We caught our own Google Ads account wasting money — twice — and it's basically been our whole marketing strategy since

Zero sales so far. Here's what's actually happened instead.

I'm building AdStake — independent audits of Google/Meta ad spend, no agency, no media buying, so there's no conflict of interest in what we find. The idea: every other big cost center in a business gets outside verification as a matter of course (SOC 2, code review, financial audits). Ad spend, usually one of the largest line items, mostly doesn't.

We ran our own product on our own $68/day Google Ads account to dogfood it before charging anyone else. First finding: "AI Max" (Google's automated match-expansion feature) had drifted our keywords onto completely unrelated queries — $166 of an early spend batch went to searches that had nothing to do with what we sell. We disabled it, wrote it up, moved on.

Two weeks later, second finding: a smaller, already-paused campaign was still spending. Every keyword in it was off. AI Max was still on for that campaign specifically, and with no real keywords left to match against, it just served ads on whatever it wanted — ad-tech junk, zero relevance. We'd fixed the campaign we were watching and missed the one we weren't.

We paused Google Ads entirely after that. Not because the tool doesn't work — because paid search is a bad fit for a category that doesn't have a name yet. Nobody searches for "independent ad spend audit" because most people don't know it's a thing you can buy. We proved that too: ran 53 keywords, 74% came back with zero real search volume.

So right now the actual GTM is: publish the findings, build a free tool people can use with zero commitment (drop one CSV, get a Health Score + the single biggest issue, no signup), and show up in the places PPC people already talk to each other.

No revenue yet. Just a genuinely useful thing that came out of watching our own money disappear closely enough to notice.

Happy to answer anything — pricing, the free tool's architecture, why we killed our own ad channel, all of it.