Most business owners we talk to are not confused about advertising because they are bad at it. They are confused because the platforms changed underneath them. Google and Meta both moved to automated campaign types that make their own decisions about who sees your ads, what those ads say, and how much each click costs. The dashboards got simpler and the actual control got harder to reach. You are told the machine is optimizing. You are not told what it is optimizing toward, and it is usually not your profit.
We run Google and Meta ad accounts for businesses that would rather not think about any of that. You keep ownership of the account. We work inside it every week, rewrite the ads, cut what is wasting money, and send you a monthly report that tells you what changed and whether it worked. When something goes wrong, you hear it from us first.
$350 a month, or 10% of ad spend, whichever is greater. No setup fee, no contract. How pricing works.
What we take off your hands
The reason ad accounts decay is not that owners are careless. It is that the work is weekly, detailed, and never finished. Search terms need reviewing because the platform will happily spend your budget on queries that have nothing to do with your business. Ad copy needs rewriting because the same three headlines running for eight months stop earning clicks. Budgets need shifting because the campaign that worked in March is not the campaign working in July. None of that is hard in isolation. All of it is relentless.
We do that work inside your account on a weekly cycle. Search term reports get reviewed and negative keywords added, so you stop paying for the wrong traffic. Ad copy gets rewritten and tested against what is already running, so the account keeps finding better messaging instead of settling. Budgets move toward whatever is actually converting. Campaigns that have stopped earning their keep get paused rather than left to quietly drain. Bids get adjusted where the data supports it and left alone where it does not.
Underneath that, we watch the things that break silently. Conversion tracking fails more often than anyone expects, and a broken conversion action does not announce itself. It just makes your reports meaningless while the numbers keep arriving. Ads get disapproved and stop serving without an email that anyone notices. Automated campaign types quietly expand into audiences and placements you never asked for. Those are the failures that cost the most, because they can run for weeks before anybody looks.
Every change we make is written to a change log with the previous value, the new value, the reason, and what happened afterward. That log is yours to read whenever you want. It exists because "we optimized the account" is not a report, and because we would rather show you the work than describe it.
Results from real accounts
Two things go wrong in an ad account and neither one shows up on the dashboard. You buy real orders at twice what they should cost, or you buy nothing at all while the campaign reports green. We took over one of each.
Both clients agreed to let us publish on the condition that they stay anonymous. The figures come from live reads of the ad platforms, not from a case study written afterward. Where a number came from the client rather than from our own measurement, we say so.
A direct-to-consumer cleaning products brand
A Shopify store selling cleaning products nationally, running Google Ads. The account had been run by an outside agency for years, and it had the problem most inherited ecommerce accounts have. Budget was going out at a steady clip, the automated campaign types were absorbing most of it, and nobody was checking what the money was actually buying. Brand searches, which are the cheapest traffic any business has, were being paid for inside campaigns built to find new customers.
We rebuilt the account so branded demand was captured separately from prospecting, cut the search terms that were spending without converting, and put negative keyword discipline in place. Then we held the budget down and left it there.
Revenue Google Ads attributed to the ads, per dollar spent. Anything below 1.0x means the channel loses money.
That is the number to read. Two years below break-even, then 1.94x. At 0.67x the account returned 67 cents on the dollar, so every month it ran was a month the brand lost money on Google. Across May and June 2026 it returns $1.94 on the dollar, and the direction has held all year. Same store, same products, same market.
The first-half figure of 1.55x is the honest full-period average, held down by a weak February and April while the rebuild was still landing. We show both so you can see the average and the direction.
Two different scales, shown separately. Completed Shopify orders only.
Average monthly ad spend
Lower is better
Cost per completed order
Lower is better
The single clearest way to read this account: in calendar 2024 it produced about 28.5 orders a month. In the first half of 2026 it produced about 28.1 orders a month. Nearly identical output, on 46 percent of the media spend. Average monthly spend went from $1,707.01 to $791.62, a cut of about 54 percent made in January 2025 and held since.
Cost per completed order followed, from $59.90 in calendar 2024 to $28.14 in the first half of 2026. That is roughly half, or about 2.1x better. Tracked return on ad spend moved from 0.8x to 1.55x over the same periods, which is the difference between losing money on the channel and making money on it.
This is an efficiency story rather than a growth story. We did not grow this brand's sales. We bought roughly the same number of orders for less than half the money, which for an account that had been running at a loss was the thing worth fixing first.
About the year in between
There is a year between those two columns. Across 2025 the account ran at $65.50 per completed order on a 0.67x return, worse than 2024 on both. That year was still the incumbent agency's to run. We had account access and we advised, but we did not control the budgets, the structure, or the bidding. Our control period begins in 2026.
We show it anyway, because a before-and-after that skips the middle is the oldest trick in this industry, and because anyone with access to the same account finds it in ten minutes.
Read the full case study, including the month where 672 reported conversions turned out to be 5 actual orders.
How these numbers are measured
Purchases means completed Shopify orders only. It excludes add-to-cart, begin-checkout, page views, and click-to-call events. That distinction is doing real work here: this account's default conversion reporting folded cart-adds into the headline number, and in the worst month 672 reported conversions were 664 cart-adds, 3 checkout starts, and 5 actual orders. Reporting against the headline figure would have let us claim a 13x return on a month that really returned 0.31x.
Cost-per-order figures on either side of January 2025 come from two different conversion-tracking systems. The two were never run in parallel, so these numbers are directionally sound but not precisely calibrated. Return on ad spend here means revenue Google Ads attributed to the ads, not the brand's total revenue. And this is a small account, with monthly order counts in the tens, so percentage changes move on small numbers. That is why the absolute figures sit next to every percentage above.
A medical spa advertising regulated weight-loss treatment
The owner told us she had been paying about $350 for every lead before we got there, and that the cost was the reason the account had been switched off. That number is hers, not ours. We never measured the period it came from.
The account now runs at $45.06 per tracked phone call, and a blended average of $16 per tracked action across calls, direction requests, and site visits together. Wiring a real booking event is the open work, and when it lands we will publish a cost per booked patient instead.
Underneath that, something worse was going on that nobody had spotted.
This clinic had a search campaign that was enabled, funded, and had never delivered a single impression. Not a slow month. Zero, since the day it was built. Weight-loss advertising is one of the most restricted categories on Google, and all three of its ads carried a prescription drug policy flag at the most severe level Google applies. Ads with that flag are not shown less often. They are not shown at all.
Nothing in the dashboard says so. The campaign reads ENABLED, the budget reads committed, and no status turns red. The client was paying for a campaign that could not run.
Clearing it meant pulling the raw policy record through the API rather than trusting the interface summary, separating a certificate-covers-zero-countries signature from a certificate-points-at-the-wrong-domain signature, rebuilding the destination on a certified domain, and closing a certification step that only exists in Google's interface. It now serves, at a 6.3% click-through rate.
We are not publishing a cost per lead for this account. Every conversion action on it counts a platform proxy rather than a booked appointment, and wiring real booking events is the open work.
Reporting you will actually read
Every month you get a report that opens with the four numbers that matter: what you spent, how many conversions it produced, what each one cost, and what came back in revenue where revenue is trackable. Each is shown against the prior month, because a single month's number tells you almost nothing without a direction attached to it.
After that comes the part most reports skip. We list the changes we made during the month, what each was meant to accomplish, and whether it did. Some of them will not have worked. Those are in the report too, along with what we learned and what we are doing next. A report that contains only good news is a marketing document, and you already have enough of those.
We also flag what we are worried about before you have to ask. Rising costs in a campaign that used to be efficient, creative that is losing its audience, a competitor bidding harder on your brand, a conversion action that has gone quiet. Those are the things that turn into next quarter's problem if nobody names them this quarter.
If a month goes badly, you will hear it from us before you see it in a dashboard. That is the entire arrangement. You hired us so you would not have to watch the account, which only works if you can trust what we tell you about it.
Google and Meta, run together
We manage both platforms, and we treat them as one budget rather than two specialties. That matters more than it used to. Google is where people go when they already know what they want, which makes it the better channel for demand that already exists. Meta is where people find out that something exists at all, which makes it the better channel for creating demand. Most businesses need both, in a ratio that shifts over the year.
On Google, that covers search campaigns, Performance Max, Shopping for ecommerce, and brand defense. Brand defense is the one most businesses neglect. When someone searches your company name and a competitor's ad sits above your own listing, you are paying for that in lost customers whether or not you are paying for the click.
On Meta, that covers prospecting to cold audiences, retargeting people who visited but did not convert, creative testing across multiple angles, and the pixel and conversion event setup underneath it. Meta's automated campaign types will spend your budget efficiently against whatever event you tell them to optimize for, which is why the event configuration matters more than the targeting most of the time.
Running both means we can move money to whichever platform is returning better this month instead of defending the one we happen to be good at. It also means that when one account has a problem, the other keeps working while we fix it.
Simple, clear pricing
$350 per month, or 10 percent of your ad spend, whichever is greater.
That is the entire pricing model. If you spend $2,000 a month on ads, you pay $350. If you spend $8,000, you pay $800. If you spend $20,000, you pay $2,000. You can work out your own number without a call, which is the point.
There is no setup fee, no onboarding charge, no minimum contract length, and no separate line item for reporting or strategy or account access. The monthly number covers the weekly work in the account, the monthly report, the conversion tracking, the creative and copy testing, and us picking up the phone when something breaks.
The percentage exists so that the fee scales with the work. A larger account has more campaigns, more search terms, more creative in rotation, and more that can go wrong. The floor exists so that smaller accounts are still worth doing properly rather than being run at a loss and neglected accordingly.
What we will not do is take a percentage of your spend and then encourage you to spend more for its own sake. If your account is spending past the point of profitability, the right advice is to spend less, and we will give you that advice even though it lowers our fee. An agency paid on spend has an obvious incentive problem, and the only real answer to it is to say out loud that we know, and then behave accordingly.
Getting started
Send us a note with what you are spending now, which platforms you are on, and what you have already tried. We will look at the account and come back with what we find. If it is healthy, we will tell you that, and you will have a second opinion that cost you nothing. If it is not, you will get a specific list of what is wrong and what we would do about it, and you can take that list to us or to anyone else.
Advertising works alongside the rest of what we do. Paid traffic gets you in front of people today while search visibility compounds underneath it, and both feed the same goal of being findable when someone is looking for what you sell. For businesses without a marketing team, our small business SEO program covers the organic side, and website development handles the landing pages that ads point at. If AI assistants are already answering questions about your category, AI optimization is how you show up in those answers.
This is part of our broader execute phase, the hands-on work of removing what should not be there and building what should. Tell us about your ad account and we will take a look.