My agency split-tested two landing pages on the same seller campaign and only told me about the winner

The account ownership is the structural problem here, and it overrides the reporting argument for now. When the account sits in their name, you cannot pull the raw data yourself, you cannot take the history with you if you leave, and you have no independent verification of what they are showing you. That is the leverage they used, possibly without thinking about it strategically, possibly not.

On the economics: your read is correct. CTR is a pre-conversion metric. If the page with lower CTR was producing cheaper leads that converted to conversations at a higher rate, the agency optimized for the wrong variable, which is a measurement error dressed up as a decision. The relevant metric in a motivated-seller campaign is cost per qualified conversation, possibly cost per contract, depending on how deep your attribution runs. CTR is a diagnostic, not a result.

The contract language you want going forward is specific. Clauses to require: account ownership in your name or business entity at account creation; read-only access granted to you immediately, not on request; raw data retention for all ad sets, including paused and deleted campaigns, for the duration of the engagement; reporting cadence defined as weekly with access to the underlying platform data, not a summary deck; and the right to export the full account on termination without restriction. Some agencies will push back on the account ownership clause. If they push back hard, that tells you something.

For attribution, you want a third party handling call tracking, something like CallRail sitting outside the agency's reporting stack, so you own the conversion data independently regardless of what they present.

The question about whether this is incompetence or story protection is worth holding. Both produce the same outcome for you, and the contract structure above addresses both. A licensed professional who handles agency agreements can draft the language with teeth, particularly around data access and termination rights.

What does your current contract say about account ownership on termination? That clause determines how much pressure you actually have right now.

What you found is a real problem, and it happens often enough that it has a name: agencies optimizing for click-through rate because that metric looks good in a deck, rather than optimizing for cost per qualified lead, which is the number that actually matters to you. A higher click-through rate means more people clicked. A lower cost per actual conversation means more people were ready to talk. Those two things pull in different directions, and you found a case where the agency pulled the wrong direction.

The account ownership issue is the more urgent fix. When the Google Ads account sits in the agency's name, they control the historical data, the audience lists built up over time, and your ability to leave without starting from scratch. The standard protection is a clause in your contract requiring that any ad accounts running your budget be created inside a Google Ads manager account that you own, with the agency granted access. You keep the asset. They do the work. If they push back on this, that itself tells you something.

On data access, the contract language that works is specific: you want a clause stating you receive read-only access to the live ad platforms within 72 hours of campaign launch, that all creative variants run until a statistically meaningful number of conversions, say 50 qualified form fills per variant, have been recorded before any variant is paused, and that no traffic allocation changes are made without written notice to you. "Statistically meaningful" is the key phrase. Two weeks and a click-through-rate glance is not a valid test.

I'd also ask any future agency to define, in writing, what metric they are optimizing for. Cost per lead is not the same as cost per conversation, and not the same as cost per closed deal. Getting that written into the scope of work before you sign protects you.

What does your current contract say about data ownership and reporting frequency?