What Does a Google Ads Agency Actually Do Each Month?

You hired a Google Ads agency. Monthly invoices go out. Reports come back. Leads arrive sometimes. But if someone asked you to describe what your agency actually did last week, you would struggle to answer.

That is not a personal failing. Most agencies describe their work in vague terms that do not map to anything concrete, and the reports they send show what they want you to see, not what is happening inside the account.

I have taken over accounts from other agencies where nothing had been meaningfully touched in months. The spend was running. The reports were landing. Nobody was doing the work.

This post is about what active management actually involves, week by week, and how to tell whether you are getting it.

Month One: What Setup Actually Involves

Month one at a new agency is almost never about results. That frustrates some clients, but it is the honest reality of what good work requires.

Before any agency can improve an account, they need to understand it. That means going through what is already there: campaign structure, keyword match types, bid strategies, conversion tracking, search terms history, negative keyword lists, and landing page alignment. Skipping this step means building on a foundation nobody understands.

Month one should include all of this:

Audit. A structured review of every area that affects performance: what is working, what is not, and why. If the previous agency built the account well, some of it stays. If they did not, it gets rebuilt.

Tracking verification. This matters more than most clients realise. If conversion tracking is broken, every bid decision Google makes is based on wrong data. I fix tracking before touching anything else.

In one account I inherited, the conversion tracking was pointed at the homepage, not the thank-you page. Every click was recorded as a conversion. The reported CPL of €18 was fiction. Once we corrected the tracking, the real CPL was closer to €140. The entire first month went on getting that right.

Campaign structure. Campaigns that match how the business actually works: segmented by service, geography, or intent where that makes sense.

Baseline data. Four to six weeks of clean data before drawing conclusions. Smart Bidding needs time to learn. Judging an account at week two is guesswork.

Keep in Mind: If an agency promises strong results in the first two to three weeks, they are either overpromising or planning to cut corners to show fast movement. Real improvement takes a learning period.

Verdict: month one is foundation work. If you are not seeing a proper audit and a tracking fix at minimum, you are not getting what you paid for.

Weeks 1 to 4 and Beyond: What Ongoing Management Looks Like

Once the account is built and the learning phase is done, management becomes a weekly rhythm. It breaks down like this:

Search terms review (weekly). The search terms report shows the actual queries that triggered your ads. Every week, new irrelevant searches appear: job seekers, DIY researchers, wrong geographies, adjacent services you do not offer. These go onto the negative keyword list. In accounts I manage, this is a non-negotiable weekly task.

Bid and budget review (weekly). Is spend tracking on target, or is the account underspending? Are Target CPA bids where they should be, or has Google drifted them somewhere that does not match the cost-per-lead goal? Device, time-of-day, and geography adjustments if the data supports it.

Ad copy and landing page check (weekly). Which ads are winning in rotation? Is the winning ad actually better, or just benefiting from impression variance? Are landing pages loading correctly on mobile? Any disapprovals or policy flags from the week?

Monthly review prep. Pulling the numbers, flagging anything that changed significantly, identifying the next round of tests or structural changes.

In a home services account I manage, the first 90-day search terms review identified 51 negative keywords responsible for roughly 22% of total spend. Most were job-seeker and DIY research queries that had been running unblocked since the account launched.

Pro Tip: Ask your agency what they changed in the account last week. A well-run agency can name exactly what they touched and why. An agency on autopilot will give a general answer about “ongoing optimisation.”

Verdict: active management is four to six hours of real work per week in a typical lead-gen account. Less than that, and things are being missed.

The Work That Does Not Show Up in Reports

Some of the most valuable work in a Google Ads account is invisible. No deliverable is attached to it. But it directly affects what you pay for each lead.

Quality Score maintenance. Google scores each keyword on relevance, expected click-through rate, and landing page experience. Low scores mean higher costs per click for the same position. A keyword with a Quality Score of 4 versus 8 can cost 40% more per click at the same ad position. A good agency monitors this and adjusts: rewriting ad copy for relevance, aligning landing pages more tightly to keyword intent, flagging slow-loading pages.

Auction insights monitoring. New competitors entering your auctions show up here. So does existing competition scaling up spend. This tells you whether rising CPCs are caused by something inside your account or by external pressure, which require completely different responses.

Impression share tracking. Missing impressions because of budget limits means you need more spend. Missing because of ad rank means there is a Quality Score or bid problem. Different diagnosis, different fix.

Conversion tracking integrity. Tags break. Websites get updated and a script stops firing. A pixel fires twice on some browsers. Someone needs to check that conversion data is clean and consistent, not just assume the numbers are right.

Data Tip: If your conversion numbers jump suddenly without any obvious cause, check tracking before drawing any conclusions. Broken or re-enabled tags cause more mystery swings in conversion data than any real change in performance.

Verdict: this monitoring work has no slide deck attached to it. If it stops happening, you will notice it in your cost per lead within a few months.

What Your Monthly Report Should Actually Show

A monthly report is the floor, not the full service.

A good report for a lead-gen account covers: spend vs. budget, leads (actual conversions, not clicks), cost per lead, comparison to the previous month, and the main things that changed and why.

What a good report does not do: bury everything in impressions and click-through rate statistics that do not connect to revenue. Clicks do not pay anyone’s salary. Leads do.

Beyond the monthly report, expect proactive contact when something meaningful changes. A campaign gets a policy suspension. CPC spikes for a keyword group. A test ad is outperforming the control by a clear margin. These should not wait for the monthly call.

You should also always have your own Google Ads login with direct account access. If an agency manages the account under their own login and you can only see what they share with you, that is a structural problem. You own the account and the data in it.

Well-Run vs. Coasting: What the Work Actually Looks Like

This is not what agencies say they do. This is what the actual work involves.

Task	Well-run account	Coasting agency
Search terms review	Weekly, negatives added regularly	Rarely reviewed, few negatives added
Negative keyword list	Growing list, organised by theme	Short list, little change over time
Bid strategy	Reviewed and adjusted monthly based on conversion volume	Set at the start and left alone
Ad copy testing	Active variants running, winners promoted, losers paused	Same ads running for 6+ months
Quality Score	Tracked per keyword, ad copy adjusted	Not monitored
Budget pacing	Checked weekly, adjusted toward month-end	Unchecked: overspend or underspend common
Conversion tracking	Verified monthly, anomalies flagged	Assumed correct, never checked
Landing pages	Checked against ad copy, mobile tested	Left as-is unless client reports a problem
Monthly report	Leads, CPL, what changed, what is next	Clicks, impressions, CTR with no lead data
Proactive contact	Reaches out when something changes	Silent between scheduled calls

One account I took over had last had a search terms review nine months before I came on. The negative keyword list had 11 entries. The same ads had been running since the account launched with no copy changes. Conversion tracking was intact, but nothing else had been touched. The client had no idea because the monthly reports showed clicks and impressions, not what was actually happening inside the account.

For more signs your Google Ads agency is coasting, that post goes deeper on the specific patterns to look for.

Verdict: the difference between the two columns is what separates an agency spending your money carefully from one treating your account as passive income.

Red Flags You Can Check Yourself

These show up in the account, not the reports. You will need direct access to your Google Ads account to find them.

No recent changes in the change history. Go to Tools > Change History in Google Ads. If the last meaningful change was three weeks ago, nobody has been in the account. A properly managed account has regular documented changes: keyword additions, bid adjustments, ad copy updates, negatives added.

A short negative keyword list. Accounts that have been running six months with fewer than 50 negatives have almost certainly never had a proper search terms review. Relevant negatives accumulate fast when someone is actually looking.

All ads in rotation with the same edit date. Google Ads shows when each ad was last edited. If every ad in the account has the same date from six months ago, nobody is running copy tests.

Conversion tracking that nobody has verified. Ask your agency when they last confirmed that tracking is firing correctly. If they do not have a clear answer, it has probably been a while. For a practical guide to what to count as a lead in Google Ads, that post covers exactly what your primary conversion actions should look like.

Common Mistake: Trusting the report numbers without checking the account. Reports can look healthy while the underlying account is poorly managed. If conversion tracking is broken, the report is showing you fiction.

Verdict: you do not need to be a Google Ads expert to spot these flags. You just need access to the account.

How I Handle This for Lead-Gen Clients

Every account I manage gets a weekly pass through search terms, bid pacing, and any flags from Google. Monthly, I do a deeper review: Quality Scores, auction insights, ad copy performance, and landing page alignment. The monthly note I send leads with cost per lead and what changed, not impressions.

I contact clients outside that schedule when something meaningful happens. Not because I have to, but because they should know.

The accounts I take over from other agencies usually take three to six months to compound properly: tracking cleaned up, negative list rebuilt, bid strategy tuned to real conversion data. After that, results tend to move in the right direction and stay there.

Ready to See What Is Actually in Your Account? If you are paying for Google Ads management and you are not sure what is getting done, the fastest way to find out is to look at the account directly. Or have someone who knows what to look for do it for you.