How to Audit Your Agency's Ad Reporting: 7 Red Flags
Your monthly ad report looks fine. The charts go up and to the right. The agency is pleased. And yet sales don’t seem to have moved much, and you can’t quite put your finger on why.
That gap between a good-looking report and a flat business is almost always a reporting problem before it is a performance problem. Nobody needs to be dishonest for it to happen. Reporting simply drifts towards the numbers that look best, and without a way to check, you have no reason to question it.
Here are seven red flags, and the checks you can run yourself — directly in the ad account — to see what is actually happening.
Red flag 1: The Report leads with reach and impressions
Reach, impressions and clicks are activity. They tell you money was spent and people saw things. They do not tell you whether the business benefited.
If the headline of your report is ‘we reached 400,000 people this month’, ask what that reach produced. The top of every report should be the metric closest to revenue: cost per lead, cost per purchase, or return on ad spend. Everything else is supporting detail.
Red flag 2: Conversions' that aren't really conversions
Both Google and Meta let advertisers define what counts as a conversion. That flexibility is useful — and easy to misuse. If a page view, a scroll or a button click is set up as a primary conversion, the conversion count inflates and the cost per conversion drops, while nothing meaningful has changed.
Check it yourself
- In Google Ads, go to Goals, then Conversions, and look at which actions are marked as primary
- Ask whether each primary action is something your business would genuinely pay for — a lead, a call, a sale
- In Google Ads, compare the ‘Conversions’ column against ‘All conversions’; a large gap means secondary actions are being counted somewhere
Red flag 3: Brand search is propping up the averages
People who search your brand name are already looking for you. Paid ads on those searches are cheap and convert very well, because most of those customers would have found you anyway.
When brand campaigns and non-brand campaigns are reported together, the excellent brand numbers flatter the blended average and hide weak performance everywhere else. Ask for brand and non-brand results to be reported separately, always. The non-brand numbers are the real test of whether your agency is finding new customers.
Red flag 4: Attribution settings quietly changed
Attribution decides which ad gets credit for a sale. A longer attribution window, or including view-through conversions — where someone saw an ad, didn’t click, and bought later — can make campaigns look significantly better without anything real changing.
Neither setting is wrong in itself. The problem is inconsistency. If the attribution setting changed partway through the year, your month-on-month comparisons are no longer comparing like with like. Ask what the settings are, and when they last changed.
Red flag 5: No view of how spend is split
This is where brand-side teams are most often caught out, particularly on gifted-product campaigns.
Indian tax law requires the brand — the giver — to deduct tax at source when it provides a business benefit or perquisite, such as a free product, a sponsored trip or a gadget, to someone in connection with their business or profession. For influencers, this has applied at 10% of the fair market value where benefits from one brand exceed ₹20,000 in a financial year. Guidance has indicated that where a product is returned after the content is made, rather than kept, it is not treated as a benefit.
This provision was long known as Section 194R. India’s new Income-tax Act, 2025 has renumbered many sections, so confirm the current reference with your chartered accountant before building it into your process.
Red flag 6: No creative-level data
On paid social especially, the creative — the actual image or video — is usually the single biggest driver of results. A report that shows campaign totals without telling you which creatives performed and which failed is withholding the most actionable information you are paying for.
Every report should tell you which ads won, which lost, and what is being tested next as a result.
Red flag 7: you don't have your own access
This is the most serious of the seven, and it underlies all the others. If you cannot log into your own ad accounts and see the data for yourself, you are entirely dependent on the report — and a report is a curated selection of the data.
You should hold admin access to every ad account you pay for, owned by your business and billed to your company. This is non-negotiable, and a good agency will set it up this way by default.
Five checks to run yourself this week
- Log in to each ad account directly. If you can’t, that is the first thing to fix.
- Review which actions are counted as primary conversions.
- Filter to non-brand campaigns only, and look at cost per acquisition on its own.
- Check the attribution settings and the account change history for recent changes.
- Compare the platform’s reported conversions with what your CRM or sales records show for the same period. Some gap is normal; a very large one needs an explanation.
Having the conversation with your agency
Approach this as a request for clarity rather than an accusation. Most reporting drift is not deliberate — it is the natural result of nobody asking hard questions. A good agency will welcome a client who wants to understand the numbers, because better questions tend to produce better campaigns.
If the answers are vague, defensive, or you are refused access to your own accounts, that tells you what you need to know.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good cost per lead for Google Ads?
There is no universal figure — it depends on your industry, your price point and what a lead is worth to you. A better question is what a customer is worth over their lifetime, and whether your cost per acquired customer leaves healthy margin against that.
Why do Google Ads conversions differ from my CRM?
Some difference is expected, because of attribution windows, cross-device journeys, cookie restrictions and duplicate tracking. A large or growing gap, though, often indicates that non-meaningful actions are being counted as conversions.
Should my agency own my Google Ads account?
No. Your business should own the account and pay for it directly, with the agency given access through its manager account. That way your data and history stay with you whatever happens.