Is your PPC agency actually working? 7 things to check
You do not need to understand Google Ads to audit it. You need thirty minutes inside your own account and these seven places to look. Each one takes a few clicks, and each one is hard for a report to hide.
1. Whose name is on the account?
Where to look: Google Ads, the account settings, and the billing page. What good looks like: the account is owned by your company, billed to your card or invoice, with the agency added as a manager. What bad looks like: the campaigns live inside the agency’s account and your only access is the report they send. If you leave, the conversion history, audiences, and quality scores leave with them. This check decides how much leverage you have in every other conversation.
2. Is brand search kept separate from Performance Max?
Where to look: the campaign list. There should be a campaign that only bids on your community’s name, and any Performance Max campaign should have brand exclusions applied. Why it matters: left alone, Performance Max serves on searches for your name and reports those renters as its own conversions. They were coming anyway. The result is a campaign that looks brilliant and a report that overstates what the agency’s work produced.
3. What counts as a conversion?
Where to look: Goals, then Conversions. What good looks like: tour requests, applications, and phone calls of a meaningful length, each counted once. What bad looks like: page views, time on site, every form field, or a single event counted several times. A cost per lead of $12 built on page views is not a lead cost. It is a number that makes the fee look earned.
4. What are you actually paying for in the search terms report?
Where to look: a search campaign, then Insights and reports, then Search terms, set to the last 90 days and sorted by cost. What good looks like: the top terms are your name, your submarket, and your floor plans, and the queries that never produced a tour have been added as negatives. What bad looks like: spend on job searches, other cities, homes for sale, or a competitor’s name with no strategy behind it. This report is the fastest way to see whether anyone is looking at the account week to week.
5. Where is impression share being lost?
Where to look: add the columns “Search lost IS (budget)” and “Search lost IS (rank)” to the campaign view. Why it matters: impression share lost to budget means more money would buy more of the searches you want. Impression share lost to rank means it would not, and only better ads and landing pages will fix it. An agency that answers every slow month with “increase the budget” without looking at this split is guessing, and the percentage-of-spend fee makes the guess profitable.
6. When was the last real change?
Where to look: Change history, set to the last 30 days. What good looks like: bid, budget, negative-keyword, and ad-copy changes every week, and a change the same day your special changed. What bad looks like: a month of nothing, or only automated rules. Multifamily moves weekly. An account that does not is being reported on, not managed.
7. What does a signed lease cost?
Where to look: not in Google Ads. Pull leases by source from your property management system for the last quarter, then divide ad spend plus the management fee by the leases attributed to paid search. The benchmarks: RentVision’s 2025 analysis puts the industry average cost per lead near $100, and REACH by RentCafe’s national study puts the average cost per lease across all sources at $588. Your agency’s report will show cost per click and cost per lead. Only this number tells you whether the fee is buying occupancy.
What to do with the results
- Get administrative access to the account, in your company’s name, before any other conversation.
- Ask the agency to separate brand from Performance Max and to limit conversions to tours and applications. A good agency has already done both. A defensive one will explain why the current setup is fine.
- Put the search terms report and the impression share split on the agenda for the next monthly call, every month.
- Report cost per signed lease to ownership yourself, from PMS data, so the number you manage to is not the number the agency grades itself on.
If you would rather have someone else run the seven checks, that is what our free account audit is: your account, on screen, with the findings in writing whether or not you hire us.
Questions about auditing an agency
What if we do not have access to our own Google Ads account?+
That is the first finding. Ask for administrative access to the account today. If the campaigns live inside the agency’s own account and cannot be transferred, plan the exit before the renewal, because everything the account has learned will stay with them when you leave.
How long should we give a new agency before judging results?+
Sixty to ninety days is enough to see whether the structure is right, even if cost per lease is still settling. By then brand should be separated, conversions should be tours and applications, and the search terms report should be clean. If the structure is wrong at ninety days, the results will not fix themselves at six months.
What is a good cost per lead for multifamily paid search?+
RentVision’s 2025 analysis puts the industry average around $100 per lead. Specialized multifamily accounts run well under that; the portfolio in our case study averages $29. Cost per lead is still only a proxy. Cost per signed lease, measured from your property management system, is the number that decides whether the fee is earning its keep.
30 minutes, your accounts, your properties.
Bring one community's ad account. We'll show you where spend is leaking and what we'd do in the first 30 days. You keep the findings either way.
The person on this call is the person in your ads account. Cameron Day, owner.