PPC
RED FLAGS
Practitioner advisory

You don’t need to be a mechanic to know when you’re being upsold.

A practitioner on your side of the table.

Book Free Audit →
ppcredflags.com
Q1 Performance Review · prepared by Agency
IMPRESSIONS
+47%
▲ vs. last month
CLICKS
+23%
▲ vs. last month
CTR
+18%
▲ vs. last month
IMPR. SHARE
+14%
▲ vs. last month
Leads
38
-19% MoM
Cost per lead
$284
+31% MoM
Pipeline
Not reported
n/a
where is the pipeline??
CPL up 31%, not in the deck
marked up by
a practitioner
Neutral, no referral fees
Practitioner-built, 12 years in paid media
Free one-off question, no pitch
Practitioner advisory

You don’t need to be a mechanic to know when you’re being upsold.

A practitioner on your side of the table.

Two free things you can run yourself

See them work, then decide if you want to talk.

Free Chrome extension

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.

Open full report →
Free Google Ads Script

A weekly waste audit, emailed to you.

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.

Two promises about these free tools

Absolutely free.

No sign-up. No email. No credit card. No information needed. Just copy and paste.

No data collected. Whatsoever.

No telemetry, no analytics, no API calls leave your browser. Nothing about your account, your queries, or your spend is transmitted anywhere.

June 2026 · Limited availability

Starting in June: a completely free full-service audit.

I’m going into accounts, listening to recorded agency calls, and delivering complete written reports on account health and agency work quality, at no charge.

  • Full Google Ads account review: structure, change history, bid strategy, audiences
  • Recorded agency call review: what they’re saying versus what the account shows
  • Written report with specific questions to ask on your next call
Book your free audit
Sound familiar?

Two more things you’ve probably seen in your last quarterly review.

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.

Verbatim quotes from a typical agency call, each annotated with a translation Four italic quotes that account managers commonly use, each annotated in orange monospace text with what they actually mean. FROM YOUR LAST QUARTERLY CALL “We’re still in the learning period.” → It’s been six weeks. Documented at two. “Performance Max needs runway.” → The campaign that consumes 30% of spend has no audit trail. “Quality of traffic is up, even if volume isn’t.” → A pivot. Last month it was the other way. “ROAS came in strong, in line with expectations.” → Whose expectations? Set when?

Exhibit B: The vocabulary

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 →

Mock Performance Max campaign panel showing aggregate numbers but a locked search-terms drilldown A campaign panel showing $14,820 spent on Performance Max with three big numbers and a greyed-out Search Terms drilldown labeled not available. PMAX · ALL CONVERSIONS SPEND $14,820 31% of total budget CONVERSIONS 182 CPA $81 CONV. VALUE $58.4K 3.94 ROAS SEARCH TERMS: not available at the keyword level No human reviewed where this $14,820 actually went.

Exhibit C: The black box

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 →

Live · same query stream most accounts run on

Watch a typical month route itself.

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.

Animated visualisation of monthly Google Ads spend routing into three buckets Search query pills fall from the top of a frame and settle into one of three coloured buckets: real new pipeline, brand cannibalisation, or junk waste.
Total spend, this session
$0
Real new pipeline 0%
$0
Brand cannibalization 0%
$0
Junk-search waste 0%
$0
Three labels your agency’s monthly deck doesn’t use.

The asymmetry is the business model

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.

Three people read this site.

You’re probably one of them.

  • The CMO whose monthly deck is full of green arrows and whose pipeline is the worst it’s been in two years.
  • The owner-operator paying $2K–$10K a month who has no internal benchmark for whether the numbers are good, bad, or invented.
  • The marketing director fourteen months in, still hearing “results take time,” afraid of the gap between agencies.

What I do

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.

  1. Tier 0
    Free one-off question Free
    One question, one answer, one time. Phone, email, or a fifteen-minute call. No pitch, no follow-up.
  2. Tier 1
    Quick Dive $300–500
    A 60-minute forensic teardown of your account. I find the leaks, flag the fluff, and hand you a one-page executive hit-list. You’ll know exactly where your budget is bleeding, and exactly what uncomfortable questions to ask your agency on tomorrow’s status call.
  3. Tier 2
    Monthly Advisor Retainer, on inquiry
    I sit on your monthly agency call. Pre-read the report, flag the fluff, tell you which questions to push back on. A practitioner in the room, on your side, every month.
  4. Tier 3
    Full Account Audit Project, on inquiry
    Read-only access. Written findings on waste, structural problems, missed opportunities, and platform gaps. Recommendations you can hand directly to your agency.
  5. Tier 4
    Agency Transition Support Project, on inquiry
    For clients who’ve decided to leave. I keep the lights on during the transition so leads don’t fall off a cliff, then help brief the incoming agency.
Discreet engagement · Off your agency’s radar

Don’t want your agency to know you’re getting a second opinion?

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.

Why I’m the one telling you this

Alex Langton at a glance: 12 years in paid media, $1.5 million per month currently under management, eight years agency-side and four years in-house, multi-channel, B2B e-commerce and lead gen. A summary panel showing three large statistics (years, current monthly spend, agency vs in-house split) plus the channels currently managed and the industries served. WHO YOU’RE TALKING TO 12 YEARS IN PAID MEDIA since 2014 $1.5M PER MONTH currently under management, in-house 8 / 4 YRS AGENCY / IN-HOUSE both sides of the table CHANNELS, RIGHT NOW Google Ads · Microsoft Ads · Meta · LinkedIn · Reddit Quora · TikTok · Programmatic display · Trade pubs INDUSTRIES B2B e‑commerce · B2B lead generation NEUTRAL no referral fees

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.

From LinkedIn

What I’ve been writing about lately.

Public notes from the practice. Audits in progress, agency patterns, and the conversations they spark.

Follow on LinkedIn

Free · no questions asked

Ask me one thing.

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.

PDF, spreadsheet, or image. Your agency’s monthly report, a search-terms export, a screenshot of a number that doesn’t add up.

No follow-up sales sequence. No newsletter. One question, one straight answer, usually within two business days.

Your account data, pipeline metrics, and campaign structures stay confidential, under mutual‑NDA standards. I won’t share, sell, or use any of it for public case studies or portfolio work. If we end up in a paid engagement, read‑only access is revoked the moment the work is delivered.