Spending $10k a Month on Google Ads? Audit Before You Change PPC Agency

You spend about $10,000 a month on Google Ads through an agency. Leads have flattened, the monthly report is a PDF of clicks and impressions, and the account manager changed twice this year. You are wondering whether to find a new PPC agency, and if so, how to avoid swapping one disappointing agency for another.

Here is the direct answer. Before you switch, audit what you already have. Check that you own the Google Ads account, that conversion tracking measures real leads or sales, and that the agency is actually making changes. If those three are broken, a new agency can help, but only if you fix ownership and measurement first. If they are fine, the problem may be the offer, the landing page or lead follow-up, and a new agency will not solve it.

Step one: confirm you own the account

At this spend level, the account history is a real asset: years of search terms, conversion data and bidding history. Make sure the Google Ads account sits under your business, with your own login holding admin access, and that the agency is linked through its manager account rather than owning the account outright. The same applies to Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and any conversion tracking tags.

If the agency set everything up under its own accounts, ask for ownership to be transferred now, while the relationship is still working. That request tells you a lot about the agency.

Step two: check what the reports are not telling you

Google’s third-party policy requires agencies that manage Google Ads to provide customers with monthly reports on costs, clicks and impressions at account level, reporting the exact amount Google charged, excluding their own fees. It also requires them to disclose management fees in writing before the first sale and on invoices, and it prohibits guaranteeing top placement on Google.

Those are the minimum. A useful report for a $10,000 account goes much further:

• Conversions that matter. Leads, qualified leads, sales or revenue, not page views or “engagements.”
• Cost per qualified lead or cost per sale, not just cost per click.
• Search terms that spent money without converting, and what was done about them.
• Changes made last month and the reasoning behind them.
• What they plan to test next.

You can check the change record yourself. Google Ads keeps a change history in the account, showing what was edited and when. A long silence there while you are paying a management fee is a clear signal.

Step three: make sure conversion tracking is honest

Most underperforming accounts share one problem: Google’s bidding is optimising towards the wrong goal. Common faults:

• Counting every form view, button click or phone number tap as a conversion.
• Duplicate conversion tags firing twice.
• No link between an ad click and whether the lead became a customer.
• Calls not tracked at all in a business that sells mainly by phone.

If automated bidding is fed junk conversions, it gets better at buying junk. For lead generation businesses, importing offline results from your CRM, such as which leads became qualified or closed, gives Google’s bidding far better signals than form fills alone.

What “Google Partner” does and does not tell you

Many agencies lead with a Google Partner badge. According to Google, Partner status requires the agency’s manager account to maintain an optimisation score of at least 70%, $10,000 of ad spend across managed accounts over 90 days, and at least half its account strategists certified in Google Ads.

That shows a baseline of activity and training. It does not show whether they are good at your kind of business, and optimisation score is Google’s own measure of how many of its recommendations are applied, which is not the same as profit. Treat the badge as a minimum filter, not a reason to hire.

How agencies charge at this spend level

Common models include a percentage of ad spend, a flat monthly fee, a tiered flat fee by spend band, and performance-based fees. To see how they compare, take a hypothetical account spending $10,000 a month:

• A 15% of spend fee would be $1,500 a month, rising automatically as spend grows.
• A flat $1,500 fee costs the same today but does not reward the agency for simply spending more.
• A performance fee tied to qualified leads aligns incentives, but only if tracking is trustworthy and both sides agree on what counts.

These figures are illustrations, not market rates. The better question is what you get for the fee: how many hours, which senior person, how many tests per month, and who builds landing pages.

When the agency is not the problem

Replace the agency only after ruling these out:

• The landing page is slow, generic or asks for too much.
• The offer is weaker than competitors bidding on the same terms.
• Sales follow-up is slow. Leads that wait hours for a call go cold, and the ads get blamed.
• Market costs have risen for your keywords, which no agency controls.

For a smaller-budget view of how paid search, maps and organic fit together, see how a local service business should split a small Google budget.

If you do switch, do it cleanly

1. Secure admin access to Google Ads, Analytics, Tag Manager and call tracking before giving notice.
2. Export reports, audiences, and a copy of conversion settings.
3. Ask candidate agencies for a written audit of your account before hiring. Judge them on the specificity of what they find.
4. Agree a 90-day plan with measurable goals, not vague “optimisation.”
5. Avoid long lock-in contracts; a notice period of 30 days is reasonable to ask for.
6. Keep ownership with you from day one of the new relationship.

What separates a good agency from a mediocre one usually has less to do with channel expertise than with how they understand your business; we set that out in what makes a good marketing agency.

A second opinion before you switch

At $10,000 a month, an independent look at your account is cheap insurance against changing agencies for the wrong reason. AB7 Solutions’ digital marketing team can audit your Google Ads account, conversion tracking and landing pages, fix measurement so bidding optimises towards real leads, and manage campaigns with transparent reporting and your ownership of every account. If the audit shows your current agency is doing sound work and the problem is elsewhere, we will say so.

Share read-only access or a recent report, and we will tell you what is working, what is not, and whether switching makes sense.

Email: ab@ab7solutions.com | director@ab7solutions.com
Phone: +91 9878067778 | +1 321 341 7733
Website: www.ab7solutions.com

Sources: Google Ads third-party policy; Google Partners status requirements.