Most shop owners assess their agency on whether the phone feels busy. That is a lagging, noisy signal that is heavily influenced by the season. These six questions get you a real answer in an afternoon.
1. What counts as a conversion in my account, exactly?
Ask for the list of conversion actions and what each one is triggered by. You are looking for the same event being counted more than once — a form submission recorded both by a page view of the thank-you page and by the form itself. Double counting halves every cost figure in the report and, worse, it teaches the bidding algorithm a lie.
2. Which of those are primary, and which are secondary?
Only primary conversions steer the bidding. Completed jobs and closed deals usually belong as secondary — useful in reporting, but too slow and too sparse to bid on. If everything is primary, the account is chasing several contradictory targets at once.
3. Are auto-applied recommendations turned on?
Google will change your account for you if permitted — adding broad keywords, altering targets. We have seen the platform remove keywords from a live campaign on its own. Ask for it to be switched off, and ask to see the change history filtered by who made each change. If Google is making changes your agency did not, somebody should have noticed.
Optimisation score is not a performance metric
A 100% optimisation score means recommendations were accepted or dismissed — it measures compliance with Google's suggestions, not results. It can sit at 100% while leads fall. If it appears in your report as a headline number, that tells you something about the report.
4. How many of last month’s leads became paid jobs?
This is the question that separates agencies, and it is the reason we only take automotive shops. It requires connecting the advertising to your shop system, which most never set up. “We do not have access to that” is a fair answer once; it is not a fair answer in month six.
5. What did you change in the last thirty days?
You want a short, specific list with dates. Then look at what happened to lead volume after each change. Two warning signs: nothing changed for months, or several things changed on the same day, which makes it impossible to know what worked.
6. Who owns the accounts?
The ad accounts, the tracking, the domain, the website files and the Business Profile should be in your name, with the agency granted access. If any of it sits inside an agency-owned account, leaving costs you your history — and that is usually the point.
Three reporting smells
- Impressions and reach as headline numbers. They are the metrics that always go up.
- Screenshots instead of account access. You should be able to open the account yourself, whether or not you ever do.
- A platform's own numbers used to grade that platform's work. The scoreboard has to come from your side — your leads, your jobs, your revenue.
What a good answer sounds like
Specific, dated, and occasionally unflattering. An agency that never reports a change that did not work is either not testing anything or not telling you about it. The useful partner is the one who says “we tried this in week two, it did not work, here is what we did instead.”