Is your paid media agency on autopilot? How to tell, and what active management looks like

Heads of marketing at B2B SaaS companies can test their paid media agency in a single afternoon. Start in your own ad accounts, with the campaigns that spent money last month and produced nothing.

An account on autopilot still spends on schedule, and the platform defaults make the decisions.

Understory Agency runs paid media for post-PMF B2B SaaS companies from Series A through enterprise, and has worked with 150+ B2B companies since we started in 2021. On an inherited account, our first move is to stop reading the average and split the spend. Below are the 10 checks we run, so you can run them yourself this week.

Why does more ad spend bring the same pipeline?

Extra budget runs through the same leaks as the old budget. Understory Agency sees 3 leaks in most B2B SaaS ad accounts that have run for a while without an audit. Budget drifts into placements nobody selected. Brand search takes spend that should go to non-brand. The conversion goal stops matching anything the sales team recognizes.

Our audits of Hiver and Northbeam show the pattern in numbers.

Understory Agency found that 41% of Hiver's non-brand Google Ads spend in July 2026, $7,669, went to 4 campaigns that produced zero conversions (Hiver case study).

Northbeam sells marketing attribution to ecommerce brands. Understory Agency found that 74% of Northbeam's LinkedIn budget over the previous 30 days had gone to the LinkedIn Audience Network. We ran that audit in January 2026 (Northbeam case study).

Both findings sat in standard platform reports that anyone with account access can open.

Run this 10-point audit in your own ad accounts

You need access to your ad platforms and your CRM. Each check uses a report you already have.

1. Split brand from non-brand before you read any average

In Google Ads, group campaigns into brand and non-brand. Then compare cost per conversion for each group. A blended average hides which half is doing the work.

When Understory Agency split Hiver's account for July 2026, brand campaigns converted at $98 per conversion and non-brand at $1,261. That's a 13x gap.

2. List the campaigns that spent money and converted nothing

Filter to the last 30 days, sort by cost, and look for zero in the conversions column. New tests need time, so check how long each campaign has run.

This is the check that surfaced Hiver's 4 campaigns. With them removed, the rest of Hiver's non-brand spend ran at $739 per conversion, under their $950 target.

3. Read the placement split on LinkedIn

In LinkedIn Campaign Manager, find how much spend ran in the LinkedIn Audience Network. That's LinkedIn's network of third-party apps and sites outside the feed.

LinkedIn turns the Audience Network on by default, so budget lands there with no decision behind it. In our experience that traffic is full of misclicks, with bounce rates close to 99%. Switching it off was the first change Understory Agency made on Northbeam's LinkedIn account.

4. Match the conversion the platform counts to the lead your CRM counts

Ad platforms optimize toward whatever event they're told to count. Hiver's Google Ads account was counting MQLs, so Understory Agency moved the goal to SQL and set up an offline conversion that sends qualified SQLs from the CRM back to Google Ads. Hiver's cost per SQL fell 46% month over month. Northbeam's LinkedIn account had no conversion tracking configured at all.

Ask your agency which event each campaign optimizes for. Then check it against what your sales team calls a qualified lead.

5. Open the negative keyword lists

Negative keywords stop your ads from showing on searches you don't want. Old accounts pile them up.

When Understory Agency audited Hiver, the account had 18 legacy negative lists holding 14,851 keywords. Of those, 1,495 were duplicates and 2,199 were broad negatives. Broad negatives block far more searches than whoever added them intended. Check when each list was last edited, and search the lists for terms your buyers use.

6. Ask who chose each bidding strategy

Every campaign runs on a bid strategy that a person or the platform picked. On Northbeam's LinkedIn account, max-delivery bidding was producing clicks that at times cost over $50. Turning it off was our next fix after the Audience Network.

Ask your agency why each campaign uses its current strategy. A good answer names a goal and a number.

7. Break spend out by device and by day of week

Segment cost and conversions by device, then by day. Hiver's weekends took 8.4% of spend and produced zero opportunities. Their weekend cost per MQL ran 36% higher, so we brought weekend bids down roughly 80%.

Excluding mobile across all of Hiver's campaigns was worth roughly $2,600 a month in recoverable spend.

8. Count the assets the platform created for you

Google Ads can create sitelinks and other assets on its own. On Hiver's account, Google had auto-created 283 of 301 sitelinks, and only 18 were deliberate. Around 45 pointed at pages that redirected. We wrote 90 new ones across 11 campaigns.

Ask your agency which assets they wrote and which ones the platform made.

9. Read 30 days of change history

Google Ads keeps a change history for every account. Open it and read what your agency changed in the last 30 days, and when.

A managed account shows bid, budget, keyword, and creative changes, each with a reason someone can explain. Weeks without a change while results stay flat mean the account is running on its defaults.

On every Understory Agency engagement, AI monitors the account around the clock. A named paid media strategist decides and makes the changes, so every change in that history has a person behind it.

10. Check when each live ad launched

Sort your live ads by start date. Ads fatigue, so an actively managed account keeps adding new creative and copy variants and pulling tired ones. Understory Agency's paid media includes done-for-you creative, and our team keeps testing new headlines and calls to action while switching off the bottom performers.

If the newest live ad in your account is months old, nobody is testing. Ask your agency what they tested last month and what they switched off.

What should a paid media agency report every week?

A weekly report from an actively managed account fits on 1 screen and leads with pipeline. A head of marketing should be able to read it in a couple of minutes and know what happens next.

The 5 lines of a weekly paid media report

Line in the report	What it should show	What autopilot looks like
Spend and pipeline	Spend by channel next to the pipeline and revenue your CRM attributes to it	Clicks, CTR, and CPC with no CRM numbers
Changes made	What changed this week, why, and the number that prompted it	The same campaigns on the same settings
Tests	What was tested, what won, and what was switched off	No new ads for weeks
Problems flagged	Anything off target, raised before you ask	Problems you find in the CRM first
Next week	The plan, and anything the agency needs from you	Next steps copied from last month

We hold ourselves hardest to the 4th line. A client should hear about a problem from us before they find it in their CRM. Understory Agency clients also get a live dashboard they can open any day, with spend, leads, meetings booked, pipeline created, and revenue closed. Each client also has a designated Slack channel, bi-weekly meetings, and quarterly business reviews.

The first line depends on your CRM. If it can't tie spend to pipeline yet, fix that first with HubSpot attribution reporting.

How Understory Agency runs and reports on paid media

Understory Agency runs paid media on LinkedIn, Google, Meta, Reddit, and X. We built our own ad intelligence tool, so our strategists work from live data. One request pulls a full performance report, with spend, CTR, CPC, conversions, and recommendations, live across LinkedIn, Google, Meta, Reddit, and Microsoft.

As a certified HubSpot Solutions Partner, we set up HubSpot or Salesforce with custom properties and dashboards through RevOps. Clients see pipeline and revenue next to spend. New form fills go to your sales reps in Slack the moment they're submitted.

If you'd like us to run the audit with you, book a call.

Should you bring paid media in-house or change agency?

Run the audit first. It shows whether you have an account problem or an agency problem.

Bring paid media in-house if:

you run 1 or 2 channels;
someone on your team has the hours to read the accounts every week;
your CRM already shows pipeline by channel.

Change agency if:

the audit found defaults spending your money, and your agency never raised them;
the weekly report stops at clicks;
you need paid media, creative, landing pages, and CRM work run together.

When you choose a B2B demand gen agency, ask to see the report they send a current client. Understory Agency runs all 4 as one Allbound team and puts ad platform and CRM data in the same report.

Whichever you choose, keep admin access to your own ad accounts and CRM. The history should stay with your company when people or agencies change.

FAQ

How do I tell whether my paid media agency is actively managing our account?

A head of marketing can tell from 3 reports: the 30-day change history, the campaigns that spent money but converted nothing, and the LinkedIn placement split. Understory Agency starts inherited accounts with the same checks.

Why is our agency spending more on ads and getting the same pipeline?

B2B SaaS teams see this when new budget flows into the leaks the old budget already had. Understory Agency's audits of Hiver and Northbeam found those leaks in zero-conversion campaigns, default placements, and conversion goals set to the wrong event.

What tools help audit a paid media account?

The platforms' own reports cover most of the audit. Use Google Ads segments and change history, and the placement split in LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Your CRM shows whether those leads became pipeline. At Understory Agency, we also pull a live performance report across LinkedIn, Google, Meta, Reddit, and Microsoft with our own ad intelligence tool.

Should we turn off the LinkedIn Audience Network?

B2B SaaS advertisers should check how Audience Network leads convert in the CRM before keeping it on. On Northbeam's account, the Audience Network was the first setting Understory Agency switched off.

Should a paid media agency charge a percentage of ad spend?

Agency fees tied to spend rise when your budget rises, whatever the pipeline does. Understory Agency charges custom flat retainers for each service, never a percentage of spend.