How do I tell if my Google Ads agency is doing a good job?

Reporting is the easiest thing to polish and the hardest thing to interrogate. A 4× ROAS slide deck delivered monthly tells you nothing about whether the account is actually being managed well. The signals that separate genuine performance from polished reporting are mostly process and discipline, not headline metrics.

Signal one: profit and margin reporting. If the monthly report is ROAS, CPC, CTR and conversion rate, and nothing on contribution margin, return rate or POAS: the agency is reporting on the platform, not the business.

Signal two: SKU-role differentiation. Are different SKUs treated differently? Is there a documented commercial role per SKU or category? A 'we run one tROAS target across the catalogue' answer is a flag.

Signal three: PMax cannibalisation. Has the agency run a brand-off experiment to measure PMax incrementality? If not, you do not know how much of PMax revenue is real lift versus substitution.

Signal four: team continuity. The senior who pitched should still be on your account. If a junior account manager is now the main contact, the agency has down-shifted you without telling you.

Signal five: change log. Is there a weekly or fortnightly log of what was changed and why? Vague answers here mean the account is being maintained rather than managed.

Signal six: contribution profit vs revenue. If revenue is growing but contribution profit is flat or down, the agency is winning the metric they are reporting on and losing the one that matters.