# Paid Ads Audit Before Renewing Your Agency > What an independent paid ads audit should check before you renew your agency: five checks, in order, across Google and Meta, and what to do with the findings. Source: https://snowballcreations.com/paid-ads-audit-before-renewing-your-agency/ Author: Max Sinclair Published: 2026-10-07 Updated: 2026-10-07 --- **Key takeaways** - An audit before renewal answers one question: is this account being managed, or just billed for? Every check should serve that question. - Run the checks in order: ownership, tracking, results with brand removed, the change history, then structure. A failure early on makes every later number unreadable. - The monthly report is the agency's view of the account. The change history is the account's view of the agency. Read the second one. - An audit from an agency that wants your business is only useful if every finding comes with the place in the account where you can see it yourself. An independent paid ads audit before you renew should establish five things, in this order: that you own your Google and Meta accounts outright, that the conversion tracking counts things that make you money, what the results look like once brand searches are taken out, whether anyone has actually worked the account week to week, and whether the structure fits how your business sells. If those five hold up, renew with a sharper brief. If they don't, you've found out before signing for another stretch rather than halfway through it. That's the whole answer. The rest of this piece is how to check each one, written for the founder or marketing head who has to make the call and would rather not take anybody's word for it, ours included. ![The paid ads audit as five checks in order, from account ownership to campaign structure](/images/blog/paid-ads-audit-before-renewing-your-agency-audit-order.svg "Each check only means something once the one above it has passed, which is why the order matters more than the list.") ## Why the audit has to happen before the renewal, not after The audit belongs in the weeks before your notice period starts, because that is the only point at which its findings cost the agency anything. After you've signed, a list of problems becomes a list of promises to fix them, and you're paying for the fixing. Before you sign, the same list is evidence for a decision you still get to make. There's a second, quieter reason. Most founders we speak to don't suspect their agency of anything dramatic. They have a feeling that the account plateaued a while ago, that the monthly reports have started to look alike, and that nobody can quite explain what changed last quarter. That feeling is worth testing, because "it's fine" and "it's drifting" look identical from inside a PDF. If the bigger question is whether an agency is the right model for you at all, that's covered in [should I use a paid ads agency](/should-i-use-a-paid-ads-agency/). This piece assumes you have one and are deciding whether to keep it. ## Check one: who owns the accounts Before anything else, confirm that the Google Ads account, the Meta ad account, the pixel, the Merchant Centre feed and the analytics property all belong to your business, with at least one person on your side holding admin access. If the agency owns any of them, the rest of the audit is academic, because leaving would mean starting again with no history. This matters more on Google than people expect. [Google's own help page on access levels](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9978556?hl=en-GB) (read 7 October 2026) explains that when a manager account has ownership of your account, admins on that manager account can also edit user access, managers and product links within it. That's normal for an agency and perfectly fine while everyone is happy. It's less fine if nobody at your company is an admin, and the same page warns that an account with only one administrator can lose access to its tags if that person becomes unavailable. So the audit should record, for each platform: - who the admins are, by name, and which of them work for you - which business owns each asset: ad account, pixel, product feed, analytics property - whether the agency's access could be removed tomorrow without breaking anything It's dull work. It's also the check that decides whether the other four are worth doing. ![A warehouse worker checks boxed ceramic lamps against a clipboard beside an open roller door on a wet street](/images/blog/paid-ads-audit-before-renewing-your-agency-hero-04.jpg) ## Check two: is the tracking counting the right thing Conversion tracking decides what the platforms optimise towards, so a reviewer has to read the conversion list before reading a single result. The question isn't "is tracking installed?" but "does each counted conversion represent money, or a step towards it you'd genuinely pay for?" It's the check most likely to change how every other number reads. For e-commerce, that means purchases carrying their real value, with no add-to-basket or page-view actions sitting among the primary conversions where they inflate the return. For SaaS and B2B it means lead quality. Students, job seekers and free-tool hunters fill in forms too, and an account optimised for raw form fills will cheerfully buy more of them. The way we run accounts, the platforms are fed qualified demos and paying users through offline conversion tracking back to the CRM, and that's in place before a pound is spent. A good reviewer will ask to see what the conversions actually were: last month's leads and what became of them, or orders matched against the purchases the platform claims. If your agency has never asked you for that data, that's a finding in itself. Our guide to [knowing whether your paid ads are working](/how-to-know-if-your-paid-ads-are-working/) goes further into the tracking setup. ## Check three: take brand out and look at what is left Once you trust the tracking, split the results into brand and non-brand before judging them. Brand searches come from people who already know your name, so they convert cheaply and well, and an account that blends them into the headline numbers can look healthy while the growth campaigns quietly lose money. How we run accounts: brand campaigns are separated and kept small, about 5% of a SaaS budget, and brand conversions are never counted as growth. A reviewer should report cost per acquisition and return on ad spend with brand removed, and show that trend across the whole contract. If the non-brand line has been flat or falling while the blended figure looks fine, you've found the plateau you were feeling. We've written about why [a Google Ads brand campaign flatters an account](/google-ads-brand-campaign-problem/), and our own research on [cheap clicks versus expensive ones](/cpa-vs-cpc-are-cheap-clicks-better/) shows how far apart brand and non-brand acquisition costs sit in real B2B accounts. ![A founder places a ceramic table lamp on an oak side table while a photographer crouches to shoot it in a studio](/images/blog/paid-ads-audit-before-renewing-your-agency-hero-07.jpg) ## Check four: did anyone actually manage the account This is the check that answers the renewal question most directly. Both Google and Meta keep a log of every edit, and a reviewer should read it for the whole contract, looking for a steady rhythm of small, deliberate changes rather than a flurry at launch followed by silence. The monthly report tells you what the agency wants you to see; the log tells you what it did. The setup is a fraction of the job. In the way we work, the money is made in the weekly, monthly and quarterly lever checks on every platform, and that cadence should be visible in the history. Long gaps, or edits bunched into the days before each monthly call, tell their own story. ### On Google Read the search terms behind the spend, not just the keywords. We default to phrase match, keep exact match for brand and almost never use broad, so an account running mostly broad match with thin negative lists deserves a question. Check the budget steps too: we never more than double an account's spend inside a single month, because scaling on one good week tends to buy the worst traffic on offer. Finally, look for recommendations accepted wholesale. Platform reps' advice is written for the platform's revenue, which is why we wrote up [how to undo Google ad rep advice](/google-ad-rep-advice-sucks-how-to-undo-it/). ### On Meta Creative is the main lever on Meta, so the log should show new ads going in regularly, not the same three running since spring. When performance has dropped, a good reviewer works through the suspects in order: creative fatigue, frequency, budget jumps, stock-outs and toxic comments left unmoderated. For a homeware brand we'd also expect a retargeting window of around 45 days and a progressive-discount carousel for warm audiences. If neither exists, ask why. ## Check five: does the structure fit the business The last check asks whether the account is built the way your business makes money. A structure that suits a low-priced impulse buy is wrong for a premium sofa, and one built for a self-serve trial is wrong for a sales-led B2B product. The reviewer should be able to say what each campaign is for and why the budget sits where it does. We hold accounts against a few benchmarks from our own method. None is a law, and a good agency may have reasons to differ, but it should be able to give them. For B2B SaaS the usual mix is about 75% Google and 25% LinkedIn, because LinkedIn creates the demand that Google later converts and is never run on its own. For e-commerce on Google, Standard Shopping is the go-to with Performance Max as an experiment beside it, and the split runs roughly 60% to top-performing products, 30% to a catch-all campaign and 10% to brand. Once an account is past testing, about 80% of spend sits behind proven winners and 20% goes into new tests. ![Paid ads audit benchmarks: 75/25 Google and LinkedIn for SaaS, 60/30/10 Shopping split, 80/20 winners and tests](/images/blog/paid-ads-audit-before-renewing-your-agency-splits.svg "Three splits a reviewer can compare with your account in a minute. A big gap is a question for the agency, not a verdict.") If the account is one Performance Max campaign doing everything, or a lone LinkedIn campaign carrying a B2B budget, that's worth a direct question. For the layout we'd use on a software account, see our [complete SaaS ads campaign structure](/complete-saas-ads-campaign-structure/). ![Three people from a small software company talk over coffee at a table by a sash window in a brick office](/images/blog/paid-ads-audit-before-renewing-your-agency-hero-05.jpg) ## Who should run the review, and how to read one from an agency that wants your account The honest answer is that a truly neutral review is rare. Freelancers, consultants and agencies who audit accounts usually do it because they'd like to run them, and we're no exception: our account audit is free because some of the people who take it become clients. That doesn't make a review worthless. It means you judge it on evidence rather than tone. Ask for every finding to come with its location: which campaign, which date in the change history, which conversion action, which search term. Anything you can open the account and see for yourself is a fact. Anything you can't is an opinion, and opinions from someone pitching are worth less. Be wary of a review that finds everything wrong, and just as wary of one that finds nothing. The useful ones rank three or four problems by how much money each is costing and say plainly what's fine. It's also fair to let your current agency respond. A good one will answer each point with its reasoning, and sometimes the reasoning is sound. If you're weighing a different model altogether, our comparison of [agency, freelancer and in-house PPC](/ppc-agency-vs-freelancer-vs-in-house/) sets out the trade-offs. ## Renew, renegotiate or move Most audits land in one of three places. If ownership, tracking and the change history are clean and the non-brand trend is heading the right way, renew, and use the findings as next quarter's brief. If the foundations are sound but the management has drifted, renegotiate: put the cadence of checks in writing, agree what good non-brand performance looks like, and set a review date well before the next renewal. If the agency owns your assets, the tracking counts the wrong thing or the log shows months of silence, move. Ownership is the one to fix first, before you give notice, so the history comes with you. If you're looking at who takes over, our [homeware paid ads agency](/homeware-paid-ads-agency/) and [SaaS paid ads agency](/saas-paid-ads-agency/) pages set out how we'd run yours, with the [Google advertising](/google-advertising-agency/) and [Meta advertising](/meta-paid-advertising-agency/) pages covering each platform. ## Sign the renewal on evidence, not on a feeling The pre-renewal audit isn't about catching anybody out. It replaces "I think it's fine" with five answers you can check for yourself: who owns the accounts, what counts as a conversion, how the account performs without brand, whether anyone has worked it, and whether its structure fits how you make money. Book it a few weeks before your notice period, ask for evidence with every finding, and give your agency the chance to answer. If you'd like us to run those five checks on your Google and Meta accounts before you decide, [book a free account audit](/get-in-touch/) and ask us to show you where each finding lives in the account. ## Frequently asked questions ### How far back should a paid ads audit look? At least to the start of the current contract, and ideally the quarter before it too, so you can compare the account before and after the agency's changes. A review of the last 30 days tells you about the last 30 days, which is rarely the reason you are deciding whether to renew. ### Should I tell my current agency I am getting a second opinion? Yes. A good agency expects it and will answer the findings point by point, often with context the reviewer could not see. If someone at your company holds admin access you can grant a reviewer access yourself, so you need the agency's cooperation for the explanations, not its permission. ### What access does an auditor need to my Google Ads account? Read only is enough. Google's help page on access levels, read 7 October 2026, says read-only users can view campaigns, run campaign performance reports and see users, managers and product links, but cannot edit campaigns. For Meta and analytics, ask for the lowest permission that still shows the whole account. ### Does an ads audit cover the website and landing pages? It should look at the pages the ads send people to, because a campaign cannot outsell its landing page. It should not turn into a quote for a rebuild. If the site and the offer convert nobody today, ads will not change that, and an honest reviewer says so before suggesting more spend. ### What does it cost to move to Snowball after an audit? The account audit itself is free. If you then work with us, fees run from £1,749 per platform per month, with a three-month commitment, then one month's rolling notice, and a minimum ad spend of £2,500 a month per platform.