The three main Google Ads agency red flags are: no audience exclusions on cold traffic campaigns (the algorithm targets your existing customers instead of new ones), repeated campaign restarts (results spike for three days then crash because the agency resets the algorithm instead of fixing targeting), and vague answers to specific questions (evasive reporting is a reliable signal of poor account management). Each one is checkable in under five minutes.
Most business owners look at their Google Ads results once a month, glance at the numbers their agency sends over, and assume everything is fine. But if your campaigns spike at the start of each reporting period and quietly underperform for the rest of the month, you are watching a performance, not a real result.
I audited an account recently where an agency had been restarting the same campaign every single week for four months. The client thought the account was healthy because the weekly screenshots always showed strong early results. What the screenshots never showed was that the agency was recycling the same warm audience over and over — people who already knew the brand — and counting it as new customer acquisition.
This article covers the three specific red flags I look for when auditing accounts managed by external agencies, and exactly where to find the evidence in your own account.
01Why Bad Agencies Are So Common
The barrier to entry for starting a Google Ads agency today is zero. You need a laptop and a business email. There is no experience requirement, no certification requirement, and no one checking whether you actually know what you are doing before you start charging clients.
This creates a situation where a significant portion of agencies are learning Google Ads on their clients’ money. The client sees the interface, sees ads running, sees a monthly report with numbers in it, and assumes the work is professional. The agency, meanwhile, is figuring things out campaign by campaign.
The three red flags below are not theoretical. They come up consistently when I audit accounts that were previously managed by outside agencies. None of them require access to the agency’s internal systems — you can find all of this evidence in your own Google Ads account right now.
You need Google Ads account access at the Administrator level to check change history and audience exclusions. If your agency has not given you this access, that is itself a red flag. You should always have full view access to your own account.
02Red Flag 1: No Audience Exclusions on Cold Traffic Campaigns
Every Google Ads account should have at least two types of campaigns working at the same time: a cold traffic campaign targeting people who have never heard of you, and a retargeting campaign targeting people who already have. These two audiences require completely different bids, different creatives, and different goals.
The problem is that the Google algorithm is lazy. When you run a cold traffic campaign without audience exclusions, the algorithm does not go find new customers. It goes to the easiest, lowest-resistance audience it can find, which is the people who already know your brand, already visited your site, or already bought from you. These people convert faster and cheaper, which makes your results look good on paper, but you are not actually growing your customer base at all.
How to check this in your account
Focus on any campaign labeled as prospecting, cold traffic, acquisition, or simply your main search or shopping campaign.
This opens the audience management panel for that campaign.
If there are zero exclusions listed, your cold traffic campaign has no audience filter at all. The algorithm is treating existing customers, website visitors, and complete strangers as the same audience.
A properly managed cold traffic campaign should exclude at minimum: all website visitors (typically a 30 to 90 day window), past purchasers or converters, and any custom CRM audience of existing customers. If none of these are excluded, you are not running cold traffic acquisition. You are running a campaign that will exhaust your warm audience in a few days and then stall.
The fix for this is not complicated — you create audience segments for site visitors and customers, then apply them as exclusions at the campaign level. Any specialist with real experience does this as a baseline setup step, not an advanced optimization. Its absence usually means the account was set up quickly without thinking through the funnel structure.
03Red Flag 2: The Campaign Restart Strategy
This one ties directly to the exclusions problem and is what I call the three-day insanity spiral. When a new campaign launches without proper audience exclusions, the algorithm immediately goes after the warm audience. Results look strong for the first two or three days because that warm audience converts at a high rate. Then the warm audience runs out and performance drops sharply.
A competent specialist responds to this by fixing the targeting, restructuring the ad groups, or improving the creative. An incompetent agency responds by pausing the campaign and relaunching it. The relaunch resets the algorithm’s learning, which briefly sends it back to the warm audience again, which produces another few days of decent-looking results, and the cycle repeats.
This is not a mistake. It is a deliberate strategy to produce favorable numbers for the reporting period without actually solving the underlying problem.
How to find this in Change History
This shows every change made to the account, including who made it and when.
You need enough history to see a pattern, not just a one-off pause.
This isolates every time a campaign was enabled or paused.
If you see the same campaign being paused and then re-enabled on a weekly or bi-weekly cycle, without any structural changes in between, you are looking at the restart strategy.
Pausing a campaign occasionally is completely normal — seasonal adjustments, budget reallocation, or a planned test all require it. The red flag is a repeating pause-and-relaunch cycle on the same campaign with no structural changes made in between. If the campaign keeps getting restarted but nothing about the targeting, bids, or creatives is changing, the restarts are the strategy, not a side effect of normal optimization.
04Red Flag 3: The Communication Void
This is one I learned firsthand. If you send your agency an email with two specific questions and receive a reply after a week that answers one of them vaguely, that communication style is a direct reflection of how they manage your account. Agencies that communicate clearly are almost always the ones who know what is happening in the account. Agencies that go quiet or reply with walls of marketing language usually do not.
There is a particular vocabulary that bad agencies use when they do not know what is happening. Learning to translate it will save you a lot of time and money.
| What your agency says | What it actually means |
|---|---|
| “The algorithm is still learning.” | On a campaign older than 3 weeks, this means they have no explanation for the drop. |
| “We’re in an optimization phase.” | Nothing specific is being done. This phrase fills time in reports. |
| “Traffic quality has been lower lately.” | They cannot explain why conversions dropped and are blaming Google. |
| “We’re running some tests to improve performance.” | There is no documented hypothesis or expected outcome for the test. |
| “ROAS dropped because the retargeting pool shrank 40% since your last promotion. We’re adding prospecting budget this week to rebuild it.” | This is what a real answer looks like. Specific cause, specific action, specific timeline. |
The test I recommend: send your agency exactly two specific questions in a single email. Something like “why did our ROAS drop last week compared to the week before” and “which campaigns are currently spending the most budget and what is the ROAS on each.” Set a three-day deadline in your head and evaluate both the speed of the reply and how specifically it answers each question.
If you get a reply within 24 hours with concrete numbers and a clear explanation, you have a decent agency. If you get a reply four days later that talks about algorithm changes and optimization phases without a single metric, start looking for a replacement.
An agency that consistently answers one question out of two is not a communication problem — it is an account management problem. It means they pulled the answer to the easier question and did not dig into the harder one. Every question you ask about your account deserves a complete answer. You are paying for that expertise.
05How to Audit Your Agency in 10 Minutes
You do not need a specialist to run a basic health check on your Google Ads account. The three checks below cover the red flags above and take about 10 minutes total. Do them this week, before your next call with your agency.
If you want these checks running automatically on a schedule — not just once — Google Ads scripts can monitor for campaign status changes, budget anomalies, and performance drops and send you email alerts without requiring a login.
- 1 Check audience exclusions. Open each cold traffic or prospecting campaign, go to Audiences, and verify that past visitors and past purchasers are excluded. If any prospecting campaign has zero exclusions, flag it immediately and ask your agency to explain why they were not set up.
- 2 Pull Change History filtered by Campaign Status. Set the range to 90 days. Look for any campaign that was paused and re-enabled more than twice without a corresponding change to targeting, bids, or creatives. If you find a pattern, ask your agency to explain the reason for each restart in writing.
- 3 Send a two-question test email. Ask why a specific metric changed in a specific week, and ask for the current ROAS breakdown by campaign. Grade the response on speed (under 48 hours), specificity (actual numbers), and completeness (both questions answered). Do not accept vague answers as acceptable.
If your agency fails all three checks, you are almost certainly not getting the results you are paying for. If they fail one or two, have a direct conversation about what you found and give them a clear timeline to fix it. If you have never had access to your own account to run these checks, request it immediately — your agency managing your account without giving you view access is itself a serious warning sign.
If you want to go further and run a full account audit yourself, the process is documented in our complete Google Ads tutorial. Or if you would rather have an independent specialist review the account, our Google Ads management service includes an audit as the first step.
06Frequently Asked Questions
