services / paid ads · google · meta · amazon

Paid ads, watched by a person

Most ad accounts are set up once, switched to automated bidding, and left to run. The platform keeps spending either way. What follows is where that money goes, and what I do about it.

where ad budgets leak

Open the search terms report of an account nobody has been watching and you will find the fastest bad news in marketing. The account is paying for searches that could never become customers: people looking for jobs, for free versions, for how-to instructions, for competitors' brand names that share a word with yours. Broad match puts your ad in front of them; automated bidding happily buys the click.

The second leak is quieter. Automated bidding is only as smart as the conversions you feed it. If your account counts every form spam, misdial, and pageview as a conversion, the machine optimizes toward noise, with your money, at full confidence. Bad tracking doesn't just misreport results. It actively steers the budget wrong.

Then the defaults: search partner networks switched on, display expansion switched on, location settings set to "presence or interest" so you pay for clicks from people who will never be your customer. None of these are mistakes anyone made. They are what the platform chooses when nobody chooses.

The settings favor the platform. Someone has to favor you.

the right channel, not the favorite one

I don't sell a channel. I ask where your buyer actually decides, and put the budget there.

Google
Captures demand that already exists. Someone searches for what you sell; you are there or you are not. The highest intent money can buy, and the easiest to waste on the wrong searches.
Meta
Creates demand. Reaches your buyer before they search, on Facebook and Instagram, by who they are rather than what they typed. Wins when the offer and creative are right, burns budget when they are not.
Amazon
Wins the shelf. If your product sells on Amazon, the search results page is the shelf, and placement on it is bought. Ranking, reviews, and ads work together or not at all.

the work itself

Conversion tracking that tells the truth. Real leads counted, junk excluded, phone calls tracked, so the bidding has honest data to optimize against.
Negative keywords and match-type discipline. The unending pruning that keeps your ads off searches that can't buy. This is weekly work, not setup work.
Account structure. Brand and non-brand separated, campaigns organized so budget goes where you decide, not where the algorithm drifts.
Landing pages that match the ad. A click that lands on your homepage is half wasted. The page has to continue the sentence the ad started.
Reporting in leads and cost per lead. Monthly, written in plain English, with what I changed and why. Not a dashboard login you'll never open.

what happens when

Week one
Full audit of the account and tracking. Immediate quiet fixes: negatives on obvious waste, location settings corrected, default network placements reviewed. You get the findings in writing.
Month one
Conversion tracking rebuilt and verified end to end. Account restructured. The waste identified in the audit is cut, and budget consolidates on what remains.
Month three
Enough clean data to judge cost per lead honestly. Now we scale what earns it and kill what doesn't, with numbers we both trust. This is where growth decisions belong; making them earlier is guessing.

I won't promise a flood of leads in thirty days. Anyone who does is either guessing or planning to count things that aren't leads.

see for yourself first

The free ad audit is the whole first step: read-only access, a personal read-through of your account, and a written list of what's leaking. If your problem is showing up in search rather than paying for it, start with SEO or run the free market check.