Should You Audit Your Ad Accounts Before Switching Agencies?

Q: What should the audit check before a switch?

Ownership: that your company owns the ad accounts, the Google Analytics property, the tag manager container and the conversion data, with admin access in your name.; Tracking: whether reported conversions match your CRM or sales records within a known gap.; Spend: where the budget actually went, including Performance Max and broad match search terms.; Fees: how the current agency charges, and whether the fee rises automatically with ad spend.; History: what was changed in the account and when, so the next team knows what has already been tried.

Linda Orr

Oct 26

2 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Yes, in most cases. An independent audit before you switch agencies tells you whether the problem is the agency, the account setup, or the tracking underneath it. If the tracking is broken, a new agency will inherit the same bad data and make the same bad decisions with it. An audit also gives you a written baseline, so you can judge the next agency against something real.

Should You Audit Your Ad Accounts Before Switching Agencies? Cover image from Orr Consulting

1. Why not just hire the new agency and let them fix it?

Every agency that pitches you will offer a free audit, and every one of those audits will find problems. That is how they win the business. A free agency audit is a sales document. It is rarely wrong, but it is written to lead to one answer: hire us. An independent audit is written for you, and the list of fixes is yours whether you hire anyone or not.

2. What if the agency is not the problem?

This happens more often than people expect. Sometimes the account is fine and the landing page is the bottleneck. Sometimes the conversion tracking is counting page views or duplicate form fills, so the agency has been optimizing toward the wrong number. Sometimes the leads are good and sales follow-up is slow. Switching agencies will not fix any of those, and you lose months while the new team learns the account.

3. What should the audit check before a switch?

Ownership: that your company owns the ad accounts, the Google Analytics property, the tag manager container and the conversion data, with admin access in your name.
Tracking: whether reported conversions match your CRM or sales records within a known gap.
Spend: where the budget actually went, including Performance Max and broad match search terms.
Fees: how the current agency charges, and whether the fee rises automatically with ad spend.
History: what was changed in the account and when, so the next team knows what has already been tried.

4. What about account ownership?

Check this first. Some agencies run clients through their own ad accounts, which means the history, the conversion data and the audiences can leave with them. If you do not have admin access to your own accounts, ask for it before you give notice.

5. How long does a pre-switch audit take?

Timing depends on the number of campaigns, the lookback period and how quickly we get access, so start the audit as soon as you're considering a switch. The findings give you a better brief for the agencies you talk to next.

6. What does it cost?

My Google Ads audit starts at $3,500, and multi-channel paid media audits covering Google, Meta, LinkedIn and Microsoft Ads start at $5,500. Both are flat fees. I also wrote about the warning signs in How Do I Know If My Agency Is Wasting My Ad Budget? If you are weighing a switch, book a free 30-minute call.