Google Ads Management That Starts by Finding Where the Money Went

Because the answer is usually outside the account. In a recent two-year review of a supplement brand's account, tracked revenue had fallen by half in a year. The manager had rebuilt the campaigns three times looking for the cause, and each rebuild threw away what Google's bidding had learned, which cost the brand somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000 on its own. The real cause was that searches for the brand's own name had fallen by two thirds. Google Ads collects brand demand; it does not create it. Something upstream had stopped sending people, and no setting inside the account could have shown that.

The same review found the account bidding to an 83% return on a $95 first order in a subscription business with no lifetime value passed back, informational searches burning two thirds of the cold budget with no sale, and the two biggest product pages scoring 2 out of 10 on mobile speed. None of it took admin access to find. It took someone reading the account, the pages and the customer economics at the same time, and that is the job I do.

I ask for reports-only access, so nothing can be changed, and I pull two full years: campaign performance by month, the complete change history, the landing page report and the search terms. Then the audit answers the questions a dashboard never will.

Within 48 hours of access you get a recovery brief: a short, plain-English document with the numbers in tables, one recommendation per section, each tied to a week, and a closing section on what the account cannot fix. The brief is yours whatever you decide. If you want to act on it yourself or hand it to your current manager, that is a fine outcome. If you would rather I ran it, the brief becomes the first eight weeks of the plan.

The audit is free for the founding accounts I take on this quarter, because it is the fastest way to show what the management would do. I would rather you see the weaknesses in the current setup with your own eyes than read a pitch about them.

The same loop I run for the creative team, with the account added. On Monday the tooling reads the account: spend, cost of a new customer, share of cold clicks that buy, brand against cold, disapprovals and anomalies, in a one-page note I read before anything else. Tuesday decides what the data says to test next: search terms into negatives or new ad groups, fatigue into new concepts, a congruency break into a page fix. Wednesday and Thursday are creative and copy, written to Google's policy and matched to the page they land on. Friday the changes are made through tooling that logs who, what, why and the before and after, and the creatives go up.

Every two weeks you get a written report of five numbers: brand searches and what a brand click costs, the cost of a new customer from cold searches, the share of cold clicks that buy, the share of spend going to searches with no sale, and a list of what was changed and why. Once a month we reset the targets from updated customer-value data. No structure rebuilds without a written case and a four-week read, which is the discipline most accounts have never had.

Three things. The person reading your account is the person writing your ads and your landing pages, so a search-term finding becomes a page fix the same week instead of a ticket to another department. The targets are set from what a customer is worth over a year, not from a first order, because most of my clients sell something people buy again. And the reading is done by an AI engine I built on Claude Code, with my own copywriting skills and a private library of frameworks and tested copy, so two years of search terms get read in minutes rather than sampled on a quarterly call.

The creative that feeds the account comes from the same place: angles mined from your customers' own words, statics and ad copy written to the angle, landing pages and advertorials that continue the ad's sentence, and a compliance pass on every asset before it ships. For brands also running Meta, the same creative loop supplies that account too, so one argument runs across both platforms.

Direct response brands spending roughly $5,000 to $100,000 a month on Google Ads, where paid traffic is most of revenue and the owner cannot read the account well enough to know whether the manager is doing a good job. Supplements and health are my home vertical; DTC, info products and financial publishing follow the same loop with their own compliance rules. The work behind it is the direct-response testing discipline I learned at Belron, where a campaign I ran for nine years tracked $523 million in sales, and the copy that has produced a 300% return on ad spend for a ClickBank Platinum vendor and an 8% cold-traffic conversion rate for a VSL funnel.

If the audit shows your account is already well run, I will say so and point to whatever the real constraint is. That happens, and it is still worth the two days.