[dangerface]

The first point I was being too hard on them.

The agency will add 20% on the spend because they can get better results than the client doing keyword research, writing ads and testing them.

The client did the hard work for the agency basically made the campaign themselves and then paid the agency 20% to set it live.

They should have done it the other way around get the agency to setup the campaign and then "scale" it themselves and they would have been able to an extra 20% ad spend for nothing.

The second point you are right again. I mean more that the funnel should start at the point of contact with the end user (the ad) and the landing page should be built for that ad, they seem to have tried to do it the other way around.

They obviously know what they are doing as far as tactics, it looks like they learned it from SEO, but I think they have tried to apply an SEO strategy of content first to their ad campaign and it didn't work.

You can't change advertising channels so you need to change your content to fit the channel not the other way around.