Same result. Half the spend.
We’ve audited a lot of Google Ads accounts. The same four leaks come up in nearly every one of them. None are your fault, they’re how PPC is sold. All of them are fixable in week one.
Paid for the click you'd get free.
Bidding on your own brand name when nobody else is. £5–£25 a click for traffic Google was going to send you anyway.
Broad match. No leash.
Google's favourite setting and your worst. "Plumber Loughborough" becomes "plumbing apprenticeship Birmingham". Pays per click anyway.
Spend by time-of-day. Maybe.
Nine out of ten accounts run 24/7. Three quarters of conversions happen 09:00–18:00 weekdays. Do the maths.
Asking for more budget.
When the answer is always "more". When the report is always "below industry benchmark". When you stop being shown the cost-per-acquisition column.
Six leaks. The same six. Every time.
Every Google Ads account ever opened has four to six of these. We close the cheap ones first, the wins that don’t need creative, copy or a new test. By the end of week two there’s a saving number on the wall.
You're bidding on your own company name. Without a competitor in sight. We turn off, watch the organic traffic stay flat, and you keep the budget. Number-one win in nine audits out of ten.
- , Branded spend audit
- , Organic-cannibal check
- , Recoverable budget figure
Broad match was Google's 2018 idea and it still costs you most. We move spend to phrase and exact where it earns, kill it where it doesn't, and tighten the search-term report to within a foot of the keyword.
- , Match-type rebalance
- , Negative keyword list
- , Search-term hygiene
A national setting on a regional business. Three radii on the same campaign. London traffic on a Loughborough plumber. We pull the heat map and find the postcodes that actually pay.
- , Geo conversion heat map
- , Location bid plan
- , Excluded regions
Most B2B accounts get 80% of conversions in working hours. Most run their ads around the clock. We day-part it. Same leads, smaller bill.
- , Hour-by-day conversion grid
- , Dayparting schedule
- , Out-of-hours budget plan
Half the accounts we open are counting form-loads, scroll-depth, or every contact-page view as a conversion. The ROAS looks great. The bank account doesn't. We re-anchor to revenue, server-side where we can.
- , Conversion-event audit
- , GA4 + server-side review
- , Revenue-anchored CPA
Ad-group bloat. Orphan campaigns. Recommendations auto-applied. Twelve-quarter-old copy. The unsexy hygiene the previous agency stopped doing in month three. We rebuild it.
- , Structure rebuild plan
- , Recommendation policy
- , Copy refresh shortlist
Same revenue. £20k/mo less spend.
National appliance retailer. Established agency, established account, six-figure annual Google Ads bill, board-level pressure to scale. We were called in to second-opinion the account not to replace anyone. By week two there was a £20,000-a-month saving on the table and no drop in turnover.
Got any freebies? Yes.
We’re not scared of sharing what we know. Take our advice and implement it yourself, brilliant. Watch these and think “I need someone to do this for me,” even better. Either way you’re winning, and the tools are free.
Cost-per-lead calculator
Tap in your spend and your leads. See your true CPL across every channel in seconds, the number most agencies hope you never find.
Lifetime-value calculator
Work out what a customer is worth across every year they buy from you and the spend ceiling you can hit to win one.
30 days of CEO marketing tips
A short film a day for thirty days, aimed at directors who need to understand what their marketing team is actually doing.
What are we thinking?
The real stuff. Not “10 tips to boost engagement” clickbait. We call out the BS in our industry and share what twenty years of doing this has taught us. Here’s the last few.
Why AI Tools Shouldn’t Have Paid Adverts, but they are going to…
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SEO is NOT dead
Ladies and Gentlemen, SEO Is Still Alive I’m writing this today because, quite frankly, I’ve seen blogs and threads sent out today that are already out of date. I’ve seen one particularly about the history of Google – how it went from 10 blue links to position zero, then moved to AI overview, and how […]
Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to… flip flop marketing
What on earth is Corbett on about now. Well unfortunately people I’m seeing this happen so much at the moment because everyone is looking for their silver bullet. Something has happened to society, personally I blame Amazon, but in reality it’s the internet and social media. We can get our groceries delivered, we can buy […]
Half our calls end “don’t”.
We turn work away. About half the businesses that ring us don’t need an audit, they need to fix their tracking first, or wait six months, or just spend less. Better to say so on the call than the invoice.
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01
You spend £5k–£40k/mo on Google Ads.
Sweet spot. Big enough to have real leaks; small enough that we can find them all in two weeks.
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02
Your agency keeps asking for more budget.
And the CPA column keeps not appearing in the report. That's the tell.
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03
You can't tell us your cost-per-lead.
Not "ROAS" — cost-per-lead. If your agency can't either, the audit pays for itself in week one.
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04
Last restructure was 18+ months ago.
Account fitness rots quietly. Auto-applied recommendations. Stale copy. Orphan campaigns. We rebuild.
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01
Spend is under £3k/month.
Honestly: at this level, your own time + Google's tutorials beats us. We'll tell you the same on a call. Save the audit fee.
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02
Your agency is under six months old.
Give them the year. Auditing too early is a reason to fall out with a partner who hasn't had a fair crack.
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03
No GA4. No Search Console. No conversion data.
We can't audit what we can't see. Fix the measurement, then call us. Or: book the marketing consultancy retainer instead.
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04
You're shopping for the cheapest agency.
We're not it. We're the second opinion who tells you to spend less. Refer-out list available if you want a retainer mill.
One door in. The audit.
We don’t do PPC retainers cold. Every engagement starts with the two-week audit. Most clients fix it themselves from the doc and don’t need us again.
PPC Audit
Two weeks. We open the account, close the cheap leaks on paper and get you on a call. Either fix it yourself, fix it with us, or sit on it.
- , Two-week audit window
- , All six leaks investigated
- , Recoverable spend figure
- , Priority fix list · Wk1/Wk4/Q1
- , GA4 + conversion sanity check
- , 60-min walkthrough call
- , No retainer required after
Rescue Retainer
Only available after an audit, and only if the saving justifies the retainer. If your spend doesn't earn it, we'll say so.
- , Account ownership transfer
- , Weekly hygiene + bid review
- , Monthly board pack
- , Same dashboard, your login
- , Quarterly creative refresh
- , 3-month minimum
- , We'll tell you when to drop it
The number is on the wall by week two.
20 minutes. We say yes or no. Half the time it's no and that's the point.
Manager-account access. GA4. Search Console. CRM if you have one.
Branded bleed. Match-type. Geo. Daypart. Conversion truth. Account fitness.
Recoverable monthly spend figure. Priority fix list. Walkthrough call booked.
You keep it. Implement yourself, with us, or sit on it. We'll happily not hear from you again.
Rescue retainer offered, only if the saving justifies it. Most don't need us past Wk 3.
The bits everyone asks.
Eight questions we get on every fit call. If yours isn’t here, ring it in.
We'd rather not. The audit is the offer; the retainer is the back-up. Nine times out of ten the doc tells you and your existing agency exactly what to fix, and they fix it. Everyone keeps their job, you keep the money.
A confident agency welcomes a second opinion, we make their job easier by giving them air cover for the unpopular changes. The audit is read-only and arrives with a one-page note for them, not just you. Most calls end politely.
On accounts with spend over £10k/mo, recoverable waste is typically 15–40% of monthly spend within the first 90 days. We won't put a number on yours until we've seen the account, anyone who does is selling, not auditing.
Half the audit fee back if we don't identify at least 2x the audit fee in recoverable monthly waste. We've never had to refund. We'd rather decline the audit on the fit call than fail one.
The audit framework is Google Ads. Meta sits in the same shape and we'll cover it if it's in the spend mix. LinkedIn we audit, don't run. TikTok we refer out.
No. We won't do conquest bidding on your competitors' brand terms either, it's a tit-for-tat that drives both your CPAs up. If your agency is, that's a flag we'll raise.
The appliance retailer is the headline. We'll share two more case write-ups on the call, references on request. Twenty years in marketing, not all of it pretty, ask Spike about the ones that didn't work.
20% off the audit. Quote your charity number on the fit call.
Twenty minutes. Yes, no, or fix-it-yourself.
Tell us your monthly spend, your sector, and who’s currently running it. We’ll say in twenty minutes whether the audit makes sense and what to fix yourself if it doesn’t.
Book your FREE fit call →