Your PPC agency is probably wasting money if it reports clicks, impressions and cost per lead but cannot tell you how many of those leads became qualified conversations or customers. Ask for one number: cost per qualified opportunity by campaign for the last 90 days. If the agency cannot produce it, or the answer is that sales has not given them the data, nobody is steering the spend toward revenue. You can confirm it yourself in an afternoon by checking who owns the account, what counts as a conversion and what people actually searched before they clicked.
Most PPC reports are built around numbers the ad platform measures well: clicks, click-through rate, cost per click and conversions. The trouble is what the platform calls a conversion. If a conversion is a form fill, a page view or a call longer than a few seconds, the agency can lower cost per conversion every month while the leads get worse.
That is rarely bad faith. It usually happens because nobody on your side defined what a good lead is and fed that back to the agency. In 15 years leading marketing and operations, I have found the biggest waste in paid search is not a bad bid or a weak ad. It is a well run account optimizing toward the wrong goal.
You do not need to be a PPC specialist for these. Ask the agency for admin or read access if you do not have it already, and set aside an afternoon.
The Google Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts should be in your company's name, with your billing and your login as an admin. If the agency owns the account, you lose the history, the data and the tracking when you leave.
Open the conversions list and read each action marked as primary. If page views, button clicks or every phone call count the same as a real form submission or booked meeting, your cost per lead is inflated with noise. Stronger setups send qualified leads or closed deals from your CRM back into the ad platform so it learns from real outcomes.
Look at the search terms report for the last 90 days, sorted by spend. Read the top 50 terms. If you see job seekers, students, competitors' support questions, free tools or services you do not offer, money is going to clicks that were never going to buy. Broad match combined with automated bidding makes this more likely, so check it even if the agency says it is handled.
Split spend between searches that include your company name and everything else. Brand searches are cheap and convert well because those people were already looking for you. If most of the agency's results come from brand terms, the account may be taking credit for demand it did not create.
Check location settings, device settings and whether search campaigns are also showing on the display network or partner sites. A location option that includes people merely interested in your area, rather than people located there, can spend budget far outside your market. Ask for spend by placement if campaigns mix search, display and video.
Take the last 30 leads the agency reported and trace each one in your CRM. How many were real buyers, how many did sales contact, how many became opportunities. If you cannot answer this, the problem is shared: the agency is flying blind and so are you. My page on why leads do not turn into customers covers what to do when the leads are real but sales does not close them.
| What you find | Likely cause |
|---|---|
| Junk search terms, weak conversion setup, spend outside your market | Agency problem: the account is not being managed carefully |
| Good search terms, real leads, but few become customers | Business problem: offer, pricing, speed of follow-up or sales process |
| Good leads that sales never contacts | Handoff problem between marketing and sales |
| Nobody can say what a qualified lead is | Leadership problem: no one owns the definition or the target |
Firing the agency fixes only the first row. For the others, a new agency will run into the same wall within a few months.
Write down what you found in plain language. Share it with the agency and ask for their response in writing.
Sit with your head of sales and write it down: company size, need, budget or timing, whatever matters in your business. Give it to the agency and ask them to report against it from now on.
Remove the weak conversion actions from bidding, add negative keywords for the junk terms you found, tighten location settings and pause campaigns with spend and no qualified leads. Start sending qualified lead or deal data from your CRM back to the ad platform if it is not already happening.
Compare the new number with what you were paying before. Give it a full sales cycle before judging closed revenue, but you should see lead quality change within weeks. If the agency resists any of this, that is your answer.
Management fees and ad spend are two separate numbers, and my PPC management cost page explains the common pricing models and what drives them. The bigger cost is usually the wasted spend itself, which keeps compounding until someone fixes the goal the account is optimizing toward. If the real gap is senior direction across paid search, sales handoff and reporting, a full-time CMO typically costs $280,000 to $450,000 a year. My fractional CMO engagements run $2,500 to $50,000 a month, most between $8,000 and $15,000, month to month with no long contract. The breakdown is on my fractional CMO cost page.
Get help when you have changed agencies and seen the same results, when nobody internally can read the account or challenge the agency, or when paid search is a large share of your marketing budget and you still cannot connect it to revenue. A fractional CMO can set the targets, hold the agency to them and fix the handoff to sales, so the spend works toward customers rather than clicks. I run every account myself and target first results within 30 days. My PPC management page shows how I approach paid search.
At minimum: spend, qualified leads and cost per qualified lead by campaign, how many of those leads sales accepted, pipeline created and, once your sales cycle allows, customers won. Add the share of spend on brand versus non-brand searches and a short note on what was tested and changed. Clicks and click-through rate are useful for the agency's own work but should not be the headline of a report to a founder.
Yes. The account, the billing and the conversion tracking should be in your company's name, with the agency added as a user. That way you keep years of data and settings if you change agencies, and you can always see what is happening. If an agency insists on owning the account, ask what happens to it when you leave and get the answer in writing before you continue.
Give a new agency about 30 days to clean up the account and tracking, and 60 to 90 days to show better lead quality against an agreed definition of a qualified lead. Judging closed revenue takes at least one full sales cycle. If after 90 days the agency cannot show cost per qualified lead by campaign, the issue is the way they work, not the time they have had.
It can be, once spend is large enough to justify a dedicated person and you have someone senior to set the goals. Small accounts often do better with a good specialist or agency, because the platform changes often and a part-time owner falls behind. Either way, someone on your side must own the definition of a qualified lead and check the results against revenue every month.
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