If your agency says they are optimising your account every week, the Change History should make that visible. You should see search term work, negative keywords, ad tests, budget decisions, bid strategy checks, tracking fixes, asset updates, and experiments that match the problems in the account.
What you should not see is three months of silence, followed by a suspicious burst of edits the day before your monthly report.
The useful benchmark: enough changes to match the account
Change count is not a score by itself. Fifty careless edits can make an account worse. Five excellent changes can unlock a campaign. Still, account activity gives you a useful smell test.
As a rough guide, a well-managed account often shows something like this:
| Monthly ad spend | Healthy human activity | What you are looking for |
|---|---|---|
| Under £1,000 | 5-15 meaningful changes | Basic search term checks, budget control, obvious waste removed. |
| £1,000-£5,000 | 15-40 meaningful changes | Weekly hygiene, negatives, ad copy testing, conversion checks. |
| £5,000-£20,000 | 40-100 meaningful changes | Structured testing, campaign-level decisions, regular query and asset work. |
| £20,000+ | 100+ meaningful changes | Deeper segmentation, experiments, feed or creative iteration, tighter monitoring. |
Treat those ranges as a conversation starter, not a courtroom verdict. Complexity matters. A lead-gen account with five campaigns may need less visible editing than a Shopping account with a large product feed.
What should count as a real Google Ads change?
Good changes usually connect to a problem, a hypothesis, or a clear account-management habit.
- Search term reviews: adding negatives, spotting expensive irrelevant queries, and protecting spend from waste.
- Ad and asset testing: new copy, stronger offers, refreshed sitelinks, callouts, images, and headlines.
- Budget moves: shifting money toward campaigns with better intent, margin, or conversion quality.
- Bidding and target adjustments: changing targets because performance evidence supports it, not because the agency is bored.
- Conversion tracking checks: fixing tags, removing duplicate conversions, and checking lead quality.
- Campaign structure work: splitting or consolidating only when the account actually benefits.
What should not count?
This is where agencies can make themselves look busier than they are. The raw number in Change History can be inflated by automated edits, bulk edits, cosmetic changes, or Google recommendations accepted without much thought.
- Auto-applied recommendations from Google.
- Bulk label changes or naming cleanups that do not affect performance.
- Repeated budget nudges with no strategy behind them.
- Initial setup work being recycled as evidence of ongoing management.
- One large batch of changes immediately before a reporting call.
This is why our audit separates likely human work from automated activity. The difference matters.
Want the honest count?
Upload your Google Ads Change History CSV and FireMyAgency will show how much human work happened, how much looks automated, and where the gaps are.
Audit My Change History Show me how to export itThe pattern matters more than the number
A strong account has rhythm. You see consistent work through the month, not random bursts. You see edits tied to the account's actual issues. You see search term work in Search campaigns, feed or asset work in Shopping and Performance Max, and tracking checks when lead quality changes.
A weak account often has gaps. No activity for weeks. No search term hygiene. No ad testing. No conversion tracking fixes. Plenty of reporting language, but very little operational evidence.
Questions to ask your agency
If you want to test the relationship without making it hostile, ask simple, specific questions:
- How many manual changes did you make in the last 30 days?
- Which changes had the biggest expected impact?
- How often are you reviewing search terms?
- Which changes were made by Google automation rather than a person?
- What did you decide not to change, and why?
A good agency can answer these calmly. A weak agency usually retreats into vague language: optimised, monitored, refined, improved.
So, how many changes should your agency make?
Enough that the account tells a believable story. If you are paying a monthly fee, you should see evidence of consistent judgement. The Change History should show a person looking at the account, making decisions, learning from the results, and protecting your money.
If it does not, the problem is not the number. The problem is the silence.