An independent read of your ad account, for a flat fee
A Second Opinion on Your Ad Account
Every month the money goes out and a report comes back saying things are going well. You read it, you nod, and you still couldn't say whether that spend earned its keep. We read the account itself and tell you the truth about it in writing, in words you already use.
The situation
You suspect something, and you can't prove it
Nothing has gone visibly wrong. The ads are running, the invoices clear, the reports arrive on time and full of numbers that all point up. But the phone isn't ringing more than it did a year ago, and when you try to line up the good numbers with what's actually happening in the business, they won't line up.
That gap is the whole problem, and most owners sit in it for years because naming it feels like an accusation.
You can't resolve it from where you're sitting, for two reasons:
- The report is written by the people being evaluated, so it shows the metrics that flatter the work and quietly leaves out the ones that don't.
- The vocabulary is a moat. Impressions, match types, attribution windows, ROAS. You'd have to learn a second language before you could ask a hard question, and the people who'd teach it to you are the ones you'd be asking.
So you let it ride for another quarter.
The audit
The five questions we answer about your account
We go through the account campaign by campaign and answer the things you'd ask if you knew the ground.
Was each campaign judged by the job it was hired for?
A campaign built to get your name in front of people should be graded on that, and a campaign built to bring in leads should be graded on what each lead costs. The most common move in agency reporting is celebrating a campaign on a number it was never built to move. More money spent than last month is not, on its own, a win.
Where is the money actually landing?
We look for the searches and placements that have nothing to do with what you sell, campaigns of your own bidding against each other for the same person, and budget still parked on something that stopped paying off a while ago.
Is the tracking telling the truth?
Conversions get counted twice, form fills get counted as leads when nobody on your side ever saw them, and tracking code fires on the wrong pages. When the counting is wrong, every decision built on it is wrong too, including the ones that looked smart.
Are the ads still alive?
We check how long the same ads have been running, whether the variations are genuinely different or the same ad in five fonts, and whether the numbers show people tuning them out.
Did the results actually change?
Accounts get churned by people reacting to noise. One bad week is not a reason to rebuild a campaign, and we'll tell you which swings in your account were real movement and which were normal wobble.
Access
Nobody touches your account except you
We ask for read-only viewer access, which lets us read every number and change nothing. We never touch a setting, a budget, or a campaign, and we couldn't if we wanted to.
You grant that access yourself in a few minutes, and you can revoke it yourself just as fast, whether we've finished or not.
The verdict
Sometimes the honest answer is that your agency is doing good work
That happens, and when it does we write it down plainly and the finding costs you exactly the same.
An audit that can only come back bad isn't an audit, it's a sales pitch with a report attached, and you'd have no way to know which one you were reading.
We'd rather be the second opinion you trust than the replacement you gambled on, and the only way to be worth trusting is for the good verdict to be as available as the bad one.
What you get
What lands in your inbox
Everything comes back in plain language, written so you can act on it or hand it to someone else who will.
- A written report that goes campaign by campaign and says what's working, with the evidence sitting right next to the claim.
- A number on the waste, in dollars, wherever the data supports putting a number on it. Where it doesn't, we say that instead of guessing.
- A short list of what we'd change first, in order, so nobody has to decide where to start.
- A walkthrough call where we go through it with you and you ask whatever you want, including the questions you didn't feel qualified to ask before.
Questions people ask before they say yes
Will my agency find out?
That's your call to make, not ours. Granting viewer access is visible to anyone with admin rights on the account, so a team that's paying attention may notice, and we're genuinely happy for good work to be seen. Plenty of owners tell their agency up front and it goes fine.
What if you don't find anything wrong?
Then we say so, in writing, and you've bought yourself the thing you actually wanted, which is knowing. You'll still get the campaign by campaign read and the first-changes list, because even a healthy account has a next move.
Do we have to move the ads to you?
No. There's no obligation of any kind, and the report is written so your current team can pick it up and work from it. Hand it to them, hand it to somebody else, or hand it to us.
What do you need from us?
Read-only viewer access to the account, and a straight answer about what the ads are supposed to be doing for the business. That second one matters more than people expect, because a campaign can only be graded against the job it was hired for.
Find out what your ad money is actually doing
Tell us which account you want looked at and we'll take it from there. Someone replies within one business day, and it's a real person reading what you sent.
Part of Cascade's Marketing Strategy & Research practice.