--- title: "Six Months of Agency Reports. Not One Better Cost per Job." description: "A composite account story about a $4,000 monthly retainer, polished reports, and the rising CPA that never made it onto a slide." image: "https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6823bbd57170ea42b357cf81/6abb474f54ba684cf486ca4a_4a49b7ec-a6cd-441a-9bad-f05e47e76939.png" --- September 29, 2026 • min read # Six Months of Agency Reports. Not One Better Cost per Job. ![Young man with curly hair wearing a black shirt outdoors against green foliage background.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6821efca072e48f6f495a47e/68562d390107b3921a6e3d68_1743932904108.jpg) **Alexander Perleman**, Head Of Product @ groas Ex-Goldman Sachs and Stanford Computer Science alex@groas.ai [LinkedIn](https://groas.com/post/the-quarter-i-watched-an-agency-bill-4k#) ![Cover image for: Six Months of Agency Reports. Not One Better Cost per Job.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6823bbd57170ea42b357cf81/6abb474f54ba684cf486ca4a_4a49b7ec-a6cd-441a-9bad-f05e47e76939.png) Take this as a composite: I have inherited enough versions of this account that the names blur, but the structure stays the same. It is Tuesday at 10 a.m. The agency lead shares a twelve-slide deck. Green arrows point up beside click-through rate and impression share, and the owner nods along. The first month’s report reads well. Spend is up a little; clicks are up a little more. Cost per click looks controlled. The deck calls it momentum. I call it **paperwork that looks like progress**, because the number that decides whether the business gets cheaper jobs has not improved. CPA sits flat for a third month, and nobody on the call says it out loud. #### The slides look busy; the account gets expensive The owner hires the agency the way a lot of owners do: a referral, a good first audit, then a proposal listing search, Performance Max, landing pages and reporting. The fee is $4,000 a month. For spend between $5,000 and $20,000 a month, [$1,500 to $4,000 is a normal mid-market retainer](https://blog.applabx.com/google-ads-management-pricing-how-much-does-it-cost-in-2026/), so the number does not stop the conversation. Over six months, though, it becomes $24,000 in fees before a dollar of media. That is a lot to pay for an account that does not get better. On the call, something always appears to be moving. Slide three shows CTR up 0.4 points. Slide five shows impression share up 6%. Slide seven holds a screenshot of two new responsive search ads, with a note about testing underneath. The owner asks whether the ads are bringing in cheaper jobs. The agency lead says the click trend is healthy and promises to keep an eye on efficiency. It sounds like an answer, so the meeting moves on. I used to tell clients that exact line. I was wrong. *Click trend healthy* is what you say when you have not tied the clicks to anything that pays. One audit guide puts it plainly: [do not be impressed by CTR or impression growth unless conversions rise too](https://www.upgrow.io/blog/how-to-audit-your-google-ads-agency). I learned that the slow way, looking at accounts that had become better at buying traffic while the businesses behind them stayed stuck. By month three, I have the login. Not the PDF: the account. I pull ninety days side by side, because the report feels much calmer than the numbers. Spend has crept from $11,200 in month one to $13,800 in month three. Conversions have moved from 148 to 151. **CPA has climbed from $75.67 to $91.39**, even as the deck keeps calling efficiency stable. Put those figures on one slide and the direction is hard to miss. Keep them apart and there is always another green arrow to discuss. Rising click costs make a quiet account more expensive. [Average CPC sat around $5.26 to $5.42 in 2025 benchmarks across 16,000 campaigns, with costs up in 87% of industries](https://searchengineland.com/google-ads-costs-keep-rising-but-conversion-rates-improved-in-2025-477927); average cost per lead was near $70.11. If clicks cost more while the account’s bids, match structure and negative lists sit still, the same volume of jobs can cost more to acquire. The report shows clicks and CTR because those still go up. The owner wants to know what a job costs. He has not seen the CPA climb because nobody puts the two lines together. Spend lives on slide two. Conversions live on slide nine, in small type under calls and forms. CPA has no slide at all. I have built reports like that myself, back when I managed accounts by hand and wanted a call to go smoothly. I told myself the client cared about momentum. What I meant was that I had not fixed the leak yet. #### The page changes, but the routine does not Around month four, someone on the client side swaps the landing page. The new version has a different headline, a stock photo and a shorter form above the fold. Nobody tells the agency. The agency never asks. I find the change because the Quality Score column starts pointing me toward the page: three core exact terms that had sat at 7s and 8s are now at 4s. Average CPC on those terms is up 31%, with nothing else changed in the ad groups. I know that pattern from the inside. A client once swapped a page on me at 4 p.m. on a Friday, and my Monday report looked like someone had turned a dial. [Landing page experience helps determine Quality Score](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/14086?hl=en): usefulness, relevance, navigation and whether the page matches what the ad promises all matter. Change the message on the page without checking the ads and keywords pointing to it, and the account can pay more for the same click. The page swap does not explain every number in this composite. It gives the agency something urgent to inspect. Nobody does. I open Change History and set the range to 90 days. That screen logs edits without caring how polished the deck looks. [An audit guide calls a barren log a major red flag](https://www.upgrow.io/blog/how-to-audit-your-google-ads-agency). This one is close to barren: a budget tweak in week two, two ad approvals and a location exclusion that looks like it came from an automated recommendation. No new keywords. No bid tests. No negative additions after the landing page swap. Four entries in three months, against twelve slides every month. I have seen the more extreme version on someone else’s money. [In one documented case, a business paid $800 a month while its 30-day history showed no work; the 90-day view showed only access changes](https://www.clairejarrett.com/800-a-month-0-changes-in-90-days-the-screen-that-proves-it/). No negatives, ad work or bid work. Set up once and left running. This $4,000 composite is not identical, but the contrast between the report and the log has the same shape. [One practitioner rule of thumb](https://specialty.vision/15-minute-google-ads-audit-2/) calls fewer than five human entries in 30 days on roughly $3,000 a month in spend *coasting*; it looks for 20 or more, with negatives, ad edits and bid work in the mix. This account has four in 90 days. Those entries are not a scorecard by themselves. One useful change can matter more than twenty cosmetic ones. But when the cost of a conversion rises, a landing page changes and the log barely moves, the agency needs a better explanation than *we’re monitoring it*. Monitoring is supposed to lead to a decision. The 1 a.m. work I used to do would have given them somewhere to start: pull the search terms report, sort by spend with no conversions, add junk terms as negatives, split the two ad groups where one keyword is eating the budget, then check the landing page against the ads after the swap. It is mechanical work. It takes about three hours and a strong coffee. It might not solve the whole account in one sitting, but it would at least put the rising CPA in front of someone who could act on it. I do not think the missing checks prove the agency lead is lazy. The fee explains enough without guessing at his character. [A flat retainer pays the same whether the account is touched or not; percentage-of-spend fees rise when spend rises](https://blog.applabx.com/google-ads-management-pricing-how-much-does-it-cost-in-2026/). Neither arrangement automatically produces bad work. Neither makes the boring checks more valuable to the agency when a polished monthly deck already gets the invoice paid. I have felt that pull from the other chair. #### The renewal call asks for the missing slide Month six brings a renewal call. The agency lead opens the familiar template with a new month on the cover. CTR gets its slide. Impression share gets its slide. There is a fresh line about seasonality softening conversion intent. The owner listens for ten minutes, then asks what changed in the account last month and what it did to the cost of a job. The lead scrolls through the deck as though the answer might be in an appendix. He mentions the two new ads again. He mentions keeping an eye on efficiency again. The owner cuts in, quiet rather than angry. He is paying $4,000 a month, he says, and his cost per job is higher than when they started. Has anyone looked at the page his money sends people to? Silence. Then a promise to audit the landing pages that week. ![A polished slide deck with green arrows on a conference call screen, above a statement showing rising spend](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6823bbd57170ea42b357cf81/6abb475054ba684cf486ca4e_cf5d330c-5ce3-474e-9e91-a57e31836040.png) After the call, the owner asks what I would check first. We already have the account open, so I show him the ten-minute version I run on inherited accounts: spend and CPA on the same graph, Quality Score change dates beside site changes, then Change History set to 90 days. It is a short sequence, but it makes the next question much harder to dodge. What happened here, and who noticed? I keep a longer list for owners who want to inspect their own accounts: [10 red flags your Google Ads agency is not delivering results](https://groas.com/post/google-ads-agency-red-flags-not-delivering-results). He runs down it on his screen while I watch. He stops at number three and laughs in the tired way people laugh when the answer has been in front of them for months. An honest look in month three would have put the CPA climb from roughly $75 to $91 in plain view. After the page swap, someone could have checked the Quality Score drop against the site change and asked what needed fixing. The four entries in the 90-day log would not, on their own, tell the whole story. Alongside those numbers, they would demand an account of what the retainer was buying. I know how that conversation feels from the other chair because I once had a client run it on me. My report had green arrows. My log had a thin month. I told myself I was waiting for statistical significance. The truth was simpler: I was paid in full whether I did the late-night search-term pass or not. That is not a defense of my work. It is why I no longer accept a report as evidence that the necessary work happened. The owner does not renew on the call. He asks for the logins to stay on and says he will think about next quarter. A week later, the agency sends a save offer: two weeks free, a fresh landing page review, a new test plan. He forwards me the email with three lines under it. Six months. Twenty-four thousand in fees. Cost per job higher than when they started. I spend my weeks around a different cadence now, with [groas running bids and negatives around the clock](https://groas.com/) while a human owns the strategic read on landing pages and offer changes. That does not make the judgment about the page disappear. It means the routine checks do not wait for someone to find three hours and a strong coffee. **The agency had been paid for activity the owner could see, while the account needed work he could not.** His ops manager keeps the deck open on a second monitor for a few days, the way you keep a receipt you might need to return. Nobody is angry. The meetings have been polite; the slides have been clean; the people have been pleasant. The last screen share stays open after the owner hangs up. Slide one still says *momentum*. ## Related Posts [![Cover image for: Stop Asking When Google Ads Will Finish Learning. Stop Resetting the Conditions.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6823bbd57170ea42b357cf81/6abb4bda3748f4695a8d3309_5fc122e6-dd3d-4a83-87da-ca6f1fd63488.png) ##### Stop Asking When Google Ads Will Finish Learning. Stop Resetting the Conditions. Budget swings, tCPA cuts, and Friday asset dumps can keep Smart Bidding recalibrating. Before you blame the learning phase, check your change history. 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