Your agency can't explain their work? Fire them.

You open the PDF. There are graphs. Lots of them. Impressions climbed 18%. Reach is up. Engagement rate is "strong this quarter." You scroll to the last page looking for the number that actually matters — how many jobs did this buy me? — and it is not there. That is not an oversight. That is the product.

Most agency reports are built to look like work rather than to account for it. The difference matters enormously when you are spending $2,000 to $8,000 a month and your margins are tight. If you cannot connect a line in that report to a booked job, a paid invoice, or an inbound phone call, you are not reading a performance document. You are reading a retention document.

Activity metrics are not outcome metrics — and your agency knows the difference

Impressions tell you how many times an ad was shown. Reach tells you how many people could theoretically have seen it. Engagement tells you someone tapped a like or lingered on a video. None of those numbers appear on your bank statement. A booked plumbing call does. A confirmed physio appointment does. A paid e-commerce order does.

When an agency leads every report with activity metrics, they are making a deliberate choice about what you pay attention to. Outcome metrics — cost per call, cost per lead, cost per booked job — are harder to inflate. They are also the only numbers that tell you whether the engagement is working. Any agency worth retaining can produce both. Most produce only the first category because the second category creates accountability.

Complexity is not proof of work

Complexity in a report is not proof of work. It is proof you haven't asked the right questions yet.

When you mistake a dense PDF for deep expertise, the agency wins twice: they spend less time on your account and more time producing the PDF, and you stay on contract because you assume you'd be lost without them. This is not a cynical characterisation of all agencies. It is a structural incentive that bad agencies exploit and that good agencies actively work against.

Fourteen months too long

Australian owner-operators stay with underperforming agencies an average of 14 months longer than they should, trading quiet frustration for the effort of switching. The mechanism is always the same: the reports look professional, the account manager is responsive, and the business owner assumes the gap between the report and their revenue is something they do not understand yet. It is not. The gap is the agency's product working exactly as designed.

You do not need a solicitor to push back on a bad agency. You need two documents: the ACCC's updated 2023 Small Business Unfair Contract Terms guidance and a copy of your current contract. Read them side by side and you will likely find a problem on the first page.

What the ACCC actually says

Per the ACCC's 2023 Small Business Unfair Contract Terms guidance at accc.gov.au, an unfair contract term includes any clause that allows one party to avoid performance obligations without consequence. A standard agency clause that says "we make no guarantee of results" sits directly in that category if it is paired with a 6- or 12-month lock-in that gives you no exit when performance is missing. The clause creates an imbalance: the agency is paid regardless of outcomes; you bear the entire consequence of poor performance.

Australian Consumer Law section 24 and the 'proprietary methodology' excuse

Australian Consumer Law section 24 defines a term as unfair if it causes significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations and is not reasonably necessary to protect the legitimate interests of the party who would benefit from it. When an agency cites a "proprietary methodology" to avoid disclosing how your ad spend is allocated across campaigns, that clause fails both tests. There is no legitimate interest served by hiding where your money went. The only interest served is theirs: preventing you from seeing that $1,200 of your $3,000 monthly spend went to branded keywords you already owned organically.

The 90-day rule and your paper trail

If your contract has a lock-in period longer than 90 days with no performance exit clause, you already have grounds to act. Start here:

1. Write a formal email — not a call, an email — requesting a complete spend allocation breakdown by campaign and a decision log for the past three months.
2. State that you are requesting this to assess compliance with your contractual performance obligations.
3. Set a seven-day deadline for the response.

That email creates a paper trail. It also frequently prompts an agency to either improve immediately or offer an early exit rather than defend their reporting in writing. Both outcomes serve you.

Strip every metric out of your agency report. Every graph, every percentage, every benchmark comparison. What is left? If the answer is nothing, your agency has not done anything they can name. That is the entire test.

The decision log standard

A transparent agency should be able to point to one campaign decision from last month — a bid adjustment on a high-performing ad group, a keyword pause on a term that was consuming budget with zero conversions, an audience exclusion that removed irrelevant traffic — state clearly why they made it, and show you a before-and-after on the metric it was meant to move. One decision. One reason. One result. If they cannot produce that in two minutes, they did not make a decision last month. They let the campaign run and billed you for the month.

If your agency can't name one decision they made last month and show you what changed, they're billing for access — not outcomes.

Google's own documentation is on your side here

Google's conversion tracking documentation at support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722054 states explicitly that campaigns optimised without conversion data "may not reflect true business value." That is Google telling you, in plain language, that click data alone is not sufficient to make good campaign decisions. If your agency's monthly report does not include call tracking or form submission data pulled into the campaign's conversion column, their optimisation decisions are based on platform-reported clicks — which means they are flying blind at your expense, and Google themselves have flagged this as a problem.

The absence of a decision log is not normal

Some agencies will tell you that documenting every campaign decision is too granular or too time-consuming. That is false. Any agency running Google Ads has access to the change history log inside the platform — every bid change, every keyword pause, every ad group modification is timestamped and recorded automatically. Producing a decision log requires pulling that data and adding one column: why. An agency that will not do that is not protecting their process. They are protecting their ability to bill for inaction.

Get your last agency report open. A PDF, a dashboard link, a shared Google Data Studio — whatever they sent. Run these five questions against it right now. Each one has a pass and a fail. Two fails and you should be writing that formal email tonight. Three fails and you should be planning an exit.

The five questions

1. Can you find one line item connected to a booked job, paid invoice, or inbound phone call? If the answer is no — if every row in the report is an activity metric with no path to revenue — your report is decorative. It was built to look like accountability without creating any.
2. Does the report name a specific decision made last month, the date it was made, and the metric it was meant to move? Not "we continued to optimise targeting." A specific decision: "On 14 March we paused the [keyword] term because it had generated 47 clicks and zero conversions over 30 days, reducing wasted spend by $340." If you cannot find that language, your agency is billing for access.
3. Is your ad spend allocation broken out by campaign and by outcome, or is it shown as a single lump sum? A lump-sum spend figure — "$3,200 in Google Ads this month" — is a red flag under ACL section 24. You cannot assess value, you cannot compare campaigns, and you cannot identify waste. An honest allocation takes four rows in a spreadsheet.
4. Does the report include call-tracking or form-tracking integration, or does it rely solely on platform-reported clicks? For any Australian service business — trades, clinics, professional services, retail with a phone — platform clicks without conversion tracking are meaningless. You need to know which clicks became calls and which calls became jobs.
5. Can your agency tell you, in one sentence, what they will do differently next month and why? Ask them this directly if the report does not state it. Write down their answer word for word. Responses like "we'll continue to monitor performance" or "we'll keep optimising the campaigns" are disqualifying. A real answer sounds like: "We're going to test a 15% bid increase on the [service] ad group on weekday mornings because call data shows 68% of your converted leads come in between 7am and 10am AEST."

Some agencies are well-practised at sounding credible while saying nothing. These four responses are the most common deflections you will encounter when you start asking harder questions. Recognise them for what they are.

"We use a proprietary scoring model"

If they cannot explain what the model measures, what inputs it uses, and how it connects to your business outcomes in plain English, it does not exist as a decision-making tool. It exists as a conversation stopper. A real scoring model has a methodology you can read. A fake one has a name and a logo.

"Results take 6–12 months to show"

This statement is only acceptable in the first two months of an SEO engagement, and only if it is paired with leading indicators you can actually check: crawl health in Google Search Console, indexed page count, keyword ranking movement on target terms. In month seven of a paid search campaign, "results take time" is not an explanation — it is an invoice justification. Google Ads can show conversion data within the first billing cycle. If it is not there by month two, the tracking is broken or the campaigns are not set up for your business.

"We can't share account access for security reasons"

This is the most serious red flag on this list. Your Google Ads account, your Meta Business Manager, your Google Analytics property — you paid for all of it. Under Australian Consumer Law, withholding access to your own paid account data is not a security measure. It is a control mechanism that prevents you from seeing spend allocation, audience settings, and campaign structure. Any agency that will not give you admin access to your own accounts from day one is building a switching cost, not protecting your data.

"Engagement is up significantly this month"

Ask one follow-up question every time you hear this: what did that engagement convert to? If the answer is silence, a subject change, or a reference back to the engagement figure itself, you have your answer. Engagement that does not move toward a call, a booking, or a purchase is not a business result. It is a number the agency chose to report because the numbers that matter are not moving.

Describing good reporting in the abstract is not enough. Here is what it looked like in practice for a real client.

The Western Sydney plumbing client

A plumbing business in Western Sydney came to SoudCoh after 11 months with a previous agency. Their monthly spend was $4,200. Their report showed strong impressions growth and a "healthy" click-through rate. Their booked call volume had been flat for six months. The previous agency could not name a single campaign decision they had made in the prior 90 days.

SoudCoh's engagement began with one structural requirement: every Google Ads campaign decision had to be tied to call-tracking data from a dedicated 1300 number. No decision was optimised against platform clicks alone. Within 60 days, booked calls rose 22% while total agency spend dropped 40% — from $4,200 to $2,520 per month — because the call data revealed that two campaigns were consuming 38% of the budget and generating fewer than 4% of the converted calls. Those campaigns were paused. The budget was reallocated. The results were immediate. Full detail is available in the SoudCoh case studies.

The decision log format

Each monthly report at SoudCoh's Google Ads service opens with a decision log. It has four columns and no exceptions:

No decision is reported without all four fields completed. If a month passes and no meaningful decision was made, that is stated directly — with an explanation of why the account was held steady and what signal would trigger a change. That transparency is harder to produce than a glossy PDF. That is the point.

Account ownership is non-negotiable

The plumbing client retained full admin access to their Google Ads account, their Google Analytics 4 property, and their call-tracking dashboard from the first day of the engagement. Not as a feature. As a baseline. Account ownership is not a premium add-on at SoudCoh — it is a condition of the engagement. If your current agency has not given you admin access to every platform you are paying to advertise on, send the formal email tonight.

Most bad agency exits are messier than they need to be because the business owner waits until they are angry and then acts without a paper trail. Do it the other way around: build the paper trail first, act second.

Step one: the formal written request

Write a plain email — not a call, an email — to your account manager and their direct manager if you have the contact. State the following:

1. You are requesting a complete spend allocation breakdown by individual campaign for the past three months.
2. You are requesting a decision log showing every campaign change made in the past three months, the date of each change, and the outcome measured.
3. You require this documentation within seven business days to assess whether reporting obligations under your current agreement are being met.

Do not apologise for asking. Do not frame it as a complaint. Frame it as a contractual documentation request. This approach does two things: it creates a written record of the request and the response (or non-response), and it frequently prompts the agency to either produce the documentation — which is progress — or offer an early exit rather than defend the absence of records in writing.

Step two: reference the ACCC guidance directly

If the agency cites contract lock-in as a reason they cannot exit early or do not need to produce the documentation, respond in writing with a direct reference to the ACCC's unfair contract terms guidance at accc.gov.au/business/contracts-tenders-and-agreements/unfair-contract-terms. Request written confirmation that their reporting meets the performance transparency standard required under the agreement. Most agencies will not respond to this in writing because a written response creates further documentation they cannot walk back.

Step three: the three requirements for any new contract

Before you sign with anyone new — including for SEO, Meta ads, or any other channel — require three things in the contract itself, not in a verbal promise:

1. Full account ownership from day one. You are the admin. The agency is a manager. This is written into the agreement.
2. A 30-day performance exit clause. If the agency cannot produce a decision log meeting the agreed standard after 30 days of billing, you can exit without penalty. This clause is reasonable. Any agency that refuses it is telling you they expect to underperform.
3. A monthly decision log as a contractual deliverable. Not a courtesy, not a best-efforts commitment — a named deliverable that triggers the exit clause if absent.

Invoice two is the correct deadline. By the time a second invoice is due, there has been one full campaign cycle. The tracking is set up or it is not. The decision log exists or it does not. An agency that cannot produce a minimum viable report after 30 days of billing will not produce one after 90. Do not wait to find out.

The minimum viable report for an Australian service business

This is not a complex document. It is five rows and a decision log. Any agency running a Google Ads or Meta campaign for an Australian service business should be able to produce this in under two hours:

Call tracking is not expensive — the "too complex" excuse is a deflection

AEST-timestamped call recordings tied to campaign source are standard with any call-tracking integration. CallRail starts at approximately AUD $55 per month. Delacon, which is Australian-built and widely used in the trades and healthcare sectors, is in a similar range for small accounts. If your agency tells you call tracking is too complex to implement or too expensive to include in your reporting, they are deflecting. The real reason is that call tracking creates accountability they would rather not have. A Google Ads campaign running for a plumber, an electrician, a physio, or a cleaning business without call tracking is a campaign that cannot be honestly optimised — and per Google's own documentation, it may not reflect true business value at all.

The one-paragraph summary before you act

If your current agency cannot show you one named decision from last month, one outcome tied to that decision, and a complete spend breakdown by campaign — tonight, before you pay the next invoice — you are not paying for marketing. You are paying for a monthly PDF that keeps you confused enough to stay. The ACCC guidance exists. The ACL exists. The exit process is straightforward. The replacement standard is simple. The only remaining question is how many more months you want to wait.

Book a free 20-minute report review with SoudCoh — bring your last agency PDF and we'll run the five-question diagnostic live with you. No prep needed, no obligation, no jargon. Just your PDF and 20 minutes. Start by booking the twenty minutes.