Before you renew a performance marketing agency, ask for four things: your own admin login to the ad accounts with written confirmation of who owns them, a list of what counts as a conversion, spend set against enquiries and revenue from your own records, and the scope of the work in writing. An agency that is reluctant to provide any of them is telling you something before the renewal does.
This is written for a UK owner or marketing lead who has been paying an agency for a year or more and is not sure what the money bought. You do not need to be technical to run the checks below. You need access, a few hours, and the willingness to ask plain questions.
One disclosure first. Rogue is a performance marketing agency too, so weigh what we say accordingly. The checklist works whoever you ask, and you can run all of it without us.
What to ask for before you sign again
Four requests, in the order we would make them.
- Your own admin access, and who owns each account. Google Ads has several access levels: read-only users can view campaigns and run reports, standard users can also edit campaigns, and admins can manage users and unlink a manager account. Read-only is enough to look. Admin is what lets you control who else has access. Do the same on Meta: find out which business account owns your ad account, your Pixel and your Conversions API setup, and make sure you are an admin of it. Ask the agency to confirm all of this in writing.
- A list of your conversion actions. For each one: what it counts, what fires it, whether it is primary or secondary, and what value it carries. Ask for it as a document, not a screen share.
- Spend, enquiries and revenue side by side. By campaign, for the last few months, with the enquiry and revenue columns coming from your CRM or sales records, not from the ad platform.
- The scope in writing. What the fee covers, what is out of scope, and how performance is judged. Our guide to Google Ads costs in the UK covers the common fee structures if you are not sure what you are paying for.
Treat the first request as a test. If you cannot get your own access to an account you pay for, nothing else on this list matters until that is fixed.
Check the tracking is honest
Tracking is a common place for accounts to go wrong, and it is the part an agency can most easily mark its own homework on. Smart Bidding optimises toward whatever conversion data it receives, so a flawed signal does damage quietly. We cover the common failures in how to fix Google Ads conversion tracking. For a renewal, four checks are enough.
Are conversions defined as something that matters? A conversion should be a qualified enquiry, a booked call or a sale. A contact form that counts when the page loads, rather than when it is submitted, or a button click treated as a lead, makes every report look better than the business is doing. Open the conversion list from request two and read each line as if you were a stranger.
Is each conversion counted once? Duplicated conversion actions overcount results and teach the bidder the wrong lesson. On Meta, the same event can arrive twice, once from the browser Pixel and once from the Conversions API. Meta matches events by event ID and name and generally keeps the one it receives first, so the IDs need to match across both. Ask the agency how it handles this. A confident, specific answer is a good sign.
Is Consent Mode configured? Google describes consent mode as a way for your tags to adjust their behaviour according to the visitor’s consent choices, and it can be set up in a basic or an advanced way. The choice affects how much of your traffic your ad account can learn from. We explain the effect on bidding in the consent gap. Whether and how you ask for consent is a legal question for you and your adviser, so the aim here is only to confirm that the measurement side was set up deliberately, not left on defaults.
If you sell offline, do closed deals come back? Many UK firms close work by phone, on a quote or in a sales call. Google’s offline conversion import is built for this: a click ID captured at the enquiry is returned to Google Ads later, with the type of conversion and when it happened, so the platform can see what happened after the click. Google’s help page says offline conversion uploads through the Google Ads API were due to move to its Data Manager API from 15 June 2026, and recommends starting with enhanced conversions for leads if you have not adopted offline import. Ask which route your agency uses and whether it still works. Our guide to value-based bidding shows how offline results change what the bidder prioritises.
A 30 minute reconciliation
This is the single most useful test, and it needs no tools.
- Pick one full calendar month.
- List every enquiry and sale from that month from your CRM, your inbox and your phone log. Note where each one says it came from.
- Put that next to the conversions and revenue the ad platform reports for the same month.
- Write down the gap, in either direction.
A gap is normal. Platforms and CRMs count differently, and some enquiries arrive through channels no one tagged. What matters is whether the agency can explain it. If the platform reports more leads than your inbox and CRM can account for, that difference is the first thing to run down. If your CRM shows more than the platform, tracking is probably missing something, and the bidder is learning from less than it should.
Spend versus results
Once you trust the tracking, look at where the money goes.
Ask for results by campaign type, and separate brand search (people already looking for you) from non-brand. Brand campaigns tend to look excellent because they catch demand that already exists. Automated campaign types can blur the line: as we explain in when to use Performance Max, branded traffic converted through Performance Max can obscure true upper-funnel performance and inflate reported return on ad spend. If a renewal pitch leans on a headline return figure, ask how much of it is brand.
Then ask for the measure that matters to you. Cost per lead is a start. Cost per qualified lead, or revenue against spend, is better. If the agency can only report impressions, clicks and the platform’s own return figure, that is a reporting gap, not a performance result.
Red flags
None of these proves bad faith. Each is a reason to ask a question before you renew.
- No access. You cannot get admin on your own accounts, or the agency’s manager account is the only admin.
- Reporting that stops at clicks. Dashboards full of impressions, click-through rate and platform return, with nothing tied to enquiries or revenue.
- Conversions that jumped after a tracking change. A sudden rise straight after someone touched the tags is worth a question before it is worth a celebration. It can mean double counting.
- Definitions that change without notice. What counts as a lead is not the same as it was six months ago, and nobody told you.
- Vague answers about automation. The agency cannot explain what Performance Max or Google’s AI Max is doing with your budget, or what inputs it has been given.
- No clear way out. A long term with no break clause, and no agreed handover of the accounts and the data if you leave.
When an independent audit is worth it
An independent audit is worth paying for in three situations: a renewal is coming and the platform numbers do not match your own records, the agency is the only source of your reporting, or your spend is large enough that one fixed setting would repay the cost of looking.
It is not always worth it. On a small budget with a handful of conversions a month, working through this checklist yourself, plus the seven-step Google Ads audit framework, may be all you need.
Our paid ads audit is a fixed-price review of your Google and Meta accounts, delivered in 48 hours. You give us read-only access, and we do not change anything without your sign-off. The plan is yours to keep whether or not you work with us afterwards, and if you appoint us to manage the account within 30 days, the full fee is credited against your first month. The page is written for brands spending £5,000 to £50,000+ a month on Google or Meta. If you would like to see what the ongoing work looks like, it is described on our performance marketing page.
If a renewal date is approaching, book a 30 minute call and tell us what you are paying for now. We will tell you plainly whether an audit would be worth the money in your case.