Paid search can be the cleanest line from budget to business impact, or it can be a slow leak that drains money and momentum. The difference usually comes down to the working relationship and rigor of your Paid Search Agency. I have sat on both sides of the table: in-house marketing teams trying to wring performance from limited budgets, and agency teams managing dozens of accounts with competing demands. When the partnership clicks, you see disciplined experimentation, consistent communication, and measurable progress in metrics that matter to the business. When it doesn’t, performance stalls, trust erodes, and you start to wonder if a fresh set of hands would change the trajectory.
Switching agencies is disruptive. It costs time, energy, and often money. But staying with a paid search company that has drifted into autopilot is more expensive. If you are on the fence, these five red flags will help you assess whether your current partner is still earning the right to manage your spend, or whether it is time to plan a transition.
Red Flag 1: Strategy Hasn’t Evolved, Even Though the Market Has
Paid search does not stand still. Platforms change auction dynamics, roll out new campaign types, and retire beloved controls. Competitors pivot offers, seasonality shifts, and your own product mix evolves. If your agency’s strategy looks the same as it did nine months ago, performance is probably lagging behind what’s possible.
A common pattern: the agency launches a set of brand, non-brand, and competitor campaigns with a few ad groups per product line. Initial wins show up as a drop in cost per conversion. Then, nothing changes except the occasional budget shuffle. No restructuring as match types behave differently, no systematic testing of creative, no movement toward value-based bidding once you have enough conversion data. The account ends up fossilized in a past moment.
A strong Paid Search Agency behaves more like a trading desk than a set-and-forget vendor. They document hypotheses, prioritize tests, and show you what they killed, what they kept, and why. In retail, that might be shifting from manual CPC with tight match types to Performance Max with a clear asset strategy and robust negative keyword hygiene layered through brand exclusions and feed governance. In B2B, it might mean building a keyword strategy around pain and job-to-be-done terms, moving to enhanced conversions, and optimizing to pipeline value once the CRM connection is stable.
Look for evidence in your reports. Do you see a clear testing roadmap with dates, owners, and expected outcomes? Are insights tethered to your business calendar, like product launches, peak season, or sales targets? If you’ve grown fivefold in revenue but your campaign structure still mirrors your 2022 SKU taxonomy, your agency is not steering.
Red Flag 2: Reporting Is Long on Vanity Metrics, Short on Business Meaning
Impressions, clicks, and click-through rate are useful in context. On their own, they can distract from what matters. You should hear more about qualified leads, assisted revenue, margin, and payback period than top-line platform numbers. If your agency’s “wins” revolve around lower CPC without a discussion of conversion quality, you are seeing surface-level optimization.
I once audited an account where the agency celebrated a 30 percent reduction in CPA over two quarters. Fantastic, until we traced conversions back to the CRM and discovered the lead-to-opportunity rate had fallen by half. The net effect was fewer closed deals and higher cost per opportunity. The optimization had over-weighted high-intent but low-fit queries because the conversion action was an unqualified form submission. No suppression of student emails, no filtering for company size, no progressive profiling to gauge intent. They optimized the wrong outcome.
The fix was not complicated. We tightened the conversion definition to include marketing-qualified thresholds, enabled enhanced conversions, pushed conversion values to reflect expected revenue by channel and offer, and moved to target ROAS bidding with guardrails. Performance improved, and sales stopped chasing dead-end leads. But the lesson stuck: the wrong metrics invite the wrong behavior.
A credible paid search company will ask for access to your analytics and CRM, argue for better conversion plumbing, and report beyond the platform. If they seem uncomfortable moving the conversation out of Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising, they might not be equipped to tie media to revenue.
Red Flag 3: You Can’t Get Straight Answers About Budget, Fees, or Changes
Transparency is easy when things go well. The real test is when performance dips, a platform update disrupts your baseline, or the finance team asks you to trim spend without losing pipeline. If your agency dodges questions or hides behind jargon, something is off.
Budget clarity matters because paid search is dynamic. You should know which campaigns absorb incremental budget and why, what caps are in place to protect CPC spikes, and how competitive shifts are affecting impression share. You should also have a clear picture of agency fees. If media spend goes up, do fees scale linearly or does the retainer stay flat? Are there hidden add-ons for landing page tests or feed optimization? If your monthly invoice keeps growing while the scope hasn’t changed, press for detail.
I once reviewed a setup where the agency billed a premium for “proprietary technology.” When we peeled the onion, the tech was a Looker Studio dashboard and a simple Google Sheets script to pull search term data. Neither was wrong, but neither justified a 20 percent uplift. The client switched to a firm that priced on scope and outcomes, not opaque tools, and reallocated budget to creative testing where it actually moved results.
The same applies to change logs. You should be able to trace why performance moved: bid strategy adjustments, negative keyword expansions, auction insights, budget reallocation, landing page updates, or macro shifts like seasonality. When weekly updates read like weather reports without a map of what changed, it is time to ask tougher questions.
Red Flag 4: Creative and Landing Pages Are an Afterthought
You can’t outbid bad creative. The best media strategy will stall if your ad copy, assets, and landing pages fail to connect. Too many agencies treat creative as a quarterly chore rather than a weekly habit. They rotate two or three headlines, ignore extensions, and send non-brand traffic to a generic page with a slow hero image and a form that asks for everything except a blood type.
The fix starts with a simple truth: search intent is elastic. A buyer typing “best enterprise payroll software” is not the same as a buyer typing your brand name plus pricing. Both can be valuable, but they need different promises, proof, and friction levels. If the same landing experience serves both, you will either under-qualify or under-convert.
The best teams adopt a creative testing muscle. They build thematic variations tied to benefits, objections, and trigger events, not just feature lists. They use ad customizers to match offers to queries and geos. They manage assets in Performance Max and demand high-quality images and videos that can carry the message, not just stock footage with your logo slapped on. And they coordinate with your web team to test form fields, pulled-through social proof, and page speed. I have seen conversion rates double just by adding a short, benefit-led subhead above the form and placing two relevant logos near the CTA.
There is a budget angle too. Creative quality changes your effective bid. Better relevance raises quality score, lowers CPC, and expands reach at the same cost. If your Paid Search Agency talks about bids and budgets but rarely brings fresh copy, assets, and landing hypotheses, you are paying a tax you don’t need to pay.
Red Flag 5: You Feel Managed, Not Advised
When the agency relationship deteriorates, meetings turn into status updates and slide walkthroughs. You hear what happened last week, not what should happen next week. You see incremental tweaks, not informed bets. That is the heart of the problem. You hired a partner to help you win in a moving market, not to narrate performance.
Advisory shows up in small, tangible ways. The agency flags that your competitors pushed aggressive price-match language and recommends a counter-position grounded in your fulfillment advantage. They notice a spike in mobile queries for installation support and suggest a “buy plus install” bundle with a local extension test. They bring a forecast that shows how much budget is needed to win your peak season, along with what levers to pull if you can’t fund the full plan. They call out when your product feed is the bottleneck, not the media, and they help you get it fixed.
I once worked with a B2B SaaS client in workforce management. The agency at the time spent most calls defending blended CPA trends. Once a new team took over, they PPC Company pulled pipeline data, saw a lag in enterprise-stage progression, and recommended shifting 15 percent of spend to mid-funnel competitor-comparison queries while building a CIO-oriented landing page with procurement language and security proof. The immediate result was fewer leads, but 30 percent more qualified opportunities within two months. That is what advice looks like: trade-offs with a thesis, and the courage to pursue quality over volume.
How to Diagnose These Red Flags Without Burning the Relationship
Nobody wants to blindside a partner. If you are seeing one or more of these signals, run a structured check. The goal is to confirm whether you can course-correct together or whether you need a new paid search company to take the reins.
Here is a short, practical diagnostic you can complete within two weeks:
- Ask for a 90-day testing roadmap that includes hypotheses, success metrics, sample sizes, and dependency owners, along with the last three months of test results and learnings. Request a full conversion audit: what counts as a conversion, how enhanced conversions or offline imports are configured, whether values are passed, and what the current optimization event is for each campaign. Require a transparent budget and fee breakdown: media by network and campaign, platform credits, third-party tool costs, and agency fees by activity, not just a lump sum. Review creative velocity: how many new ad variants, assets, and landing tests have launched per month, with performance deltas attributed to creative rather than bid changes. Compare platform metrics to business outcomes: map leads to opportunities and revenue, and require the agency to explain gaps, lags, and attribution differences.
If the agency embraces this process, fills the gaps, and comes back with a plan that aligns to your real business goals, you may not need to switch. If they stall, offer excuses, or provide partial answers, you have your confirmation.
What a High-Performing Paid Search Partnership Actually Looks Like
It helps to picture the target state. The best agencies operate with a few recognizable habits that keep the work moving and the relationship healthy.
They anchor on business outcomes. Media strategy ladders up to revenue, margin, and pipeline quality. They work with incomplete data, but they push to improve it. They help you decide which conversion event to optimize for now, and when it makes sense to step up to a more valuable signal even if volume dips.
They operationalize testing. There is a log of tests with clear statuses: pending, running, concluded, deprecated. Winning experiments graduate into the standard, and learnings accumulate rather than vanish. This discipline matters more than any single tactic.
They coordinate the full funnel. Search works best when organic, paid social, and lifecycle marketing pull in the same direction. A strong Paid Search Agency will request your email sequences, collaborate on landing page strategy with the web team, and ensure that message-market fit remains tight across channels.
They show their work. Change logs are complete. Anomalies are investigated. Forecasts are caveated realistically, with scenario ranges rather than single-point predictions. If they are moving to Performance Max, they explain how they will segment asset groups, protect brand, and measure incrementality using geography holdouts or query mapping to the extent available.
They maintain creative momentum. Every month, you see fresh headlines and descriptions, adjusted for seasonality and new claims you can defend. You see new assets for PMax and Discovery. Landing pages get iteration, not just traffic.
I once saw this play out with a DTC brand in home fitness. The agency proposed three creative themes aligned to distinct intents: rapid-results, small-space living, and injury recovery. They paired these with separate landing pages and a common offer calendar. They measured lift not just in platform-reported conversions, but in AOV and return rates over a 30-day window. The rapid-results concept drove the most volume, but the small-space theme delivered the best margin and lowest return rate. Budget followed outcomes, not headlines, and year-over-year paid search revenue grew 42 percent with stable spend.
Edge Cases Where a Switch Might Not Help
Sometimes the frustration is real but the fix is elsewhere. These scenarios often masquerade CaliNetworks as agency problems, but changing partners won’t solve the core issue.
Your conversion plumbing is broken. If your tracking is inconsistent, form spam runs wild, or CRM mapping drops half your leads, any optimization is guesswork. No agency can reliably improve performance without stable signals. Address data quality first, then hold the agency accountable for what they can control.
Your offer is out of step with the market. In crowded categories, price and proof carry more weight than clever bidding. If your free trial requires a credit card and competitors offer a frictionless demo, expect to pay a premium for each sign-up, no matter who runs the media. Consider improving the offer before you swap partners.
Your budget is mismatched to your goals. Expecting enterprise pipeline at SMB budgets yields frustration with any team. A good agency should set expectations early. If they did and you pressed ahead anyway, the problem might be constraints, not execution.
Your internal team cannot action recommendations. If landing page updates take months or legal reviews stall ad changes for weeks, creative velocity dies. The best agencies can adapt, but there’s a floor. Improve internal throughput, then reassess the partnership.
If you recognize one of these, fix it in parallel. A better agency can help you diagnose and navigate constraints, but even the best will struggle if the fundamentals block progress.
Planning a Smooth Transition If You Decide to Switch
When the red flags outweigh the fixes, plan the change with intent. Paid search is live, and you do not want to tear down working elements or trigger costly learning resets unless necessary.
Start by securing access and assets. Ensure your company owns the ad accounts, conversion tags, product feeds, audiences, and creative assets. If the agency insists on running campaigns in their master account, push for a migration to your own environment before you part ways. Shared ownership is the most common pain point I see during transitions.
Pick transition windows that are gentle. Avoid peak season or key launches. If that is impossible, preserve campaign IDs and structures where performance is stable while you layer improvements gradually. Changing bid strategies, conversion events, and structure all at once will trigger complete relearning and make performance unpredictable.
Define success for the first 60 days. Most transitions need a stabilization phase. Make it explicit. Ask the new team to outline what should be held steady, what will be tested immediately, and what outcomes they expect. A realistic plan might target parity for the first two to three weeks, then a handful of controlled tests to move key metrics. Judge the new partner on the quality of thinking and early signal, not a miraculous short-term spike.
Communicate with stakeholders. Sales hates surprises. Let them know why some metrics may wobble and when they can expect lead quality and volume to normalize. If you change conversion definitions, explain the effect on dashboards. Confidence holds when people understand the plan.
Finally, set the cadence. Agree on weekly standups, monthly strategy reviews, and quarterly planning. Ask the new agency to propose an agenda that dedicates time to insights and actions, not just reporting. If they can articulate how meetings turn into movement, you will feel the difference quickly.
Questions Worth Asking a Prospective Agency
Use the red flags as a lens for your vetting. A few precise questions reveal how a team thinks, not just how they pitch.
- What is your process for deciding which conversion event each campaign should optimize for, and how often do you revisit that choice? Show us the last three tests you ran for a client like us. What did you expect, what happened, and what did you change as a result? How do you design landing page experiments when web resources are constrained, and how do you attribute impact to creative versus bids? When auction dynamics or platform features shift, how do you adjust budgets and structures? Provide a recent example and the outcome. What are the leading indicators you watch when scaling spend so we don’t chase volume at the expense of efficiency or quality?
You will hear two kinds of answers. One variety will be buzzword-heavy, tool-centric, and noncommittal on trade-offs. The other will be specific, show their math, and discuss failure openly. Choose the second.
The Cost of Waiting Too Long
Every month with an underperforming agency compounds the loss. Money leaves the account without stacking learnings. Creative stagnates. Competitors outrun you in auctions and in perception. Your team spends cycles defending what should be self-evident if the work were working.
The flip side is encouraging. When you fix the partnership, even modest accounts unlock hidden efficiency. I have seen 10 to 20 percent improvements in cost per qualified lead within six weeks just by tightening conversion signals and refreshing creative. I have seen revenue lift of 25 to 40 percent year over year with flat budgets after a disciplined rebuild, particularly when the new team collaborates across channels and owns both media and landing page optimization.
You do not need perfection. You need a Paid Search Agency that treats your budget like their own money, thinks clearly, experiments rigorously, and tells you the truth when the data disagrees with the plan. If your current partner shows the opposite, the five red flags above are not just warnings. They are a permission slip to make a change.