Most Small Ad Budgets Leak. I Find Out Where.
Most small ad accounts I have opened were paying for clicks that never sold, and the owner had no way to see it. I find the waste, cut it, and move the money to what sells.
What Is Usually Wrong
- Conversion tracking is counting page views or duplicate purchases, so the platform is optimizing toward the wrong thing.
- Broad match keywords are spending on searches that have nothing to do with you.
- The agency report shows impressions and clicks because those numbers always go up.
- Nobody has added a negative keyword or excluded a placement in months.
- Google and Meta are each claiming the same sale, and the total in the reports is bigger than the total in the bank.
The agency report shows impressions and clicks because those numbers always go up.
What I Do About It
- Fix the tracking before touching a bid, because everything downstream depends on it.
- Read the search terms and placements report line by line and cut what is not selling.
- Restructure toward what is converting, then rebuild spend gradually with a monthly review you can read in five minutes.
- Compare platform-reported revenue to what actually landed, so you stop paying for the same sale twice.
What Lands on Your Desk, and When
A tracking audit and a waste estimate: how much of the budget is going to searches, audiences, or placements that never convert.
Tracking fixed, dead spend paused, account restructured around what sells.
A one-page monthly review: spend, real revenue, what changed, and what happens next month.
Not a promise of a percentage. If the numbers are not moving by the end of the month, you say so and the work stops. No notice required.
What This Typically Costs
Most of this work starts as a Checkup ($1,500 to $3,500) or a fixed-scope Fix ($6,000 to $25,000, quoted flat). Ongoing management sits inside the Standing Arrangement at $2,000 to $5,000 a month, cancel any time. Full pricing and terms →
Free Tool
Steps five and six of the free audit show you how to spot the waste yourself. Open it →
What budget does this make sense for?
Roughly $3,000 a month in ad spend and up. Below that the management fee starts to eat the gain, and I will say so rather than take the engagement.
Asked on nearly every first call
Do you manage the ads or just audit them?
Both. Advice without hands is where most consulting fails a small company, so I am in the account doing the work. If you already have someone, I can audit what they are doing and tell you plainly whether the invoice is justified.
What budget does this make sense for?
Roughly $3,000 a month in ad spend and up. Below that the management fee starts to eat the gain, and I will say so rather than take the engagement.
Can I cancel?
Any time, no notice, no exit fee. If the numbers are not moving you should not be paying me.
Tell Me What Is Not Working
Tell me what you spend and what you can and cannot see in the results, and I will show up to the call with real observations, not a slide deck about myself.
What a Normal Google Ads Conversion Rate Looks Like
WordStream's 2025 benchmarks, drawn from 16,446 US search campaigns, put the average search conversion rate at 7.52 percent, with industries ranging from 2.55 percent in finance and insurance to 14.67 percent in automotive repair. Those are WordStream's figures, not ROILadder results, and they are the yardstick I start from when I look at an account.
If your account sits well under your industry's number, the gap is usually tracking, landing pages or wasted spend, in that order, and it is the first thing I would want to look at.