What services provide recommendations for optimizing ad spend in search advertising?

Google’s own Recommendations tab (free, with a catch)

The first service most founders meet is the one already inside the account. Google Ads ships a Recommendations tab and an Opportunity Score (a percentage out of one hundred, scored against Google’s idea of an optimized account) that surface dozens of suggestions: add broad match keywords, raise budgets, apply auto-applied bidding changes, enable Performance Max, expand audiences, lift the daily cap on a campaign that is “limited by budget.”

It is free, it updates daily, and it is sitting inside every account already. It is also the service tier with the worst incentive alignment of the four.

The Recommendations tab is built by the platform that earns more when an account spends more. The recommendations that score highest in Opportunity Score are almost always the ones that broaden match, lift budgets, or hand more control to automated bidding. Applying every recommendation is the fastest way to inflate spend without inflating revenue. The recommendations that trim waste (pause this near-duplicate campaign, exclude this converting-but-unprofitable audience, tighten this match type) rarely appear, because they reduce platform revenue.

The honest read: scan the tab weekly, apply the two or three that match what a human would have flagged anyway (extension issues, broken tracking, missing conversion actions), and decline the rest. Opportunity Score is not a scoreboard worth chasing.

Cost: free. What it catches: tracking gaps, missing extensions, obvious setup errors. What it misses: the structural decisions behind most waste, and the recommendations that would lose Google revenue.

Agency optimization retainers

The largest service tier by headcount. Performance agencies (KlientBoost, Disruptive Advertising, Tinuiti, Single Grain, and several hundred smaller shops) sell a monthly retainer where a team logs into the account on a recurring cadence, applies optimizations, and reports back.

Retainer pricing usually runs two to ten thousand a month for accounts under one hundred thousand monthly spend, and climbs from there as a percentage of spend (often ten to fifteen percent on managed media). The deliverable is a mix of weekly account work, monthly reporting decks, and a recurring strategy call.

The honest read: a quality agency retainer pays for itself when spend is high enough that one strategic catch a quarter covers the fee, and when the founder genuinely does not want to be in the account. Below thirty thousand a month in spend, the retainer math gets thin. The same junior analyst is often managing twelve to twenty accounts in parallel, and the optimizations run from a templated checklist that does not bend to the specific business.

Cost: two to ten thousand a month, plus a percentage of media above a threshold. What it catches: ongoing optimization cadence, weekly account hygiene, reporting structure. What it misses: deep architectural rebuilds that would lose the retainer the retainer, and founder-specific judgment calls a templated playbook does not cover.

Fractional consultants

The middle tier. A fractional consultant is a senior operator (usually with five to fifteen years of platform experience) who manages a small portfolio of accounts on a part-time retainer. Pricing runs fifteen hundred to four thousand a month for two to six hours of weekly attention, depending on consultant rate and account complexity.

The structure: no junior analyst, no templated deck, no minimum spend commitment. The same senior brain that would cost ten thousand a month inside an agency is in the account directly, but for fewer hours and on a flatter fee.

The honest read: this tier fits accounts between fifteen and seventy-five thousand a month in spend, where the founder wants senior judgment without paying for the agency overhead that funds the junior bench and the new-business team. The risk is consultant capacity. A good fractional operator is usually full, and the available ones often are not the senior tier they sell themselves as.

Cost: fifteen hundred to four thousand a month. What it catches: senior-level strategic calls, structural fixes, cadence between major reviews. What it misses: the bench depth an agency offers when the account scales fast and needs five people on it next quarter.

Senior solo operators (one-off audits and recommendation memos)

The tier most founders do not know exists. A senior solo operator spends three to six hours in the account, writes a custom recommendation memo against the specific business model, and delivers a prioritized fix list with no retainer attached.

Price points run one thousand to five thousand for a one-time engagement, depending on account size and operator rate. 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 the founder or in-house marketer can run without the operator present.

This is the service tier this site offers. The free 25-page Google Ads Setup Audit is the public version of the same diagnostic process, written so a founder can run it without paying anyone. The paid memo goes deeper and is account-specific. Either way, the deliverable is a recommendation list the founder owns, not a retainer that depends on the operator staying in the account.

Cost: one to five thousand, one-time. What it catches: structural decisions, attribution gaps, conversion-setup errors, account architecture mismatches, the recommendations the platform tab and the templated agency report both miss. What it misses: ongoing cadence (a memo is a snapshot, not a subscription).

On a regional medical imaging account I audited, ninety days of Meta spend ran a little over sixty-six hundred dollars across nearly four million impressions. The numbers read fine in the dashboard: half a percent click-through rate, thirty-cent CPC, four hundred sixty thousand reached. The recommendation the senior memo surfaced was structural: there were no conversion actions configured against the lead form, no Customer Match audiences loaded, and the campaigns were optimizing for reach because nothing downstream gave the algorithm anything else to optimize for. The dashboard hid the problem. The memo named it in two paragraphs.

Service tier	Price	Strength	Limitation
Google Recommendations tab	Free	Daily updates, inside the account	Biased toward more spend
Agency retainer	$2K to $10K/mo	Weekly cadence, bench depth	Templated, junior-staffed
Fractional consultant	$1.5K to $4K/mo	Senior judgment, no agency overhead	Capacity often full
Senior solo memo	$1K to $5K one-time	Custom diagnosis, founder owns the fix list	Snapshot, not subscription

Which service fits which spend level

The right tier tracks closely to monthly spend and how much account ownership the founder wants to keep.

Under ten thousand a month, the free Google Ads audit plus the Wasted Spend Calculator cover most of what any paid service would surface. The Recommendations tab gets a five-minute weekly scan, and most of it gets declined.

Ten to thirty thousand a month, a one-off senior memo every six months is the highest-impact spend on the list. Between memos, the founder runs the workbook themselves and ignores most of what Google’s tab suggests.

Thirty to seventy-five thousand a month, a fractional consultant on a flat monthly fee, supplemented by a senior memo annually, lands closer to agency results at half the cost.

Above seventy-five thousand a month, an agency retainer with senior bench depth starts to make math sense, and a senior memo from outside the agency every twelve months keeps the retainer honest. The solo vs agency comparison at /vs/agency breaks down which model fits which spend band and where an agency is the right answer instead.

The fit between service tier and account is mostly a function of spend and how much ownership the founder wants to keep. Below thirty thousand a month, a one-off senior memo every six months out-performs every retainer on this list at a fraction of the cost. The audit at /audit is the public version of that memo, and a diagnostic call is the paid version when the account needs an outside read against the specific business model.

The hub at /wasted-ad-spend/ walks through the rest of the leaks. The full engagement levels and what each tier covers live at /pricing.