You can tell in about ten minutes, without knowing anything about marketing. Open your last report. If you can explain, in one sentence, what your money actually produced last month — not clicks, not impressions, but leads or sales — your agency is doing its job. If you can't, that's the answer. Everything below is how to check the rest.
That test matters more than it sounds like it should. A bad agency doesn't usually look bad. The dashboard is full, the report lands on time, and the numbers all trend up and to the right. The problem is almost never that nothing is happening — it's that what's happening isn't being measured against what matters to you.
Can you read the report without a translator?
Start here. It's the fastest tell. A good report tells you what you got for your money: leads, booked calls, sales, and what each one cost. A weak one leans on click-through rate (how often people click the ad, not whether they became customers), impressions, and "engagement" — real numbers, but not ones that pay your bills. If you finish reading it and still can't say whether last month was good or bad for your business, the report was written to be approved, not understood.
Ask a blunt question at your next check-in: "How many actual customers came from this, and what did each one cost me?" Watch how directly they answer. A straight number, even an unflattering one, is a good sign. A pivot to "brand awareness" or "we're optimizing the algorithm" is not.
Do you own your own accounts and data?
This is the one most business owners never think to check — and the one that costs the most when it goes wrong. Ask directly: whose name is the Google Ads account under? Who owns the analytics property? If the honest answer is "the agency's," you don't have a marketing partner. You have a hostage situation. Fire them, and you can lose your campaign history, your conversion data, and months of tuning overnight.
Your accounts and your data should sit under your business's own name from day one, so if you ever leave, everything leaves with you. If an agency resists giving you admin access, ask why. There's rarely a good reason.
Are they measuring the right thing at all?
Even an agency reporting real numbers can be measuring the wrong ones. Conversion tracking — the setup that tells you which ad actually produced a real lead, not just a click — is easy to get wrong in ways that make performance look better than it is. A phone call from an existing customer, a form submitted twice, a page view mistaken for a purchase — all of it can get counted as a "conversion" and quietly inflate the report.
Ask what specifically fires a conversion in your account. If the answer is vague, or nobody can walk you through it, the number at the top of your report may not mean what it claims to. This is the same failure mode we've written about before — an account that looked healthy on paper while counting families of existing customers as new business.
Is the strategy built around your buyer, or a template?
Ask what changed in your account recently, and why. A good agency can point to specific decisions: a keyword list trimmed because it was buying the wrong searches, a budget shifted because one service was outperforming another, a landing page rebuilt because the traffic wasn't converting. If the honest answer is "not much," you're paying to keep the lights on, not to have someone actively working your account.
This is also where junior handling shows up. Ask who actually manages your account day to day. If the person who sold you the engagement isn't the person running it, and you've never spoken to whoever is — that's worth knowing.
What a real audit looks for
If you've gone through those four questions and you're still not sure, that's exactly what an outside audit is for — a second, independent set of eyes on the account structure, the tracking, and where the budget is actually going, with no incentive to protect the current setup. It should hand you a plain-English list of what's working and what isn't, ranked by what it's actually costing you, whether or not you ever switch agencies.
None of this requires you to become a marketer. It requires an agency willing to show its work. If yours can answer these questions clearly and specifically, keep them. If every answer is vague, that's not a coincidence — it's the report doing its job of not being understood. We built Bolo around the opposite bet: that a client who can read their own report, and owns their own data, is a client who stays because the results are real — not because leaving is hard.