A fixed-fee forensic examination of your Google Ads by Igor Ivitskiy, PhD: nineteen years in paid advertising, $770M+ overseen. The verdict is the product.
The report says it was the best quarter yet. The profit says otherwise. Nobody in the room can point to which dollars are wasted.
The agency swears by its ROAS. The CFO calls it fiction. The argument is six months old, and you are expected to be the referee.
You run the ads yourself, evenings and weekends. You suspect part of the budget buys nothing. You have no way to check.
Your team wants a bigger budget. Before you sign it, you want one person with no stake in the answer to look. Everyone you ask has something to sell you.
The platform that spends your money also reports how well it was spent. So it takes credit generously: for your brand name, for returning customers, for people who were coming anyway. I have seen a 99% "optimization score" on an account wasting a fifth of its budget, and a 49% score on the cleanest account in its niche.
Bids, budgets and rules change on dates nobody remembers. The damage starts quietly, and the monthly average smooths it into invisibility. The change history names the exact day. I find it.
It will happily sell you clicks that cost more than the profit they can ever return. And it charges weakness a premium: on one contested term, the weakest player paid three times the leaders' price. The report calls them conversions. Your P&L calls them losses.
A services business, $40,000 a month on Google Ads, agency-managed. The agency was competent: it hit every target it was given. The report said 4.6x. Here is what the examination said. A redacted engagement, figures rounded.
I put a year of the account's real economics next to what the platform claimed. They disagreed by six figures. That is not an accounting error. That is where an examination begins.
Behind the gap, four leaks, each with a number and a date from the account's own history: spend flowing to a service line that converts easily but earns thinly ($128k a year), the firm's own clients counted as new acquisitions ($74k), a quiet match-type expansion that kept inquiries flat while quality fell ($61k), and bidding tuned to a number nobody profits from ($49k). Identified: $312,000 a year.
Every figure had to survive three independent sources: platform data, analytics, the books. What survived: $273,000 a year, actionable. Every finding in your report names the exact screen in your account where you can see it yourself.
One page you will read first: the verdict, the number, the signature. Behind it, the full case: every finding rated by severity, priced per year, tied to a numbered exhibit, and pointing to the screen in your account where you verify it. Then the recovery plan, ordered by dollars returned per hour of work.
I am paid a fixed fee, in full, before any findings.
The fee does not depend on what I find.
The report is the product. Nothing else is attached to it.
I change nothing in your account, and the change history will prove it.
The verdict is the value, whatever it says. Owners have paid me to hear "this channel cannot pay for itself, stop." That sentence freed a budget, a team, and a year of attention. Certainty is what you buy. Leaks are just its most common form.
One account. One week of forensic work. One signed verdict.
The report will either show you where the money is, or prove your account clean. If it does neither, I return every dollar, and you keep the report.
The fee includes a walkthrough of every finding. If you want me closer than that, training your team or supervising the fix, that is a separate engagement we discuss after you have read the report. Most owners will not need it: the report is built to be executed without me.
You request. I ask a few questions, and we both decide it is a fit.
A short working call: your goals, your margins, access.
The report is on your desk. Walkthrough included if you want me to present it.
Find the money it is losing, or prove it is clean. Either way, you get a report you can act on.