Vander Els Partners
The honest answer for a lot of the industry is: less than the retainer implies. So here is what the work looks like when it is being done, in enough detail that you can ask your current agency and know from the answer whether it is happening.
Ads: subtraction
Every week someone reads the search terms report, which is the list of what people actually typed before they clicked your ad. It is full of searches you should not be paying for: price shoppers, how-to questions, towns you do not serve, jobs you do not do. Those get added to the negative list so the budget stops reaching them. Then budget moves toward whatever produced booked work, not whatever produced the cheapest click.
Ask: what did you add to the negative list last week? An agency doing the work can answer in ten seconds.
Search: pages and plumbing
Someone checks that the site is still indexed and still fast, because sites get slower by accident, one plugin at a time. Someone adds or improves a page for a service or a town where the demand is real, based on what people in your market search for, not a keyword list pasted into headings. And the slow work of authority happens in the background: citations, local links, the listing kept accurate.
Ask: what page changed last month, and why that one?
The map: watched
The Google Business Profile gets checked for suspension, for edits Google made without asking, for reviews that need a reply, for a competitor's duplicate listing. This is daily, not weekly, because a suspended listing costs calls every hour it sits.
Ask: when did you last look at the profile?
Tracking: reconciled
Calls, forms and the CRM get compared against each other, because they disagree, and the disagreement is where leads go missing. A form that quietly stopped delivering is found by the person who checks the mail log, not by the dashboard.
Ask: how many forms did the mail server send last month, and how many did the CRM receive?
Reporting: one number that has to add up
At the end of the month, the calls, the forms, the spend and the map coverage are put next to each other and made to reconcile. When two sources disagree, you are told which one to believe and why. Screenshots of four separate dashboards are not a report.
The short version
Weekly ads work is subtraction. Weekly search work is pages and plumbing. The map is watched daily. Tracking is reconciled, not assumed. If your agency can answer the four questions above without looking anything up, the work is being done. If it cannot, now you know.