Are there platforms that offer audits to check if my ads are costing too much?

Free DIY audit workbooks

The category most founders skip because it does not 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 free 25-page Google Ads Setup Audit on this site is the workbook I run on every paid review before I write a single recommendation. It walks an account through structure, match-type discipline, conversion setup, audience layering, and Performance Max guardrails one section at a time. A founder reading it line by line surfaces most of the same issues a one-thousand-dollar agency audit would, and the founder owns the diagnosis at the end instead of waiting for a follow-up call.

The companion is the Wasted Spend Calculator, a four-input estimator that returns a directional dollar figure against vertical benchmarks. Neither replaces a senior human review. Both replace the SaaS subscription a single-account founder does not need.

Cost: zero. 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.

Automated SaaS auditors

WordStream Advisor (now part of LocaliQ) is the platform most founders meet first. It generates a free “Google Ads Performance Grader” report that scores an account against benchmarks for quality score, click-through rate, account activity, impression share, and wasted spend. The grader runs in about a minute and gives a letter grade per category. It is a useful temperature check. It is not an audit.

Optmyzr is the heavyweight in this category. Its rule engine catches issues a manual review misses, and its quality-score tracker is the cleanest in the category. I use it on accounts above fifty thousand dollars a month in spend where the SaaS line item earns its keep. Under that threshold, the free platform reports plus a fifteen-minute weekly cadence does the same work for zero a month. Pricing starts around two hundred ninety-nine a month.

Adalysis is Optmyzr’s closest competitor and stronger on responsive search ad analysis. If RSAs are the bottleneck (low ad strength, weak headline variance), Adalysis pays for itself faster.

What automated SaaS auditors catch: bid anomalies, match-type drift, ad strength decay, quality score declines, budget pacing issues. What they miss: whether the account architecture matches the business, whether the conversion setup is double-counting, whether the wrong campaigns are being scaled. Those are the expensive leaks, and no rule engine catches them.

Agency audit reports

Most performance agencies offer a “free audit” as the front of a sales funnel. KlientBoost, Disruptive Advertising, Tinuiti, Single Grain, and roughly four hundred smaller shops all run the same play. A junior analyst spends thirty to ninety minutes in the account, fills out a templated deck, and the senior team uses the findings as a pitch hook on a closing call.

Quality ranges enormously. A well-run agency audit from a shop that specializes in the vertical can flag five-figure leaks in an hour. A templated audit from a generalist agency runs through the same eighteen-point checklist on every account regardless of fit, and the recommendations read interchangeably across industries.

The honest read: an agency audit is a sales tool. That does not 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. Read the deck, take the three highest-impact findings, and decide whether the retainer math works on its own merits.

Cost: usually free in exchange for a sales call. What it catches: the obvious leaks plus whatever the agency happens to sell. What it misses: anything that suggests the founder should keep the account in-house.

Senior-consultant manual reviews

The category most founders do not know exists until they have already paid for the other three. A senior consultant spends three to six hours in the account, writes a custom report against the specific business model, and delivers a prioritized fix list with no upsell attached.

Price points run from one thousand to five thousand for a one-time review, depending on account size and consultant rate. The audit pricing breakdown at /google-ads-audit-cost covers what the four tiers cost across the market right now. The output is not a templated deck. It is a written diagnosis that names the three to five highest-impact changes, ranks them by expected lift, 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 (it is a snapshot, not a subscription), and the small drift that builds up between reviews.

On the real-estate law firm I rebuilt, what the senior-review pass surfaced was structural: broad-match keywords pulled from the rep’s recommendations, conversion tracking firing on every form submit including spam, and generic ad copy fighting the other firms on the same headline. Restructuring around case type and rebuilding clean conversion tracking took spend down fifty percent and doubled signed-client signups inside ninety days. Automated graders flagged none of it.

A senior manual review pays for itself when an account is spending over twenty thousand a month and has never been reviewed by anyone who did not also want to manage it.

Category	Example	Cost	What it catches	What it misses
Free DIY workbook	Setup Audit PDF (this site)	Free	Structural and strategic leaks	Live anomaly detection
Automated SaaS	WordStream Performance Grader	Free to $299/mo	Bid drift, match-type decay	Account architecture fit
Agency audit	KlientBoost, Tinuiti, etc.	Free with sales call	Obvious leaks, retainer-friendly fixes	Findings that lose the retainer
Senior solo operator memo	One-time written diagnosis	$1K to $5K one-time	Structural calls, attribution gaps	Ongoing weekly cadence

Which platform fits which founder

The right starting point depends on spend and self-trust. A founder under ten thousand a month in Google Ads spend should start with the DIY workbook above and the Wasted Spend Calculator. A founder between ten and fifty thousand a month should run the free workbook first, then add one automated SaaS auditor for ongoing cadence. A founder above fifty thousand a month should commission a senior manual review every six to twelve months and run an automated tool weekly between reviews.

Agency audits sit outside that progression. Take them when offered, mine the three best findings, and decline the retainer unless the math is independently strong. The solo vs agency comparison at /vs/agency walks through which engagement model fits which account.

The pattern I see most often: a founder buys a three-hundred-dollar SaaS subscription, never logs in after month one, and the account keeps leaking. The platform was not the problem. The cadence was. The Tracking Stack reference covers the deduplication contract that any audit, automated or human, depends on to read the numbers correctly. The other thirty diagnostics are at /wasted-ad-spend/.

The four categories above answer which audit type fits which account, not which leaks live in any specific one. Start with the DIY workbook because it is free and the diagnosis is portable. The version I built for founders is meant for marking up your own account before deciding whether a paid review is the next step.