What Your PPC Agency Did Last Week (And How to Find Out)
You pay your agency thousands a month to manage your PPC. They send you a report. ROAS looks strong. CPA is in range. Everyone's happy.
But what did they actually do?
Not what did the campaigns produce. What did the agency physically change, test, adjust, or improve? Those are two very different things.
Google Ads keeps a complete record of every action taken in your account. Every bid adjustment, every keyword added, every ad paused, every setting changed. Timestamped, categorized, and available to anyone with account access.
Most agency clients have never looked at it.
How to check
In your Google Ads account, go to Tools > Change History. Set the date range to the last 30 days. That's one full billing cycle.
What you see next will either confirm your agency is earning their fee or raise some questions.
What you're looking at
Not all changes are equal.
Active management looks like: keyword additions or removals based on data, new ad copy being tested, audience adjustments, budget reallocation from underperformers to high performers, negative keywords added based on search term reviews. These require human expertise.
Busywork looks like: bid adjustments on accounts already running automated bidding. If your campaigns use Maximize Conversions or Target ROAS, the algorithm adjusts bids thousands of times per day. Manual overrides on top of that are either unnecessary or counterproductive. Also watch for auto-applied recommendations. Google suggests and sometimes automatically applies changes. These show up in the history and can look like agency activity. Check whether changes were made by a user or by "Google Ads automated."
Silence looks like: very few entries over 30 days. Maybe your account is so well optimized it doesn't need frequent changes. Or maybe your agency isn't actively managing it. The distinction matters because you're paying for management, not monitoring.
While you're in there, check your search terms
Go to Keywords > Search Terms in any search campaign. This shows the actual queries people typed that triggered your ads.
Scroll through it. You'll find relevant queries. You'll also find queries that have nothing to do with your business. Every irrelevant click is wasted budget.
The question isn't whether irrelevant queries exist. They always do. The question is whether your agency is reviewing this report and adding negative keywords. If the same types of junk queries appear month after month, that's a gap nobody is addressing.
What to do next
If the change history looks active and strategic, great. You have confirmation your agency is doing the work.
If it's sparse or dominated by automated adjustments, ask about it. A good agency will welcome the question and have documented answers ready.
If the search terms report shows persistent waste, ask about their negative keyword process. How often do they review it? Is there a system or is it ad hoc?
These are reasonable questions from someone spending real money on advertising. Any agency that gets defensive about a client looking at their own data is telling you something important.
Your account. Your data. Your money.
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