I think my agency is wasting my Google Ads budget. How do I get an independent second opinion?

The suspicion is usually right in shape and wrong in detail. Something is leaking, and the agency running the account is the last party who can tell you where, because the answer might be “less spend, less management, less of us.” Here is how to get the read from someone who does not have that problem.

What “independent” means here

Independent is a structural claim, not a personality one. It means the person reviewing the account does not get paid more if the account keeps spending, does not get paid more if you sign a retainer afterward, and does not own the thing being audited.

Three tests settle it before anything else:

No downstream commission. Ask directly whether the reviewer earns anything tied to your media spend. Rebates, tiered partner incentives, a percentage-of-spend management fee waiting on the other side of the audit. Percentage-of-spend pricing is the one to watch, because it pays the reviewer to recommend a bigger budget.

No incumbent relationship. The agency running the account cannot audit the account. Neither can the reseller who sold you the tracking, nor the platform rep whose quarterly number is your spend. A Google rep is not an independent second opinion. That is an account-growth role, and the recommendations tab is the same job automated.

A finding they lose money on. The useful question: what would this audit have to find for you to tell me to stop hiring people? A reviewer with no answer has not separated the audit from the pitch.

I went independent in late 2024 for the reason underneath all three. I am one person, so the audit and the work carry the same signature, and there is no account manager sitting between the finding and the founder.

Read-only access, and nothing more

A second opinion needs to see the account. It does not need to change it.

Grant read access at the platform level and stop there:

• Google Ads: read-only user access on the account itself, or manager-level read. Do not accept a manager-account link that moves your account under someone else’s MCC for a diagnosis.
• Google Analytics 4 and Tag Manager: viewer on the property, read on the container. Publish rights are not part of a review.
• Meta: a Business Manager partner add at analyst role. Not admin, not an asset ownership transfer.
• Microsoft Advertising: an agency link with read permission.

Conversion access is the part most founders skip, and it is the part that matters. If the reviewer cannot see how conversion actions are configured, which one bidding optimizes against, and what values are being sent, the audit catches symptoms and never reaches the cause. That is the layer where most of the money actually goes.

Two rules hold regardless of who you pick. Nothing gets written, paused, or restructured during a diagnosis. And every grant stays revocable by you, from your own login, without asking anyone.

No retainer required

A second opinion that arrives attached to a proposal is a proposal. Say the condition out loud before the work starts: no retainer required, and the audit is complete whether or not anything gets hired afterward.

That is a scope term, so put it in writing with the rest of the scope. Mine is published rather than negotiated. The paid version at /google-ads-audit-cost is $2,500 with no management retainer attached, and if the right call is to keep your current setup, the memo says that.

Watch for the softer version of the same trap: the audit that withholds the fix. A finding described precisely enough to act on is a finding you can hand to your current agency. A finding described as “structural issues in campaign architecture” is a sales hook wearing a diagnosis.

How to vet the auditor before you hand over access

Four checks, in the order that saves the most time.

Ask for a sample report. Not a case study, not a deck. A real deliverable with the client details removed. You are looking for named fixes, the click path or the change that implements each one, and a number attached: what this is costing per month, and what recovering it is worth. Anything that arrives as red, yellow, and green dots on a slide is a sales asset.

Ask what the scope excludes. A written scope names the platforms in the review, the window of data being read, the deliverable and its length, the turnaround, and what is not covered. Vague scope is how a two-hour skim gets billed as a diagnosis.

Ask how each number was measured. A result nobody can explain the measurement of is a screenshot. This applies to the auditor’s own proof as much as to your account. My standard for what counts is published in the measurement section of my process page, and I would hold anyone you interview to something like it.

Ask what they would refuse to recommend. A specialist has opinions about what fails. If the answer is agreement with everything you have already said, you are hiring a mirror. The seven vetting questions cover the rest of the interview.

Google Partner status is optional

Partner and Premier Partner badges certify spend volume across a manager account, exam completion, and adherence to platform recommendations. None of those measure judgment, and the last one rewards applying the recommendations a good audit exists to question.

Treat the badge as a tiebreaker, never a filter. A single senior operator reviewing your account may hold it or may not, and neither tells you whether the diagnosis will be right. Two live accounts with numbers, and an explanation of how each number was measured, tell you far more.

Three routes to the second opinion

Ranked by what they cost you.

Do it yourself first. The free 25-page Setup Audit PDF walks the ten structural settings I check on every account, with the menu path for each fix and a four-week clean-up sequence. No email gate. If you spend under $25K a month, this is usually the whole answer, and it costs you an afternoon.

Size the leak in dollars. The Wasted Spend Calculator gives a directional estimate from monthly spend, conversions, and average order value. Useful for deciding whether the suspicion is worth anyone’s time.

Have someone else write it. My free custom account audit is a 5 to 7 page written audit returned within 72 hours, with no call required to receive it. It covers the conversion-tracking setup, the signal Smart Bidding is being fed, the top three leak points ranked by spend impact, and one change you can ship without me. I write it from public account data, so you do not have to hand over access to get one. If the account is bigger or the question is deeper, the $2,500 productized audit at /google-ads-audit-cost is three to six hours inside the account and a 6 to 12 page written diagnosis, sized for accounts spending $25K to $300K a month.

What a real second opinion tells you

Three things, and the third is the one founders forget to ask for.

Where the money is going, in dollars per month rather than adjectives. What to change, in an order, with the highest-recovery item first. And whether your current agency can execute the list. Sometimes the honest finding is that the account is fine and the problem is the offer, the landing page, or the margin. Sometimes the finding is that the agency built something reasonable two years ago for a business that has since changed shape.

Take the list to the incumbent before you fire anyone. How they respond to a specific, priced, independently written set of findings is the most useful thing you will learn about them, and it costs nothing to run. If you decide to switch after that, the alternatives to an agency are the next read, and the account-ownership checklist there matters more than the pitch that follows.