Google Ads account review
Where does your Google Ads budget actually go?
A read-only review of your account. Ten checks, run by hand, that find where budget leaks and where tracking lies, and the two or three fixes that matter. Never a login.
Ten checks · Read-only access · Reviewed by a person
Most accounts have never been read.
An account that has been running for a year has usually never had anyone sit down and read where the money went. The dashboard reports what it was told to count. The recommendations tab suggests ways to spend more. Nobody opens the search-terms report.
So search partners take clicks nobody wanted. A form-fill fires twice and the conversion rate looks healthy. Performance Max spends the brand budget on people who typed your name. Search-partner placements alone can take a large share of the spend that was meant for Google Search, and an account will run that way for months without anyone noticing. Not a failing. A starting line, once someone looks.
The ten checks.
The same ten we run at the start of every account we manage. Each one is a place where budget leaks or a number lies, and each one is checkable from a read-only view.
The note you get back covers all ten, in order of what is costing you most.
- Where the money went Search partners, the Display Network and Performance Max placements, separated from Google Search itself. The place budgets most often leak without anyone noticing.
- What the conversions count Double-firing tags, form-fills counted as customers, page views counted as leads. The dashboard is only as honest as the conversion actions behind it.
- Brand versus everything else Whether brand searches are fenced from non-brand and from Performance Max, or whether the account is paying for customers who typed your name.
- Match types and search terms What broad match actually bought over the last ninety days of the search-terms report, and how far it has drifted from the intent you meant.
- Negative keywords Coverage, structure and the obvious gaps: the terms that keep appearing in the report and keep being paid for.
- Geography and schedule Where and when the budget is spent against where and when the buyers are, including the location option that quietly serves ads to people 'interested in' your market.
- Bidding strategy fit Whether the strategy matches the conversion volume the account actually has, or whether a smart-bidding strategy is starving on too little data.
- Landing-page relevance Whether the page each ad group sends people to answers the query they typed, and how quickly it loads for them.
- Budget pacing and impression share Whether budget caps are throttling the campaigns that work while the ones that do not run freely, and what impression share says on the terms that matter.
- The settings nobody changes Auto-applied recommendations, ad rotation, audience expansion, search-partner opt-in: the defaults that were never revisited after launch.
Request, grant read-only access, get the note.
- 01 You send
The account and the sector
Your website, your monthly media budget band and what the account is for. That is enough for us to know what a well-run version of it should look like.
- 02 We read it
Read-only, by hand
You grant our manager account read-only access from inside Google Ads, in about a minute, and can revoke it whenever you like. We never ask for a login. Then a person runs the ten checks.
- 03 You get
A short note, fixes in order
What we found on each check, the two or three fixes that matter most, and an honest read on whether the account needs rebuilding, tuning or leaving alone. A call if it helps.
and what to fix first
| Google Search | Checked |
| Search partners | Leak |
| Display expansion | Leak |
| Performance Max vs brand | Fix |
The opening move of the work we run for clients.
This review is the first step of the Google Ads management we run for B2B, SaaS, fintech and financial-services businesses, for nonprofits and associations, and white-label for communications firms. The ten checks are the same ones every managed account starts with; the only difference is that here you get the findings before deciding anything.
Agencies requesting for a client: the findings come to you, under your name if you prefer. How that works is on the partners page.
Request your review
See where the budget is going.
Tell us the account and the sector. We read it by hand, read-only, and send you what we find.
Straight answers.
What the review covers, what access it needs, and what happens after.
How much does the Google Ads account review cost?
It is a fixed-fee piece of work, quoted before we start. It is also how we introduce the paid-search management work we do. If the findings are useful and you want us to act on them, we can talk about that; if the account is in good shape, we will say so and leave it there.
What access do you need?
Read-only access to the Google Ads account, granted from inside your account by linking it to our manager account with read-only permission. It takes about a minute, we never see or ask for your login, and you can remove the link at any time from your own account settings.
What if the account is fine?
Then the note says so, with the evidence, and you have an independent read to take to whoever asked. Not every account leaks. Most that have been running for a year without an outside look do, in at least one of the ten places.
Do we have to hand you the account afterwards?
No. The note is yours to act on with your in-house team, your current agency or nobody. If you want us to make the fixes or run the account, that is a separate conversation with a fixed monthly retainer sized to the media budget, and the account stays yours throughout.
Can an agency request a review for a client?
Yes, and it is a common way for a partnership to start. Choose 'Agency, requesting for a client' in the form. The findings come to you, under your name if you prefer, and you decide what to take to the client.
Do you review Microsoft Advertising (Bing) accounts as well?
Yes. Tell us in the notes and we will look at both, since most of the ten checks apply to either platform and the two accounts usually share the same mistakes.
How is this different from Google's own recommendations tab?
Google's recommendations are generated to increase spend and are scored against the platform's idea of an optimised account, which is not the same as a profitable one. Several of the ten checks exist precisely to catch what auto-applied recommendations did. A person reading the search-terms report and the conversion actions finds what an optimisation score cannot.