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How to tell whether your UAE Google Ads account is being run or just being spent

Nine checks you can run yourself in an hour, without knowing anything about bidding, and the two that most UAE accounts fail.

Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 22 October 2026

You do not need to understand auction mechanics to tell whether somebody is managing your advertising. Nine things are visible to any account owner in an hour, and an account failing three or more of them is being spent rather than run. Two of the nine are specific to advertising in the United Arab Emirates and are the ones most commonly failed here.

The nine checks

  1. Is there a conversion being counted at all? Open the conversions view. If the only thing recorded is a page view or nothing, nobody can be optimising anything, whatever the report says.
  2. Is the conversion the one you care about? An enquiry, a call, a purchase. Not a click on an email address, not a scroll.
  3. Has anything changed in the last 30 days? The change history is a log. An account with no changes in a month is an account nobody opened.
  4. Are there negative keywords? A live search campaign with an empty or tiny negative list is paying for irrelevant clicks every day. This is the single clearest sign of neglect.
  5. Is your own brand separated from everything else? If brand and non brand sit in one campaign, the brand traffic is flattering every number you are shown.
  6. Are the search terms readable? Open the actual search terms and read 50 of them. You will know within two minutes whether the targeting is deliberate.
  7. Does the landing page match the ad? Click three ads. If they all land on the homepage, you are paying search prices for a browse experience.
  8. Who owns the account? It should be in your company's name with the agency granted access. An account owned by an agency is an asset you lose when the relationship ends.
  9. Does the invoice reconcile to the platform? Ask your supplier for the platform spend figure and compare it with what you were invoiced. They should match, line by line, and you should check this at least once.

The two UAE specific checks most accounts fail

Language and locale targeting that matches your buyers. The UAE audience is multilingual and an account set up on defaults often targets a language mix nobody chose. Check which languages and locations are actually selected, and whether they match the market you can serve. Accounts targeting the whole Gulf when the business serves one emirate are common and expensive.

Regulated category rules. Healthcare, financial services, property and several other sectors carry restrictions on what may be advertised and claimed in this market, and those sit on top of the platform's own policies. An agency that has not worked in your sector will write ads that are fine for a retailer and wrong for a clinic. Ask who approves ad copy against your sector's requirements, and make sure the answer is a named person.

What a competent monthly report looks like

Four things, on one page. Spend, enquiries, cost per enquiry, and what changed this month with the reason. If your report has forty metrics and none of those four, it was built to look thorough rather than to be read.

The best question to ask your supplier is what the report says in a month when nothing improved. A manager who has had those months answers immediately. Somebody who is only spending talks about impressions.

Why the organic side belongs in this conversation

On 22 October 2026 we put a 198 question set of UAE buying questions to ChatGPT and Gemini, with the market written into the prompt because the gl, hl, location and country parameters on the search API are accepted, return 200 and answer from somewhere else. That gave 60 blind readings, and the paid media batch was answered by both engines and named no supplier.

Across the whole set, 34 of 60 readings named nobody at all. That is directly relevant to a paid account, because a buyer who asks an assistant for a recommendation and gets no name is a buyer still in the market, and the business that appears in that answer collects demand it does not pay per click for. Paid and organic are not competing budgets in this market so much as two different ways of being present, and most UAE accounts are optimising one and ignoring the other entirely.

What to do if the account fails three or more checks

  • Ask for the change history and the search terms for the last 90 days, in writing. Both are exportable in minutes.
  • Ask who specifically works on the account and how much time per week.
  • Fix the conversion tracking before anything else. Without it, changing supplier just moves the same blindness somewhere else.
  • Keep the account in your own name and grant access, not the other way round.

What UAE advertisers ask when they suspect an account is neglected

Is a low cost per click a good sign? Not on its own. Cheap clicks from the wrong searches are the commonest way an account looks healthy and produces nothing. Read the search terms.

Should management fees be a percentage of spend? It is workable for large stable budgets and poor for small ones, because the fee falls exactly when a struggling account needs more attention. If it is used, put a floor and a ceiling on it.

How much time should an account take? Enough that the change history shows deliberate work. Ask for hours per week and compare it with what you are paying.

Can we run it ourselves? A small single channel account, yes, with a few hours a week and the nine checks above as your routine. The threshold at which paying somebody pays back is about spend and complexity rather than skill.

What is the first thing to fix? Conversion tracking, then negatives, then the landing pages. In that order, every time.

Run the nine checks yourself before you change supplier

An hour with the account open settles whether you have a management problem or a tracking problem, and those have completely different remedies. Change history, negatives, search terms and landing pages take fifteen minutes between them, and the conversion check takes two. Do it before the conversation rather than after, so the conversation is about evidence.

If the account fails on conversion tracking, fix that first and change nothing else. Moving an untracked account to a new supplier buys you the same blindness with a different invoice, and it is the most common expensive move in this market.

For the account ownership and permission questions that sit under paid work here, see our page on digital marketing agencies in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah.

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