Agent 04 · Takeover · When ROAS drifts

The Ads Account Audit

Most ad accounts flatter themselves: brand clicks inflate the ROAS, search terms leak money quietly, and Google’s auto-apply changes things nobody reviews. This agent does the forensic pass my specialists used to lose days to — and reports what the account is really doing, in pounds per month.

Get this skill — free in the packFree MageCloud store audit
Paul Ryazanov speaking at PubCon, Las Vegas

Paul Ryazanov speaking at PubCon, Las Vegas

What it takes off your team’s plate

The takeover work nobody has time to do properly:

The brand/non-brand truthIsolating brand terms across Search, PMax, and Shopping to compute what acquisition really costs — the number that rewrites most clients’ stories.
Search-term archaeologyNinety days of terms, sorted by cost with zero conversions, grouped into negative lists.
PMax interrogationAsset groups, placements, brand exclusions, URL expansion — the black box, opened.
Change-history forensicsFinding out who, or what, has been silently changing the account.

How a run works

Nine checks, each finding priced in monthly currency:

  1. Tracking integrity first. Conversions versus platform orders, double-counting, add-to-carts masquerading as purchases. Everything else is noise if this fails.
  2. Brand versus non-brand. True non-brand ROAS computed with brand stripped out. If brand cannot be separated because everything lives in one PMax, that is finding number one.
  3. Search terms mining. The waste, summed and grouped into shared negative lists — drafted, not applied.
  4. PMax and Shopping structure. Margin-aware structure versus one lazy catch-all; best-sellers starving the long tail or the reverse.
  5. Budgets, bids, assets, history. Limited-by-budget winners, stale tROAS targets, expired promotions, prices in ads that no longer match the site, and ninety days of change history — including what Google’s auto-apply changed on its own.

✋ The approval gate

Strictly read-only:

  • The agent audits; it changes nothing — changes route through the weekly loop after approval
  • Every waste figure traces to a filterable report reproducible in two clicks
  • Blended ROAS is never presented without the brand/non-brand split beside it
  • A ‘what we did NOT check’ section keeps the audit honest

What you get

PPC-AUDIT-[client]-[date].md — findings priced monthly, P1/P2/P3
Estimated monthly wasted spend, stated conservatively
A one-page restructure map drawable on a whiteboard
Ready-to-apply negative keyword lists, held for approval
Year-ahead planning with Roger from A&E Leisure
Year-ahead planning with Roger from A&E Leisure

I have stood on the PubCon stage in Las Vegas across a decade of algorithm changes, and the constant is this: accounts drift, platforms grab autonomy, and the numbers flatter themselves. The audit exists so my team argues from evidence — and it is the same audit we run before any MageCloud engagement touches a live account.

I have written about this from the trenches:

Run it yourself, or bring my team in

The skill is free in the pack — install it and start this week. If your store does seven figures and you want this running inside a full revenue-optimization engagement, my team at MageCloud handles it end to end.

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© Paul Ryazanov · paulryazanov.com · MageCloud · Ecommerce CampBuilt in partnership with Dennis Yu · how this system was built