Most business owners who go looking for a new Google Ads specialist in Geelong are not angry. They are just unsure. The reports look fine, the invoice arrives on time, and leads trickle in, but nobody can say whether the account is being actively managed or quietly left alone.
The good news is that you do not need to be an expert to find out. Google Ads keeps a record of almost everything, and most of it sits in plain view once you know where to look. Below are six checks you can run yourself this afternoon. If your current manager can answer all six comfortably, they are doing the work. If they cannot, you have your answer without needing a second opinion.
Why an idle account gets expensive quickly
Australian internet advertising grew 11.5% year on year to reach $18.4 billion in calendar year 2025, according to the IAB Australia Internet Advertising Revenue Report prepared by PwC. Search advertising alone hit $8.0 billion, also up 11.5% and a new annual high.
More money chasing the same clicks means costs drift upward. An account that has not been touched in months is not holding steady, it is slowly getting worse while everyone around it improves. That is the real cost of set-and-forget AdWords management, whatever it happens to be called on the invoice.
Can they show you the last 90 days of search terms?
This is the first question, and it separates the managers from the invoicers.
A keyword is what your advertiser added to the account. A search term is what a real person actually typed into Google. They are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where budget disappears. Google’s own example in the search terms report documentation is a broad match keyword like “flowers” triggering ads for “red roses” and “purple orchids”, products the advertiser may not even sell. Locally, that looks like a Geelong trade business paying for people searching how to do the job themselves, or looking for a job.
You will find it under Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms. Ask your manager to walk you through the last 90 days. There is also a “Keyword” column showing which of your keywords matched each search, and it is switched off by default. If it has never been turned on, that tells you something.
Are negative keywords still being added?
Negative keywords are the visible output of search terms work. A healthy account has a list that has grown steadily over time, with shared lists applied across campaigns, not one built at launch and never revisited.
Be careful with volume as a defence. “We’ve added 400 negatives” sounds impressive, but Google notes that negative keywords automatically account for casing and misspellings, so padding a list with variations achieves nothing. What matters is whether the wasteful searches you can see in the report have actually been excluded.
Are your conversion actions set up properly?
This is where most underserviced accounts quietly fail, and it is worth understanding because it affects everything else.
Google splits conversion actions into primary and secondary. Primary actions report in the “Conversions” column and are used for bidding. Secondary actions are observation only, reporting in “All conversions” without influencing bidding. Google is direct about this, saying that configuring actions correctly is critical, because misconfiguring them stops Smart Bidding from optimising properly.
Here is the trap. Conversions created in Google Analytics and shared into Google Ads arrive as secondary by default, and can only be switched to primary inside Google Ads. Plenty of accounts have been bidding towards nothing useful for months because of that one setting.
Then ask the simple version of the question. Is a page view being counted as a lead? Are phone calls and form fills separated? Is anything counted twice? Once the numbers in that column are real, you can judge them properly against what a good cost per lead from Google Ads actually looks like for your industry.
What does the change history say?
Change history is the timesheet your manager may not realise you can read.
Google Ads records changes to your account, campaigns and ad groups for the past two years. You can filter by date and change type, and see each change plotted against impressions, clicks, conversions, click-through rate and cost, so you can compare what was done with what happened next. If other people have their own logins, the “User” column shows the email address of whoever made each change. Edits made through the Google Ads API by third-party tools appear under the tool’s name, and automated changes can show as “Google Ads system”.
Find it under Campaigns, then Change history. If your agreement mentions ongoing optimisation and the last human-made edit was five months ago, you have your evidence in writing.
One fair caveat. Constant fiddling is also a problem. Smart Bidding needs a learning period of roughly 7 to 14 days, and Google advises against frequently changing budgets, targets or conversion goals during it, because that resets the clock. A quiet fortnight after a deliberate change is good practice, not neglect.
Do the ads and landing pages actually match?
The search terms report is also meant to shape your ads and landing pages, not just your negative keyword list. If someone searches for a specific Geelong service, sees an ad promising exactly that, then lands on a generic national homepage, no bidding strategy will save the campaign.
Walk through it yourself as a customer would. Search, click, and see whether the page answers the question you asked. When we took over the account for Too Hot To Handle, a Geelong heating and cooling business burnt by previous agencies, fixing the join between ads, local relevance and the website was a large part of the improvement. You can read how that campaign came together.
Who actually owns the account?
Leave this one until you are seriously considering a change, then check it carefully.
A Google Ads account can have only one owner. If a manager account creates a new account for you, that manager automatically becomes the owner. If they link an account you already had, they do not get ownership unless it is granted. Ownership also passes upward to any manager accounts above them.
The reassuring part is that Google is clear that ownership does not take your data or your administrative rights away. Your account still owns its data, and you can always remove a manager by unlinking them. Check it under Admin, then Access and security, then Managers. The real risk is an account created in an agency’s name, because your years of conversion history, the data that trains your bidding, sit inside it.
What good Google Ads management in Geelong looks like
A specialist worth paying should be able to answer all six of those questions without preparation, show you the change history behind their reporting, and explain their decisions in plain English rather than platform jargon. Monthly reporting is fine if it reports on decisions and what those decisions produced. Weekly reporting is noise if nothing changed.
We have been doing this for ten years from our Geelong office as a certified Google Ads Partner. If you would like a second set of eyes on your account, our Google Ads Geelong team is happy to run these checks with you and tell you honestly what we find, whether or not you move your account. It also helps to know the mistakes we see most often before your next review meeting.
