the optimisation target and why.
- Change history is thin or unexplained, and nobody can name what was changed last month or what it was meant to fix.
- The named senior on the pitch has not been in a call for a quarter.
Red flags in structure, waste, and PMax/Search conflict
The second category shows up inside the account. None of these is fatal on its own; together they say the account is being maintained rather than managed.
- Search terms that have never converted keep spending, month after month, with no negative discipline behind them.
- Performance Max and Search are competing for the same queries and nobody can show which one is winning them or what that costs.
- Brand queries quietly absorb budget that was approved for non-brand growth, flattering the blended numbers.
- Geography, device, and schedule leakage is visible but unaddressed because the reporting never segments that far.
- The shopping feed has known quality problems that have been on the backlog for two quarters.
Red flags in staffing and communication
Agency models leak senior attention structurally: pitches are staffed with the most experienced people available, delivery with whoever has capacity. You are looking for evidence of substitution, not for a villain.
Ask who is in the account weekly, what their tenure is at this spend level, and how many accounts they carry. Then compare that answer to the change history. If the names do not match the work, that is the finding.
- Turnover on your account that you learned about after the fact.
- Strategy conversations replaced by status updates and a deck cadence.
- Recommendations that always add spend and never recommend spending less.
- Escalations that route to account management rather than to anyone who can change the account.
Audit before you terminate
Do not switch on a single bad month, and do not switch on a feeling. Terminating a retainer is slow, political, and costs you continuity in a channel that punishes discontinuity. Reading the account is none of those things.
An independent diagnostic tells you whether the channel is genuinely mismanaged, or whether the problem sits in measurement, offer, or landing experience — the three places where a competent agency still looks bad. It also gives you a factual basis for the conversation with the incumbent, which sometimes fixes the relationship instead of ending it.
Request a free X-Audit — and see what a senior review covers in the senior Google Ads audit guide.
Transition checklist
If you do move, the risk is not strategy — it is custody. Work through this before notice is given, not after. Access hygiene is legitimate; locking an incumbent out mid-flight is not, and it usually costs you the change history you need.
- Who holds Google Ads admin — confirm the account sits under a manager account you control, not one owned by the agency.
- Change history and naming conventions — export both while access is intact; they are the only record of intent.
- Conversion actions and offline import — document every action, its counting rules, and how offline revenue is matched back.
- Shared budgets and MCC links — identify anything shared across accounts that breaks when the link is removed.
- What you keep if the contract ends — scripts, dashboards, feed rules, audience lists, and creative assets, named in writing.
What “better” should look like after a switch
Set the standard before the shortlist, so the new relationship is judged on the same terms you used to judge the old one. A senior strategist who is in the account weekly and reachable by name. Structure that separates discovery from proven demand. Bidding that optimises to revenue or qualified pipeline rather than to raw conversion counts. Reporting your CFO can read without translation.
That is the shape of the ongoing work described in our Google Ads management and enterprise pages — and the same standard you should hold any respondent to, including us.
Google Ads management · Enterprise Google Ads agency · How to evaluate an enterprise Google Ads agency
FAQ
- How long should I give a new agency?
- Long enough for the measurement to stabilise and for structural changes to collect data — typically a full buying cycle rather than a calendar month. Agree up front which indicators are read at 30, 60, and 90 days, and which ones are not meaningful until the account has cycled through a full season.
- Can I run a dual-agency period?
- Yes, and it is often the safest transition. Split by campaign type or by account, not by task, so accountability stays clean. Write down who holds admin, who edits conversion actions, and who owns the reporting narrative before both teams are in the account at once.
- What if the problem is tracking, not the agency?
- That is common enough to be worth ruling out first. If conversion actions double-count, offline revenue never makes it back into the account, or consent changes broke attribution, every agency downstream of that data will look wrong. An independent diagnostic separates a measurement failure from a management failure.
- Should I move in-house instead?
- Sometimes. In-house is a staffing and tooling decision, not a vendor swap, and it carries a different cost and continuity profile. Our in-house versus agency comparison lays out the trade-offs before you start recruiting.
On moving the work onto your own payroll: in-house vs a Google Ads agency.