Most business owners stay with a bad Google Ads agency 6 to 18 months longer than they should. Not because they don’t suspect something’s off, but because firing an agency feels like work. There’s the awkward conversation, the worry that things will get worse during the handover, the fear that maybe the problem is you, not them.
This piece is a checklist for diagnosing whether your Google Ads agency relationship is genuinely failing, plus a practical guide to switching cleanly without losing your account history or conversion data. If three or more of these warning signs apply to you, you’ve already paid for the cost of switching. You’re just paying it in lost performance instead of one off effort.
Warning sign 1: You can’t see what’s happening in your own account
You log into Google Ads (assuming you have a login) and the dashboard is meaningless. Campaigns named things like “PMax_v3_Aug2024_test” without context. No clear structure showing which campaigns target what. Conversion tracking that may or may not be firing. No view into search terms reports. No way to see what’s been changed recently.
A healthy agency setup gives you (the owner) clean, named structure. Campaigns labelled by intent and audience. Ad groups labelled by keyword theme. Notes in the account showing what changed and when. You should be able to walk into your own account and roughly understand what’s running.
Warning sign 2: The agency owns your account, not you
This is the single biggest mistake we see. Your agency set up Google Ads using their own Google Ads manager account, with their billing details, and your business added as a client. Looks fine when things are going well. Becomes a hostage situation when you want to leave.
If you leave that agency, you lose: campaign history, conversion data, audience lists, learning algorithms that took months to train, sometimes even the keyword research. The next agency starts from scratch. You pay for 3 months of relearning what you already paid for once.
The right setup: your business owns its own Google Ads account, you own the billing relationship with Google, and your agency has manager access (MCC). You can revoke that access in 30 seconds and the account is yours.
If you don’t know which setup you have, ask your agency. “Is the Google Ads account under our business name or yours, and who owns the billing?” Their answer (and how they answer it) tells you a lot.
Warning sign 3: 6 months of “ongoing optimisation” with no measurable improvement
Look at the last 6 months of reports. Compare cost per qualified lead in month 1 vs month 6. If it’s basically flat, or worse, going up, the campaign isn’t being optimised. It’s being maintained.
Caveat: there are legitimate reasons for flat CPL. Seasonal effects, increased competition in your market, a Google policy change that hit your industry. A good agency will name the reason and have a counter strategy. A bad agency will say “we’re continuing to optimise” without showing what they’re testing or what they expect to change.
The test: ask your agency to write down what they think will be different in your account in 90 days, and why. If they can’t, they’re managing, not improving.
Warning sign 4: They blame your landing page but won’t help fix it
Google Ads campaigns are 50% media buying and 50% conversion rate optimisation. When results are flat, agencies often correctly point at landing pages as the bottleneck. The bad ones stop there. “Your conversion rate is low. You need a new landing page.” Then they hand you back the problem.
A real partner will either fix the landing page themselves (or in partnership with a designer), test changes systematically, and measure conversion rate lift. They’ll show you A/B tests, heatmaps, scroll depth data. They’ll have an opinion on form length, button copy, hero image, social proof placement.
If your agency identifies your landing page as the problem and then has no follow up, they’re using it as an excuse for their own underperformance.
Warning sign 5: They’ve stopped pushing back on you
Early in any agency relationship there’s productive friction. You want to bid on a keyword, the agency says it’ll be too expensive. You want a bigger landing page hero image, they show you data that says it tanks conversion rate. They disagree with you about audience targeting. That friction is the agency earning their fee.
If your agency hasn’t pushed back on a single one of your ideas in months, they’ve stopped caring. They’re doing what they’re told to keep the retainer, not what’s best for your business. The signal is subtle but it’s there. When was the last time your agency told you “no, here’s why”?
Warning sign 6: You’re paying for capability you don’t need
You’re spending $2,000 a month in ad spend, and your agency charges $2,500 a month in management. Or you’re a single location plumber and your agency has a 12 person team across 3 cities. The structural cost of the agency exceeds the value of your account to them, which means either you’re paying for overhead you don’t use, or your account is being run by their most junior person.
Small accounts are often better served by smaller agencies or specialists, where your $2,000 a month account is meaningful to the people working on it. Large agencies make sense at $20,000 a month spend and up.
Warning sign 7: The owner gets the calls, but a junior runs the work
You met with the agency director or sales lead when you signed up. They were impressive, knew the industry, had strong opinions. Then you got handed off to an account manager who’s nice enough but clearly hasn’t worked on a campaign in your industry before.
Bait and switch is endemic in mid sized agencies. The senior people sell, the junior people deliver. That’s a fine model only if the junior person is properly trained and overseen. The test: ask your account manager a sharp technical question (e.g., “what attribution model are we using and why?”). If the answer involves “let me check with the team and get back to you”, you’re talking to someone who’s been handed your account without the senior context.
How to switch agencies without losing your data
If three or more of the warnings above apply, here’s a clean exit:
Step 1: Take ownership before you give notice
If the Google Ads account is in the agency’s name, this is harder. You’ll need to either get them to transfer ownership (they can do this through Google’s tools) or have the new agency rebuild the account in your name and pause the old one while data populates. Done before notice is given, this avoids any retention friction.
Step 2: Export everything
Before the relationship ends, download: 6 to 12 months of monthly reports, the full keyword list, the negative keywords list, all ad creative, conversion tracking setup details, audience lists. If your agency has been doing landing page work, get the page files and analytics history too.
Step 3: Give 30 days notice, not 7
Most agency contracts have a 30 day notice period anyway. Use that time productively. Have the new agency shadow access during the handover. Don’t pause campaigns during the transition (you’ll lose learning data). Let the new team observe what’s running before they change anything.
Step 4: Plan for 30 days of recalibration
Even with clean handover, expect performance to dip for 2 to 4 weeks while the new agency rebuilds optimisation in their own management style. That’s normal. Budget for it psychologically. Don’t measure new agency performance until month 2.
How to pick a replacement (without ending up in the same spot in 18 months)
The agencies most likely to underperform are the ones that show up with the slickest pitch and the longest list of awards. Awards measure proposal writing skill more than account management skill. Here’s what to look for instead:
- Someone who runs your account onboarding meeting and is still on your account 6 months later. No bait and switch.
- Willing to do a free account audit with specific findings before you sign. If they can’t tell you what’s wrong before they have your money, what will they tell you after?
- Pricing structure that aligns their incentives with yours. Flat retainer or split setup+management beats percentage of spend for accounts under $10,000 monthly media spend.
- Transparent reporting that includes what you read about in the second post of this series. If you ask “will you split branded and non-branded reporting?” and they say “of course”, that’s the right answer.
- Comfortable disagreeing with you. In the discovery call, if everything you say is a great idea, that’s a problem.
- References from clients in your industry, who you can actually call.
The hardest part isn’t the work, it’s the decision
Most owners we talk to who eventually switched agencies tell us the same thing: they knew something was wrong for at least 6 months before they acted. The switch itself was less work than they expected. The hard part was admitting they’d been paying for something that wasn’t working, and then doing something about it.
If you’ve read this far and recognised your situation in three or more warning signs, the cost of staying is bigger than the cost of switching. That’s not a sales line. The maths is just on your side. A campaign that’s been flat for 6 months will be flat for the next 6 unless something changes.
If you want context on what you should be paying, our breakdown of what a Google Ads campaign actually costs in Australia covers media spend, management fees, and infrastructure cost. If you want to test your current agency before you decide, our guide to reading agency reports properly walks through the questions that will quickly reveal whether your agency is doing the work.
And if you’ve decided it’s time, our Google Ads page has a free 30 minute account audit offer. We’ll look at what you’ve got, tell you what we’d change, and either confirm your agency is doing fine work, or show you what’s actually going on. Either way, you walk away knowing.
Sources and further reading
- Google Ads Help: Manager account (MCC) basics (how agency access works and how to revoke it).
- Google Ads Help: Account access levels (what each permission level lets your agency do).
Frequently asked questions
Look for clear monthly reporting tied to leads and cost per lead rather than clicks, full access to your own account, a log of the changes they made, and proactive recommendations. If you only ever see vanity metrics, dig deeper.
Yes. You should always own the account and the billing, with the agency working inside it. If the agency owns the account, your history and data leave with them when you do.
Judge the trend, not a single month. Ninety days is a fair window for a new agency to stabilise an account, but after that you should see cost per lead moving in the right direction.
Ask who will actually work on your account, how and when they report, who owns the account, and how their fee is structured relative to your media spend.