When did someone last
actually work in your ad account?
There’s a report in Google Ads your agency hopes you never open: the change history. Owners who check it have found agencies billing $2,000/month for three minutes of work. Meanwhile blended ROAS keeps sliding, your store, Meta and GA4 each report a different number, and nobody will tell you which one is real. When you ask, you’ll hear “we let the algorithm exit the learning phase.” Smart Bidding and Advantage+ are real, but they still need steering: negative-keyword sculpting from the search terms, audience and feed signals, targets set to your actual margins. An empty log plus a retainer means you are funding a toll booth between you and your customers. The $1,000 Senior Audit runs 30-day spend forensics and prices every leak.
Director-led and senior-run: nothing is handed to a junior, and there are no handoffs. Our founder, Carlos Benavides, has managed $50M+ in paid media and still reads search-term reports twice a week. Every claim on this page is cited to your account’s real numbers before it reaches you.
48h from access · every finding priced in your dollars · no lock-in
Accounts our founder has run, and what came out of them
Work our founder, Carlos Benavides, ran before Barlo Digital, in house and at agencies. Screenshots are redacted where a client asked or where an account is live. Barlo Digital is a new firm, so these are his professional history rather than client results the firm is claiming as its own.
623 campaigns, one clean month
Fragmented per-ad-set budgets consolidated into one campaign budget, audience overlap cut by roughly 60%, top performers moved to ROAS-goal bidding. The screenshot is the month it clicked.
$255K deployed without a ROAS collapse
A 60-day cost-per-acquisition trend found the three campaigns that could actually take budget. Increases applied in steps with guardrails at the ad-set level. The top campaign held 4.67x.
Take the ad account checks and run them yourself
Three checks that separate an algorithm problem from an account problem, including the numbers that should reconcile daily. No call, no pitch sequence. One email, and a reply from me if you send your site back.
Structure and bidding review, creative fatigue map, tracking drift check, and a prioritized fix list, delivered as a recorded director-level walkthrough within 48 hours of access. Credited 100% toward any project or retainer within 60 days. You’re not paying twice.
48h from access · every finding priced in your dollars · no lock-inWhat you walk away with
- Where the money actually goes: 30 days of spend traced to structure, bidding, and budget decisions.
- One revenue number you can defend: where your store, Meta, Google and GA4 disagree, why they disagree, and which figure should steer budget. Blended ROAS, MER and CAC reconciled against actual orders.
- A creative fatigue map: which ads the algorithm has already given up on, how long they have been running, and what creative volume it now takes to keep scaling.
- The tracking-drift check: whether the numbers steering your budget are even right.
- A fix list in priority order: run it in-house, hand it to your agency, or have us execute. The $1,000 credits 100% toward management within 60 days.
Three signals you can check before you pay
Thirty seconds each, from your own account. No expert needed:
- The 30-second agency check: Google Ads → Tools → Change History. Filter by user. What you are looking at is exactly how much time anyone spent working in your account last month. It can’t be hidden or edited.
- The ownership check: can you log into the ad account yourself, as an admin, right now? If your agency “owns” the account you fund, everything you’ve paid for is hostage. (You should own it. We put that in writing.)
- The landing check: click your own ad. If it dumps you on the homepage instead of the product or collection page that ad promised, you’re paying for clicks that have nowhere to convert.
Exactly what’s included
- Full-funnel structure review: prospecting → retargeting → retention, with budget guardrails
- Creative fatigue map against the volume modern delivery algorithms reward, with the rotation cadence scaling requires
- Platform-discrepancy reconciliation: store, Meta, Google and GA4 lined up so blended ROAS, MER and CAC mean one thing
- PMax and Advantage+ fence audit: brand exclusions, asset-group and feed hygiene, target-ROAS discipline
- Tracking drift checks and a scorecard that shows spend → revenue, not vanity metrics
Starts with the $1,000 Senior Audit, credited 100% · management from $2,000/mo · priced per brand (all ad channels included)
Before you decide: the full scope and guarantee per audit, and exactly what happens after you pay (2-minute read-only access checklist, no call needed).
Local or service business rather than a store? Most start with the $497 site build on the contractors page and add paid ads once the pages convert.
Before you blame the algorithm: Full field note: the five checks to run when CPA climbs 40 percent.
The measured version: what creative fatigue looks like in the numbers.
When Smart Bidding stops responding: the five signals that say it went flat.
Local Services Ads sitting on an unspent budget: the troubleshooting order we use.
Fair questions
Is this per ad account?
No. The audit is priced per brand, and one fee covers all of that brand’s ad channels (Meta, Google, TikTok) plus its tracking. The $1,000 Senior tier exists for higher spend, three or more channels, or Performance-Max-heavy accounts. That is genuinely two to three times the analysis.
What happens after I pay?
A 2-minute checklist walks you through read-only access. The 48-hour clock starts at access, not payment. You get the walkthrough video and fix list, no call needed. If you then want it managed, the $1,000 credits in full within 60 days.
Are results guaranteed?
No — and be careful with anyone who says yes. What’s guaranteed is operational: delivered within 48h of access, every claim cited to your account’s real numbers, and the audit fee credited if we work together. Start below.
Isn’t a cheap audit just a sales pitch in disguise?
Free ones usually are. That’s why this one isn’t free. You pay $1,000, you get a fixed-scope deliverable you keep either way, and the fee credits in full only if you choose to hire us. If the audit finds your current agency is doing good work, it says so. That’s $1,000 of insurance on a $10,000-a-month relationship.
What about Performance Max and Advantage+? Can you even see inside them?
No one can, fully. They’re black boxes by design, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something. What the audit does is check the fences: brand traffic excluded so PMax can’t take credit for orders you already had, asset-group and shopping-feed hygiene, target-ROAS discipline, and channel splits. You can’t open the box, but you can absolutely fence it, and stop it from eating the budget meant for new customers.
10 audit slots a week, a real cap we hold so every audit lands in 48h. When the week is full, it’s next week.
48h from access · every finding priced in your dollars · no lock-in