Switching Google Ads agencies can improve your paid search performance, but only if you review the right things before you make the move. A rushed transition can erase campaign history, break conversion tracking, and cost you months of progress — even when your frustration with the current agency is completely justified.
This guide is written for business owners and marketing decision-makers across the United States who are seriously evaluating whether to stay with their current PPC management or find a more experienced search engine marketing partner. It covers what to review before you decide, what to secure before the current agency leaves, and what to verify before you sign with anyone new.
At Adwest, we have managed Google Ads campaigns since 1997. Our team has worked with advertisers since Google’s earliest days, with more than 25 years of experience in search engine marketing, PPC, SEO, GEO, and AEO. We have seen what happens when businesses switch agencies well — and what happens when they do not prepare. This article reflects what we have learned.
Before you begin interviewing new agencies, it is worth asking whether your current performance problems are actually caused by the agency. This is not a comfortable question, but it is an honest one — and answering it correctly can save you from making the same mistake twice with a different partner.
Every Google Ads account has a change history log that records what optimizations have been made, when, and by whom. This is one of the most revealing tools available to you as an account owner or stakeholder.
If the change history shows consistent, strategic adjustments — bid changes, keyword additions, negative keyword updates, ad copy tests, audience refinements — that tells you the account is being actively managed. If the change history is sparse or shows only automated system changes with little human involvement, that is a meaningful signal about how much attention your campaigns are actually receiving.
You do not need to be a PPC expert to review change history. You need access to the account and a willingness to look at the pattern of activity over the last three to six months.
This is the section most agency-switching guides skip, because it is not flattering to anyone. But it matters.
Sometimes campaign performance is limited by factors the agency does not control:
A good agency should be telling you about these issues. If they have not, that itself may be a reason to consider a change. But it is worth investigating whether these factors are in play before assuming a new agency will deliver different results from the same foundation.
There are clear situations where switching agencies makes sense:
If several of these apply, a structured transition to a more accountable partner is worth pursuing — with the right preparation.
Before you notify your current agency or start conversations with a new one, review these areas inside your account. This is where the decision gets grounded in facts rather than frustration.
This is the single most consequential item on this list. If your agency owns the Google Ads account — meaning the account was created under their Google Ads manager account (MCC) and your business was never set up as the root owner — you may not be able to take the account with you when you leave.
Losing an agency-owned account means losing your campaign history, your quality score data, your keyword performance data, your audience lists, and your conversion history. Years of optimization data can disappear overnight.
What you need to verify:
If you discover that the agency owns the account, this does not necessarily mean they acted in bad faith — some agencies set up accounts this way as a default. But it is something you need to address before any transition begins, because it determines whether you can keep your campaign history or whether you are starting from scratch.
Conversion tracking is the foundation of every performance conversation you have with any agency. If tracking is broken, misconfigured, or counting the wrong actions, every metric you have been reviewing — cost per lead, return on ad spend, conversion rate — is unreliable.
Common conversion tracking problems include:
Before switching agencies, verify that what is being counted as a conversion actually represents a real business outcome — a qualified lead, a booked appointment, a sale. If the tracking is wrong, your dissatisfaction with performance may be based on inaccurate data.
Clicks, impressions, and click-through rate are activity metrics. They tell you that ads are running and people are clicking. They do not tell you whether your campaigns are generating business results.
The metrics that matter for evaluating agency performance are:
If your current agency’s reports focus heavily on clicks and impressions without connecting those numbers to business outcomes, that is a meaningful gap in accountability.
Open the change history in your Google Ads account and look at the last 90 days. What you are looking for is a pattern of deliberate, strategic activity: bid adjustments, keyword refinements, negative keyword additions, ad copy tests, budget reallocations, audience adjustments.
What you do not want to see is an account where the only changes are automated recommendations being accepted without review, or worse, no meaningful changes at all.
An actively managed account shows regular human decision-making. An account on autopilot shows that someone set it up and walked away.
Even without deep PPC expertise, you can review several structural elements:
If you are not sure how to interpret what you see, that is exactly the kind of thing a prospective new agency should be willing to walk through with you during an initial consultation.
Once you have decided to switch, there is a critical window between notifying your current agency and onboarding the new one. What you secure during this window determines how smooth — or how painful — the transition will be.
Make sure your business has admin-level access to:
Losing access to any of these platforms during a transition can break your tracking, disrupt your campaigns, and create gaps in your data that take weeks or months to recover from.
Google Ads billing should be tied to your business payment method, not the agency’s. If the agency is paying Google on your behalf and billing you separately, your campaigns will stop running the moment the agency relationship ends unless billing is transferred first.
Verify this before you give notice. Transferring billing mid-transition is possible but can cause unnecessary disruption.
Even if you own the account and plan to keep it, export key data before the transition:
Having this data in your own files ensures you have a baseline regardless of what happens during the transition.
Some agencies use custom scripts, automated rules, or proprietary tools that run inside the Google Ads account. When the agency leaves, those tools may stop working — and if you do not know they exist, you will not know what broke or why performance changed.
Ask your current agency to document any scripts, automations, or third-party integrations they have installed. Ask what will happen to those tools when manager access is removed.
Review your current agency contract for:
These are not legal technicalities. They are practical factors that determine how freely you can move and what you take with you. If anything in your contract is unclear, consider reviewing it with a qualified professional before initiating the switch.
This is a detail that most agency-switching guides overlook, and it can have a real impact on your results.
Google Ads campaigns go through learning phases — periods where the system is gathering data and optimizing delivery. If you switch agencies during an active learning phase, or during your peak season, you may experience a temporary performance dip that has nothing to do with either agency’s skill. It is simply the system recalibrating.
When possible, plan your transition during a period when:
A responsible agency — both the one you are leaving and the one you are joining — should understand this and help you plan accordingly.
Finding a new agency is not just about finding someone who says the right things in a sales meeting. It is about verifying that the agency operates in a way that addresses the specific problems that led you to switch in the first place.
Before you talk to any prospective agency, write down what success means for your business in specific terms:
Having these criteria defined in advance helps you evaluate agencies against your actual needs rather than their marketing materials.
Broad, open-ended questions tend to produce broad, rehearsed answers. More targeted questions give you a clearer picture of how the agency will actually handle your account day to day:
Pay attention not just to the answers, but to how the agency responds to being asked specific questions. An experienced partner will welcome the specificity. An agency that deflects or gives only broad reassurances may not operate with the transparency you need.
This is a practical consideration that rarely appears in agency-switching guides, but it directly affects the quality of attention your account receives. An account manager handling five to ten clients can give each one meaningful strategic time. An account manager handling 30 or more clients is, by necessity, managing most of them reactively.
Ask the question. The answer will tell you a lot about the agency’s operating model.
The first 90 days after switching agencies are the highest-risk period for your campaigns. A responsible agency should:
An agency that promises to tear down and reconstruct the entire account before taking time to understand what is already performing well is a red flag. Some of your current campaigns may be working. A good partner will recognize that and build from the existing foundation rather than discarding it.
The reporting problem is often what drives businesses to switch agencies in the first place. Before you sign with a new partner, be explicit about what you expect:
Clear, honest reporting is not a luxury. It is a basic requirement for a productive agency relationship.
If your current campaigns include Performance Max — and they likely do, since Google has been pushing this campaign type aggressively — there are additional considerations specific to a transition.
Performance Max campaigns combine Search, Display, Shopping, YouTube, Gmail, and Discovery into a single automated campaign. They are powerful but significantly less transparent than traditional Search campaigns. You have less visibility into which keywords are triggering your ads, which placements are driving results, and how the budget is being allocated across channels.
This makes Performance Max campaigns harder to audit, harder to evaluate, and harder to hand off between agencies. Before switching:
This is one of the areas where working with an experienced search engine marketing team matters most. The less transparent a campaign type is, the more important it is that the people managing it know what to look for and how to respond.
As you evaluate prospective agencies, it is worth asking about more than just Google Ads and traditional SEO. The search landscape is changing. AI-powered search tools — including Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and other large language model systems — are becoming part of how potential customers discover businesses and services.
This means your next agency relationship should account for emerging visibility needs, not just traditional paid and organic search. Specifically:
These are not replacements for PPC or SEO. They are complementary strategies that reflect where search technology is heading. Not every agency is equipped to support them, and not every agency will be honest about what is currently possible versus what is still emerging.
If AI-search visibility matters to your business — and for many industries, it increasingly does — ask your prospective agency what their approach is and what experience they have in this space.
Adwest has been providing digital marketing campaigns since 1997. Our team of search engine marketing professionals has worked with advertisers since Google’s earliest days, with more than 25 years of experience in Google Ads PPC, SEO, GEO, and AEO.
We share this not as a sales pitch, but because experience matters in the specific situations this article describes. When a business is evaluating whether to switch agencies, the transition process, the account audit, the conversion tracking review, and the strategic reset all benefit from a team that has done this work across market conditions, platform changes, and business cycles for more than two decades.
Our approach to working with businesses that are considering a switch is grounded in a few straightforward principles:
Results from any campaign — PPC, SEO, GEO, or AEO — depend on many factors, including market size, competition, budget, offer quality, website conversion rate, tracking quality, and execution. We do not guarantee specific outcomes, because no honest agency can. What we can offer is experienced management, clear communication, and accountability you can verify.
It depends on how the account was set up. If the agency created the account under their own Google Ads manager account (MCC) and your business was never established as the root owner, the agency may control the account. If your business created the account and granted the agency manager access, you own it. You can check by looking at your account’s access settings. If you are unsure, ask your agency directly and verify their answer in the platform.
If your business owns the Google Ads account, your campaign history stays with you. You simply revoke the old agency’s manager access and grant access to the new one. If the agency owns the account, you may lose access to all historical data, quality scores, keyword performance, and audience lists. This is why account ownership is the most important item to verify before any transition.
There is no universal timeline. The first 30 to 90 days are typically focused on auditing the existing account, verifying tracking, and making strategic adjustments. Some improvements — like fixing broken conversion tracking or pausing wasteful keywords — can show results quickly. Broader performance improvements depend on the market, the budget, the competitive landscape, and how much foundational work the account needs. A responsible agency will set realistic expectations early.
Yes, it can. Google Ads campaigns go through learning phases when significant changes are made. During the transition period, especially if the new agency restructures campaigns or adjusts bidding strategies, there may be a temporary performance dip while the system recalibrates. This is normal and should be communicated proactively by your new agency. Planning the transition timing carefully can help minimize this effect.
A Google Ads account audit is a structured review of your account’s setup, campaign structure, keyword strategy, negative keywords, conversion tracking, ad creative, landing page alignment, budget allocation, and overall performance. Getting an audit before switching — or as the first step with a new agency — helps you understand what is working, what is not, and what needs to change. It also provides a performance baseline so you can measure whether the new relationship is producing better results over time.
Ask whether the agency has experience with generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO). Ask how they approach visibility in AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews. Ask what is currently possible versus what is still emerging. A trustworthy agency will be honest about the current state of AI-search visibility rather than making guarantees about placement in systems that are still evolving.
Switching Google Ads agencies is a significant decision. Done well, with the right preparation and the right partner, it can give your business a stronger foundation for paid search performance, clearer reporting, and better long-term visibility across Google, AI search, and evolving discovery platforms.
If you are evaluating your current PPC management and want an honest conversation about what your account shows and what your options look like, Adwest’s digital marketing team is here to help.
Book a Free Consultation with Adwest’s Digital Marketing Experts and get a Free 14 Day Trial for GEO and AEO.
Visit adwestnet.com/#contact or call 800-350-5312.
