Five questions your agency hopes you never ask.
Your agency sends a report every month. It says impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions, and a paragraph that begins "This month we continued to optimize."
That report is designed to be reassuring. It is not designed to be examined. Here are five questions that examine it. Any competent agency can answer all five in a day. The point is watching which ones take a week.
1. "Send me the search terms report for the last 30 days. The whole thing."
Not the top twenty. The export. Every query that triggered an ad and cost you money.
Then open it and search for the words "free," "jobs," "salary," "DIY," "reviews," and your competitors' names. Add up what those cost. That's the cheapest waste to find in any account, and it's the first thing I look at in an audit. If it's there, nobody has read the report in a while.
If the agency hesitates to send the full export, ask why. It's your money and your data.
2. "What's my cost per lead, by campaign, and how does that compare to last quarter?"
Cost per click is a Google number. Cost per lead is a business number. An agency that reports the first and not the second is reporting the thing that's easy to make look good.
By campaign matters. A blended CPL hides the campaign that's carrying the account and the campaign that's draining it. Last quarter matters because "we're up 12% month over month" tells you nothing if the year is down.
If they can't tell you CPL by campaign, conversion tracking is probably broken or approximate. Which brings us to the next one.
3. "Show me one lead from last month and the ad that produced it."
One. Any one. A name in your CRM, the campaign, the ad group, the keyword, the search term.
This is the question that separates tracking that works from tracking that reports. Plenty of accounts count a "conversion" every time the thank-you page loads, including from your own staff testing the form, and nobody can tie a single conversion to a real human. When the lead and the ad can't be connected, the CPL in question 2 is a guess, and everything optimized against it is optimized against a guess.
4. "What did you change in my account last week, and why?"
Not "what did you do." What changed. Google Ads and Meta both keep a change history; ask them to walk you through it on a screen share.
You're listening for two things. Whether the changes were decisions or defaults (accepting Google's recommendations is not a decision). And whether there were any. A quiet week happens. A quiet quarter means the account is on autopilot and the fee isn't.
5. "If you had to cut my budget 30% tomorrow, what would you cut first?"
This is the one that makes people uncomfortable, and it's the most useful.
Someone who knows your account answers instantly, because they already know which campaign is weakest. Someone who doesn't know your account says they'd "need to look at the data," which is a reasonable-sounding way of saying they haven't.
It also tells you something about incentives. An agency paid on a percentage of spend has never spent much time thinking about how to spend less of it. If the answer is a pitch for why you shouldn't cut, you've learned that too.
What to do with the answers
Five good answers: you have a good agency. Stay. Tell them I said so.
Five reassuring non-answers: you have a report subscription, and it costs 20–40% of your ad spend.
Anything in between is normal, and worth a conversation. Not necessarily with me. With them, first. Show them this list. The ones worth keeping will be glad you asked.
If you'd like the answers without asking, I'll write you a free audit of your account and site within 24 hours. It covers the same ground: search-term waste, tracking gaps, competitor activity, and where I'd cut first. Send me your website and it's yours.
