For agencies
For agency owners who need senior work on local service accounts, without the reporting standard dropping before it reaches the client. Flat fee per account, no percentage of ad spend, and a Ledger that says exactly where the evidence stops.
The problem you are solving
Local service clients do not churn because impressions dipped. They churn because nobody could answer "what did this earn me?" three months in a row, and activity reporting cannot answer it. These are the three shapes that problem usually takes when an agency brings me in.
Calls ring an untracked number, the form thanks people on the same URL it started on, and the conversion count includes a wrong number and a job-seeker. The campaign might be working. The report cannot prove it either way.
Search-term reports get read when there is time, which is not weekly. Local service accounts punish that: a fortnight of unreviewed queries is a fortnight of budget spent on searches that could never become jobs.
They have been shown rising conversions while the phone stayed quiet, so now every number is suspect. Winning that back takes a report that volunteers its own limits, not a better-looking chart.
The deliverable
The end client should be able to see what went in, what came out, and where verification stops. That standard protects the relationship better than activity reporting does, because it cannot be contradicted later by the client's own books.
Read the full rules in the attribution standard. It is a public page on purpose, so your client can check that the reporting they receive follows a stated method.
“I count conservatively. Every untracked job is your client’s upside, not my credit.”
Three ways agencies use me
Most engagements start at the top of this list and stay there. Taking on more than the problem requires is how a support arrangement turns into an expense you have to justify.
Call, form, and message tracking, GA4 and GTM configured, duplicate-event checks, and a server-side container only where blockers and privacy limits justify the complexity. Delivered with preview and DebugView screenshots so your team can verify it rather than trust it.
Best when your campaigns are competent and the reporting is the weak link.
Account structure around real services and locations, a negative keyword list built before launch, single-theme ad groups, Search and Performance Max on separate budgets, search terms checked daily in the first week, then on a fixed schedule.
Best when the account needs senior attention every week, not a monthly pass.
Temporary read-only access, search-term reports read line by line, findings ranked by what they cost, and a starter negative keyword list your client keeps regardless of what happens next. It ends in a recommendation, including stop.
Best when you need to know what you are inheriting before you quote.
How the engagement runs
You send one account. I review it read-only and write up what it is costing, ranked by expense, with the evidence for each finding. No invoice and no obligation, and you keep the findings whether or not this goes further. This is deliberately the cheapest possible way to find out whether I am worth working with.
The audit determines the scope: tracking only, management, or both. You get a flat monthly fee per account, the spend cap for the proving period, and the verdict date. Before that document is signed, nothing is billable.
Measurement is verified before budget moves, because a rebuild judged on unreliable conversion data teaches nobody anything. Then structure: negatives before launch, single-theme ad groups, separated budgets, and a build sheet you review before it publishes.
Each month, spend and tracked enquiries go out, your client confirms which became booked work, and the Ledger reconciles the two and states its boundary. Ten minutes of client time. If they cannot confirm, the report says so instead of guessing.
Commercial terms
A percentage-of-spend fee means my income rises when your client's budget rises, whether or not the budget was justified. That is a bad incentive to hand a subcontractor, and it quietly compresses your margin every time an account scales. So the fee is flat, quoted per account, in writing.
None of that is generosity. Hostage setups are how agencies inherit unfixable accounts, and I would rather not be the reason you inherit one.
Fit
The honest version, because a bad fit costs you more than a declined enquiry does.
Evidence you can check first
Both state their own limits, which is the point. Judge the standard by what the pages refuse to claim, not only by the headline numbers.
After a full rebuild, the account reported 272 clicks and 74 leads at $13.35 each on $988.00 of spend in a 30-day window.
This record ends at the lead. Every conversion was measured through GA4 and Google Tag Manager, not guessed from click counts. That makes the lead figure reliable, but it is still not a booked-job, revenue, or profit claim.
The screens document a two-container setup: web GTM plus server-side GTM on Stape, feeding GA4, the Meta Conversions API, and 5 Google Ads conversion actions from one counted stream.
These screens prove the measurement path works. They show events flowing, matching, and not double counting. They do not show campaign results or revenue.
Questions agency owners ask
Either. Most agencies keep me behind the account and pass the Ledger through as their own reporting, which is fine because the Ledger is written to survive that trip. If you would rather introduce me as your Google Ads specialist, that works too. What I will not do is claim a return the record does not support, whichever name is on the report.
No. The client relationship is yours. I work through you, bill you, and take account access from you. If a client contacts me first, I route them back to you.
Read-only access first, so I can audit before quoting. Then standard admin access to the Google Ads account and the tag container. The account and the container stay in the client’s name. I do not migrate work into an account I control.
A flat monthly fee per account, quoted in writing, not a percentage of ad spend. That matters for you: your margin does not shrink when the client scales budget, and I have no incentive to recommend spend the numbers do not justify.
Then I write that down and you decide how to use it. An audit that says stop is more valuable to you than one that manufactures a reason to launch, because you are the one who has to keep the client next quarter.
Yes, and it is the most common way agencies start with me. Tracking is a bounded, one-time build with a screenshot-verified handoff. If your in-house team runs the campaigns well but nobody can prove which enquiries became jobs, that is a measurement gap, not a management gap.
A small number at a time, because reading a search-term report line by line does not scale the way a template does. If capacity is full I will tell you when it opens rather than accept the work and thin it out.
They keep the account, the container, the negative keyword lists, and the reporting history, because those were never mine to hold. The same rule protects you: nothing about this arrangement is designed to make leaving expensive.
Start here
Send what you have. A missing number is not a blocker. Working it out is part of the audit. No contracts, ever. I reply within 12 hours.
Send the numbers
Spend, leads, and what you suspect is going wrong. I reply within 12 hours.