Google Ads management for B2B, SaaS, startups and ecommerce
Turn Google Ads spend into pipeline, led by a senior who signs your account.
A senior buyer names every wasted dollar in a free account teardown, and you own the account, month to month.
Free account teardown in 4 business days. No commitment, month to month, mutual NDA, you own the account.
- Search$12,40074% working
- Performance Max$9,80050% working
- Shopping$5,10067% working
- Demand Gen$2,70041% working
- Working$062%
- At risk$024%
- Wasted$014%
The direction a rebuild moves your spend, not a guaranteed result.
Illustrative, from a typical $30k/mo account. Toggle to see where a teardown moves the spend.
A senior buyer replies within 1 business day. No commitment, you own the account.
A $30,000 a month account, start to finish
What follows is one account’s year, assembled from the ones we see most often. The numbers are illustrative. The pattern is not.
If you are running paid search right now, you will recognise where this goes.
Month 1 · the first report
The first report looked great.
Clicks up 34 percent. Impressions up 41 percent. Click-through rate up. The dashboard was green, the agency was pleased, and nobody in the room had a reason to ask a harder question.
Every number in this report is true. None of them answer the only question that matters.
A composite account, not a real client. Figures illustrate the shape of the problem, not a promised result.
Four months in
Then sales stopped calling the leads back.
The graphs still pointed up. But the leads coming through were students, job seekers, and people looking for a free version. Sales quietly stopped working them. And when someone finally asked what a customer actually cost, nobody could answer.
- Gmail user“Is there a free version?”
- University address“Doing research for a thesis”
- Gmail user“Are you hiring?”
- Company domain“Pricing for a 40 seat team”
- Gmail user“How do I do this myself?”
Four of five never had a budget. You paid full price for every click.
That question is the whole problem. If you cannot answer it, your budget is being spent on your behalf by a machine optimizing for something else.
So we opened the account
Here is where the money was actually going.
A senior buyer went through it line by line. The first screen he opened is the one most accounts never look at: the search terms report, which shows the actual words people typed before your money was spent.
| Search term | Cost | Conv. |
|---|---|---|
| free crm software | $1,180 | 31 |
| is there a free crm | $740 | 19 |
| how to build a crm yourself | $520 | 6 |
| crm software jobs | $210 | 0 |
| crm for a 40 person sales team | $580 | 4 |
Smart Bidding was not broken. It was doing exactly what it was told. Every free-trial signup counted as a conversion, so the algorithm learned that people who want free software are your best customers, and went and bought more of them.
These are the top five of 340 terms we flagged. Together the flagged list was $3,200 of a $12,400 search budget, and no shared negative list had been touched in nine months.
From there the pattern was obvious. Four leaks. None of them exotic, all of them ordinary, and together they were eating more than a third of the budget.
Junk search queries
− $3,200 / moBroad match was buying "free", "how to" and "jobs" searches, and they were converting, because a free-trial signup counted as a conversion. Bidding saw success and leaned in harder every week.
The Performance Max black box
− $4,100 / moPMax was quietly re-buying brand searches you already won for free, then reporting them back as new performance. The ROAS in the deck was inflated by your own traffic.
Tracking nobody could trust
− $2,300 / moA page-view tag and a form tag both fired on the thank-you page, so every lead counted twice. The call conversion had no minimum duration set, so eight-second wrong numbers counted as leads. Closed revenue never made it back into the account, so bidding kept chasing form fills.
Rising CPCs on a flat budget
− $1,800 / moLost impression share to rank climbed from 18 to 34 percent while two new bidders showed up in Auction Insights. The same budget was winning fewer of the auctions that actually mattered.
$11,400 a month, gone. Not stolen, and not wasted by anyone in particular. Just never watched. The dashboard stayed green the entire time.
The first 30 days
What a senior fixes first, and why the order matters.
Anyone can hand you a list of problems. The value is knowing which one to touch first, and what not to touch until the one before it is done.
One senior buyer does all four, in this order.
The same person who signs your account and meets you on the teardown call. No rotating account manager, no junior learning on your budget.
Tracking first. Always.
Until the number is trustworthy, every other decision is a guess. Conversion actions audited first: primary versus secondary, counting set to one instead of every, duplicates killed. Then Enhanced Conversions, then offline import so bidding optimizes to qualified pipeline rather than form fills. Fair warning we give before touching anything: your conversion count will roughly halve and your reported CPA will look twice as bad. Nothing got worse. You are seeing the real number for the first time.
Then stop the bleeding.
Negatives run in parallel from day one, because they cost nothing and break nothing, so no money burns while the tracking work lands. Full search-term audit, shared negative lists, single-theme ad groups kept consolidated enough that Smart Bidding still has signal to work with.
Then open up Performance Max.
Performance Max is not a black box any more, it just ships opaque by default. We turn on channel reporting, pull its search terms, apply brand exclusions and campaign-level negatives, and split asset groups by offer. It keeps its budget only if it can show what it bought. Some of that spend is real, so this recovers most of the leak, not all of it.
Only then, scale.
Written hypotheses tested against a baseline. Winners funded, losers cut, on a schedule, so waste cannot creep back in. Nothing gets scaled until the number underneath it is real.
That is the whole method. Audit, rebuild, test, scale, with one senior who owns all four and signs the account.
Six months later
Same $30,000. A different business outcome.
$27,700 of it now working. About $9,100 a month redirected out of noise and into searches that turn into pipeline. And for the first time, a number that survives a board meeting: cost per closed-won customer, tracked through to closed revenue.
We will not promise you a ROAS figure we have not earned on your account. Anyone who does is guessing with your money. What we promise is this: every leaking dollar named, the fixes ranked in the order they should happen, and a clear view of where the budget goes. You decide from there.
Get your teardown
See exactly where your money leaks.
Send your account. A senior names every wasted dollar and the fixes in priority order, and replies within 1 business day.
Every month you wait, roughly $11,400 leaves an account like this one and does nothing. The teardown is free, takes 4 business days, and the findings are yours to keep whether you hire us or not.
- What access do you need?
- Read-only access to your Google Ads account, and nothing else. We cannot change a bid, edit a campaign, or spend a cent with it. You grant it in two clicks and revoke it in one. If you would rather not grant access at all, export your search terms and conversions reports and we will work from those.
- Is my ad spend safe?
- Yes. Nothing changes before the teardown, we work under NDA, and you watch the first month of changes before deciding to continue.
- Who owns the account?
- You do. Always. We work inside your account and hand back every file if you leave.
- What does it cost?
- The teardown is free. If you continue, pricing is scoped from what the teardown finds, month to month. No rate card, no lock-in.
- You are new. Why should I trust you?
- You should not yet. That is why the first thing is a free teardown on your own account, under NDA, with no commitment.
Rather talk first? Book a 30-minute call with the senior.
4 business days. Mutual NDA before access. You keep the account and the findings.