$800 a Month, 0 Changes in 90 Days: The Screen That Proves It

I audited an account recently for the owner of a business that installs CCTV and access control systems for offices, warehouses and shops. He was paying an agency $800 a month.

Before I told him anything about strategy, I opened 1 screen inside his own account: the change history. I was expecting to find negative keywords being added, bids being adjusted, the normal weekly maintenance.

I set it to the last 30 days and found nothing. I stretched it to 90. Still nothing.

That’s 3 months of a paid agency and a Google Ads account that nobody had touched.

Why the change history is the 1 screen any business owner can check

Every Google Ads account keeps a log of every edit made inside it: new keywords, paused ads, adjusted budgets, negative keywords added, landing pages swapped. It sits under History in the left-hand menu and it cannot be faked or tidied up after the fact.

It’s the one part of the account a business owner doesn’t need any PPC knowledge to read. You don’t need to understand quality score or impression share. You just need to look for activity, and ask whether what you’re seeing matches what you’re being told is happening.

In this account, there wasn’t much to ask about, because there wasn’t much there. A handful of entries from account access changes, and nothing resembling actual campaign work. No negatives. No new ad groups. No adjustments to the landing pages.

Whatever this business owner was paying $800 a month for, it was not being managed. It had been set up once and left running.

What “no changes” actually costs you

An untouched account doesn’t just sit still. It quietly gets worse, because the market around it keeps moving while the account doesn’t.

In this case, the campaigns were set to maximise conversions, a bidding strategy that needs a steady flow of conversions to learn from. The account had 1 conversion in the last 30 days. Asking a bidding strategy that needs data to run on almost none of it isn’t a small inefficiency. It simply can’t work, in the same way a car can’t steer itself with the wheel disconnected.

The average cost per click sat at a few cents, occasionally rising to 30 cents. On the surface that looks like a bargain. It isn’t.

This business sells to other businesses, and a facilities manager’s click is never going to cost a few cents, because almost nobody else is bidding for that same search. Cents-a-click traffic on a business-to-business account is a symptom, not a win.

It means the account is showing up for people searching for a camera for their front door, not the companies it actually needs. Consumer searches are cheap and there are a lot of them, and that’s the traffic Google finds easiest to deliver.

That’s the same principle behind wanting cost per click to rise, not fall. Cheap clicks and good leads are very rarely the same thing.

If you were to screenshot this, in the last month, nothing had actually been done. That’s grounds to cancel, in my opinion, and possibly to ask for some of it back.

The one result the previous agency did point to, a single enquiry, turned out to be someone who was already looking for this specific business by name. Not a new customer the campaign had found. Somebody who was coming anyway, credited to the campaign because they happened to click an ad on their way there.

How to run this check on your own account

• Open History in the left-hand menu and set it to the last 90 days. Look for actual campaign work: new keywords, negative keywords, ad copy changes, landing page updates, bid adjustments. Account access changes and payment updates don’t count. If the list is mostly empty, that’s your answer regardless of what you’re being told on calls.
• Compare your conversions in the last 30 days against your bidding strategy. If you’re on maximise conversions or target CPA and you’ve had 0 or 1 conversions in that window, the strategy cannot function, no matter how good the underlying campaign looks. It needs volume to learn from.

The bigger point

None of this required specialist knowledge. It required opening 1 screen and reading it plainly.

That’s exactly what makes it so uncomfortable when it turns up empty: there was never anywhere for the story to hide. An agency that’s genuinely working an account leaves a visible trail, because the work itself generates it. Negatives get added because search terms get reviewed. Landing pages get adjusted because conversion rates get watched. Bids move because auctions change.

A blank history isn’t a quiet account. It’s an unmanaged one with a bill attached, and it’s exactly the kind of thing a PPC consultant worth paying should be able to show you evidence of, not just tell you about.

I’d rather show a prospective client this screen than describe what good management looks like. It’s the same instinct behind checking who owns your account, or working through the audit checklist before you sign anything. You know where I am.

A few questions I get asked

Isn’t a low cost per click a good sign? Not on its own. A cheap click only means Google found it easy to sell you that click, usually because there’s less competition for it. For a business-to-business account, low competition on a search term is often a sign that ordinary consumers are searching it too, not that you’ve found a bargain. Look at who’s actually converting, not what the click cost.

What if my change history shows lots of activity? Does that mean I’m safe? It means someone is at least logging in and doing something, which is a start. Activity alone doesn’t tell you if the changes were good ones. It rules out the worst case, an account left entirely alone, but it doesn’t replace checking for the 5 mistakes that show up even in well-maintained accounts.

How long should I give a new agency before I check this? 30 days is fair for a brand new build, since campaigns need time to gather data before there’s much to adjust. Beyond that, you should see negative keywords being added regularly as search term data comes in, along with the normal small adjustments. An account that’s been live for 4 months with a 90-day gap in the history has a problem, not a quiet patch.

Is it always the agency’s fault when an account underperforms? No, and I wouldn’t say it is here either. A conversion action set up wrong, a client slow to approve creative, a genuinely difficult market, all of those happen without anyone doing anything wrong. What the change history rules out is the specific excuse that work has been quietly happening behind the scenes. Either it shows up in that log, or it didn’t happen.

2 ways I can help you get this right

If you want a second opinion on whether your own account is actually being worked on, book a free call and I’ll go through it with you.

If you’d rather learn to run this kind of check yourself and build an account that outperforms without needing to rely on anyone else’s word for it, my masterclass How to Overtake Your Top Google Ads Competitors in 8 Weeks walks through exactly that.