Library

Red flags I see in PPC accounts.

A growing library of specific behaviors I’ve seen agencies use to make a flat or declining account look healthy in the report deck. Each entry names the behavior, explains why agencies do it (it’s rarely malicious; usually structural), shows what it looks like in your account or report, and gives you the question to ask plus the answer to listen for.

None of this is an indictment of agencies as a category. Plenty of good ones exist. But the shorthand they use is built for selling and renewing, not for telling you the unvarnished truth. This is the unvarnished version.

  1. No. 1
    Your monthly report leads with clicks and impressions, not leads
    When your business pays for sales-qualified leads, but the report meeting opens with click volume and impression share, you're being measured on the wrong scoreboard.
  2. No. 2
    Broad match consumes most of your budget and there's no negative keyword strategy
    When 60-80% of your spend goes to broad match keywords and the negative keyword list hasn't grown in months, you're paying Google to show your ads to people who will never buy from you.
  3. No. 3
    Every site visitor is treated as the same audience
    A first-time visitor and a returning prospect who already requested a quote should not be bid on the same way. If your agency is treating them identically, your budget is being averaged into mediocrity.
  4. No. 4
    Performance Max is running with zero search-term transparency
    Performance Max can be a perfectly good campaign type. But if your agency runs it without tight category exclusions, brand exclusions, and regular search-term-insight reviews, you've handed Google a budget and asked it not to tell you where the money went.
  5. No. 5
    The monthly report has no real month-over-month comparison on conversions
    A report without month-over-month conversion comparison isn't a report. It's a marketing brochure for the agency. The single most diagnostic format costs nothing to produce, which is exactly why some agencies don't.
  6. No. 6
    Nobody is tracking what happens after the lead form gets submitted
    A form fill is not a customer. If your agency optimises to leads but has no idea which of those leads close, the algorithm is being trained on the wrong outcome and you're paying to scale up junk.
  7. No. 7
    Every flat or declining month is blamed on a "learning period"
    A learning period is a real two-to-three-week phase that happens after a meaningful change. It is not a six-month explanation for why nothing has improved. When "learning" becomes the standing excuse, you've got a process problem dressed up as a platform problem.
  8. No. 8
    They don't ask, in any depth, who your customers actually are
    A campaign built without understanding your customer is a campaign built on Google's idea of your customer. The hour-long discovery call at month one isn't enough. If your agency couldn't describe your buyer in three sentences right now, they're guessing every day.
  9. No. 9
    Most of your paid traffic is getting dumped onto the homepage
    A homepage is a navigation hub built for everyone. A landing page is a single-purpose conversion surface built for the search you just paid for. Sending paid clicks to a homepage tells me your agency does not own the part of the funnel that converts.
  10. No. 10
    The report regurgitates the KPIs without saying what changed or why
    A report is supposed to interpret. If it just reads the numbers back to you with adjectives like "strong" and "consistent" attached, it isn't a report - it's a screenshot with narration. The interpretation is the entire point.
  11. No. 11
    They optimise to the cheapest cost per conversion, ignoring which products actually matter
    Not every conversion is worth the same. If your agency is steering budget toward whatever produces the lowest cost per lead, regardless of which product line carries margin or strategic priority, they've handed your portfolio strategy to Google's auction.