You can check whether your ads are being managed without knowing how to run a campaign. Ask for read-only access, open the account, and look for five fingerprints: recent edits in the change log, where the money sits, a believable conversion column, an ad written this quarter, and something deliberately switched off. Thirty minutes, no tools.
Somebody else has been running your paid media for about a year. Once a month a deck arrives: a spend figure, a cost per lead, a chart trending in some direction, three bullets about next month.
You read it in four minutes on a phone, ask one question about the trend line, and approve the invoice. Twelve months in, you have never opened the account that deck describes.
Two things keep you out, and neither is laziness. Logging into an account somebody else manages feels like standing behind a contractor to watch their hands. The interface is the other, built for people who live in it daily, with nowhere for a visitor to stand.
So the deck stays the only source of truth about one of the largest recurring line items in the business.
What does good management leave behind?
Nobody is asking you to evaluate the strategy. Strategy is hard to assess from outside the building, and a founder who tries usually ends up arguing about ad copy.
Judging the work is a different job from judging the decisions. Anyone managing an account leaves physical residue: timestamps, edits, paused rows, creation dates on ads, budget numbers that moved and when. Anyone invoicing an account while letting it run leaves residue just as legible.
You can audit an account you could never run yourself. What you need is a picture of what good management leaves behind.
First you need a way in: read-only access, a login that sees everything and changes nothing. If nobody can grant it, because the campaigns sit inside an account the agency owns, learn that now.
How do I check if my ads are being managed well?
Set the date range on every screen below to the last ninety days and work through these in order.
Check one. When did anyone last touch this?
Every major platform keeps a change log: a timestamped record of each edit, what it changed, and who made it. Google Ads calls it change history. Meta keeps the same record in a per-campaign edit view and a business activity log.
Healthy looks unglamorous: a handful of entries in most weeks, signed by names you recognize from your calls. A daily cap raised, a headline swapped, negative keywords added, meaning search terms the account has been told to refuse.
Two shapes should slow you down. The first is heavy activity through the opening two weeks and near silence afterward, the signature of a build nobody revisited.
The second is subtler. Entries that bunch into the two days before each monthly report mean the account is being groomed for the meeting.
The question: walk me through the last three changes you made and what prompted them.
Check two. Where does the money actually sit?
Open the campaign list, add a spend column for the last ninety days, and sort from largest down. That is how your money was really distributed, often a different picture from the summary slide.
Check that the biggest line has a name telling you what it does. An organized account encodes a product, a region, an audience, a launch date. An unorganized one has whatever the platform generated, plus copies with numbers on the end.
Sort the campaigns by spend and look at the bottom half. Neglect shows up there first, because nobody defends a small line item.
Honest explanations for a long tail exist: experiments held at a low daily cap, brand terms that need presence and almost no money, seasonal work waiting for its season.
What you are testing is whether each survivor has a purpose somebody can state out loud. The question runs line by line: what is this one for, and what would make you close it?
Check three. Does the conversion column hold believable numbers?
A conversion is whatever event you told the platform to treat as a success. It is the scoreboard the platform plays to, and the raw material of your monthly reports.
First, is the column populated at all. Check the campaign table for conversion figures in the last ninety days, then open the list of tracked events, called conversion actions on Google and events on Meta.
Read the names. Purchase, Subscribe, or Qualified Lead describes a business. Page View, Button Click, and All Form Submissions describes a website.
Second, does the figure resemble reality. Hold last month's conversion count beside the customers your billing system recorded. They will never match, because platforms count differently and each claims overlapping credit.
An order-of-magnitude gap is a genuine finding. So is a column of zeros under a campaign that spent money every week.
Repairing this is a real project with a technical dependency, and the plumbing sits in why marketing attribution breaks. Here the observation is enough.
There is also a record of what taking over one of these accounts looked like when that column read zero for eight months while spending continued. Same story, other side of the desk.
The question: which event is each campaign bidding toward, and how close did last month's count land to what billing recorded?
Fair answers exist here too. Long sales cycles push results weeks past the click. Businesses that import outcomes from a CRM weekly have a column that lags by design.
Check four. What is the most recent ad anyone wrote?
Go to the ads view and sort by creation date. You are reading one number: how long ago somebody last wrote something new.
Healthy is a trickle. New ads every few weeks, running alongside older ones that still earn their slot. Keeping a proven ad live is correct; an account that never adds anything beside it is the pattern to notice.
The tell that needs no expertise is the copy itself. Read your own ads as a stranger would. If one names a price you changed in March, a promotion that ended, or a tier you retired, you have learned how recently a human read them.
Choosing winners among those ads is its own discipline, and there is a scoring system for it. Here the date column carries the whole job.
The question: what is the newest ad in here, and what were we trying to learn with it?
Check five. What was the last thing switched off?
Change the filter on the campaign and ad lists so paused and removed items appear, then read the dates. You want a graveyard: ads stopped across the year, an ad set ended in April, a campaign closed in June.
Turning something off is the only move in an ad account that demands a reason first. A year with nothing switched off is a year with no reasons on record.
This check comes last because it survives the excuses that soften the other four. Every account accumulates things that stop working.
The question: what is the last thing you turned off, and what made you turn it off?
Can an account look neglected and still be healthy?
Yes. An account that has barely moved in three months can belong to a team doing exactly its job.
Every platform runs a learning period after a significant change, a stretch where delivery wobbles while the system regathers data. Editing a campaign that is hitting its number restarts that clock for nothing.
A practitioner who leaves a working thing alone is showing discipline. An owner who reads calm as neglect can push a good operator into expensive busywork.
Then scope. A maintenance-priced retainer buys maintenance. If your account is funded for four hours a month, four hours a month is what the log will show.
A fair amount of the work never appears in the account at all: audience research, offer feedback, landing page reviews, creative waiting on your approval. A change log undercounts a thoughtful partner.
Good account managers want an owner who can read the screen. The ones who dread the question are usually the ones who cannot answer it.
What to say on the next call
Five worrying answers do not add up to an accusation. They add up to an agenda.
Turn each item into the question beside it and listen to the shape of the reply. Someone managing your account produces specifics fast: the target they hold to, the reason a small line exists, the thing they killed in May.
Someone coasting produces the deck again, this time in sentences.
There is a second payoff with nothing to do with your current vendor. Once you can read those five screens you can describe your own account out loud, which is rare among people who pay for one.
I get called after the looking, when a founder has opened the account and cannot tell whether what they saw is normal. Often the reporting was the problem and the account underneath was fine.
When it turns out otherwise, the professional version runs six lenses across thirty days and ends in a ranked plan, written up as the growth audit playbook.
The stakes are plain arithmetic. A year of monthly decks is a year of spending that ran on an assumption, and the money leaves either way.
The waste is half the cost. The rest is the conversation that never happened, because nobody could frame the question sharply enough to get a real answer.
Thirty minutes and five screens is what it takes to frame it.
If you have looked at your own account and cannot tell what you are seeing, this is the kind of read I do. Let's talk.