WordStream Performance Grader, Optmyzr free trial, Google's own Ads Recommendations tab.
A few minutes, a letter-grade dashboard, and a list of obvious wins. Quality score distribution, click-through rate vs benchmark, impression share lost to budget or rank, basic wasted-spend signals. The Performance Grader is genuinely useful as a first pass. WordStream runs it on the same engine that powers their paid platform, so the report is real, not a watered-down sales hook. Then a sales rep calls you.
What it misses: anything that isn't a rule. The grader cannot tell you that your three Performance Max campaigns are competing with each other on the same product set, or that your offline conversion uploads are double-counting because the GCLID round-trip is broken, or that the campaign structure was built by an agency two years ago for a business that has since pivoted. Those leaks live below the rule layer.
02 Free agency lead magnet
$0 KlientBoost, Disruptive Advertising, Tinuiti, Single Grain, plus roughly four hundred smaller shops running the same play.
A junior analyst spends 30 to 90 minutes in the account, fills out a templated deck, and a senior closer presents the findings on a Zoom call. Quality ranges widely. A specialist agency in your vertical can flag five-figure leaks in an hour. A generalist running the same checklist on every account regardless of fit will read interchangeably across industries.
The honest read: an agency audit is a sales tool. That doesn't make it worthless. It makes the incentives obvious. The audit is designed to surface enough pain to justify a retainer, which means it leans heavy on findings that argue for ongoing management and light on findings a founder could fix in an afternoon. Take the audit, mine the three highest-impact findings, decline the retainer unless the math is independently strong.
My 25-page Google Ads Setup Audit PDF, plus a handful of similar workbooks from other senior operators.
The category most founders skip because it doesn't feel like a "platform." A workbook makes the operator type the numbers in by hand, and that is the moment most leaks become obvious. A tool that runs in the background while a founder ignores it does nothing. The 25-page version I publish walks an account through ten structural settings, gives you the click path for each fix, and ends with a four-week clean-up plan.
What it catches: structural and strategic issues a founder can act on the same day. What it misses: live anomaly detection, weekly cadence, account-specific quality score history. A workbook is a snapshot tool, not a monitor. For accounts under $25K a month in spend, this is the right starting point and usually the only one needed.
04 Paid SaaS subscription
$249 to $299 / mo Optmyzr (~$249/mo starter, scales with spend), Adalysis (~$299/mo), the paid tiers of Adzooma and Opteo.
The heavyweight category. Optmyzr's rule engine catches issues a manual review misses, and its quality-score tracker is the cleanest in the market. Adalysis is stronger on responsive search ad analysis: if RSAs are the bottleneck (low ad strength, weak headline variance, asset reporting gaps), Adalysis pays for itself faster. Both run continuous monitoring, not a one-time snapshot.
What they catch: bid anomalies, match-type drift, ad strength decay, quality score declines, budget pacing issues, search query waste. What they miss: whether the account architecture matches the business model. Whether the conversion setup is double-counting. Whether the wrong campaigns are being scaled. The expensive structural calls live outside the rule engine, which is why paid SaaS works best as a layer on top of a human review, not as a replacement for one.
05 Senior consultant memo
$1,000 to $5,000 one-time Independent senior operators with 7+ years in paid media. My productized version is $2,500. Other respected names in the space charge in the same band.
Three to six hours of focused work in the account. Another two to three hours writing the diagnosis. The output is not a templated deck with red, yellow, and green dots. It is a written memo that names the three to five highest-impact changes, ranks them by expected lift in recoverable monthly dollars, and includes the implementation steps a founder or in-house marketer can run without the consultant present.
What it catches: structural decisions, attribution gaps, conversion-setup errors, account architecture mismatches, the things automated tools never flag. What it misses: weekly cadence. The memo is a snapshot, not a subscription. Pair it with a paid SaaS for ongoing monitoring if the account warrants both.