Self-audit your account in 30 minutes.
A panel that opens on top of your live Google Ads screen and walks you through five checks one at a time, with hand-drawn arrows pointing at the exact tab to open.
A practitioner on your side of the table.
A panel that opens on top of your live Google Ads screen and walks you through five checks one at a time, with hand-drawn arrows pointing at the exact tab to open.
A read-only Google Ads Script that runs against your account on a schedule and emails you a complete waste report: chronic offenders, expensive converters, geographic leakage. Configure in your browser. Paste into Ads.
No sign-up. No email. No credit card. No information needed. Just copy and paste.
No telemetry, no analytics, no API calls leave your browser. Nothing about your account, your queries, or your spend is transmitted anywhere.
The green-arrow slide is the one above. If you also recognize these (the agency vocabulary, the campaign nobody can audit), you’re not imagining it. These are tactics, not accidents. Each one has a name and a fix.
Four phrases your account manager reaches for when they don’t want to commit to why a number moved. Each one is a real Google Ads concept being used as fog. See the red flag →
A single campaign that consumes a third of your spend. The aggregate looks fine. The drilldown is “not shared by Google,” which used to be true and is now mostly a choice. See the red flag →
Most B2B Shopping spend splits about three ways: a small slice that buys real new pipeline, a chunk that re-buys customers Google was sending you anyway, and a bigger chunk on searches that will never become customers. Reports never show you the split. The agency reports the total.
Each leak has a fix, and a corresponding red flag entry on this site:
Most clients of PPC agencies are in the same position you’d be in at an auto shop.
You can tell something is off. You can’t quite say what. The technician uses words you don’t fully follow. The bill arrives. You pay it.
Asymmetry is the entire business model.
The fix is not to become a mechanic. It’s to bring one with you.
You’re probably one of them.
Five ways to work together. None lock you in. The first is free, and most people who use it never come back. That’s exactly the point.
Bringing a third party into your account is a conversation with your agency, and a lot of people aren’t ready for that conversation yet. Reasonable. I had clients who clearly wanted a second opinion on my work and didn’t know how to ask for it without it feeling like an accusation, and I felt the awkwardness from the agency side too. It’s a real reason people sit on a bad gut feeling for months.
So every tier above except Tier 2 (where I’m literally on the monthly agency call) also runs from artifacts. You send me what you have: the monthly report PDF, a CSV export of the change history, a recording of the last status call, screenshots of the panels you’re suspicious of. I write up findings from that. The audit is a little narrower than read-only account access, but the gap between what your agency is saying and what the data shows rarely needs login credentials to spot.
When you’re ready to give read-only access, you give read-only access. Until then, I work with what you can send me: quietly, mutual NDA up front, no one else on the email thread.
I’m not building an agency. I don’t take referral fees. I won’t recommend a replacement agency unless you ask. And even then I’ll lean toward telling you the questions to ask, not the names to call.
Public notes from the practice. Audits in progress, agency patterns, and the conversations they spark.
One question: about your account, your agency’s reporting, a number that doesn’t sit right. A straight answer back, usually within two business days. No sign-up, no follow-up, no pitch.