The account someone else set up
A lot of small businesses come to me with a Google Ads account somebody else set up. The pattern is familiar: one catch-all group of ads, broad keywords everywhere, no list of searches to exclude, and money spent with nothing to show for it.
Working out what was wrong, which keywords were worth adding and how things were tracking each week used to be slow, manual spreadsheet work for me. So I built Metads, my own portal for building, checking and improving clients' Google Ads campaigns. As of today, it's up and running.
A grade, not an opinion
Every campaign gets a score out of 100 and a letter from A to F. The score covers five things: how the campaign is structured, its keywords, its ads, its settings and its results. Every problem it finds is listed in plain words and marked critical, warning or minor.
The important part is that the grade comes from the same fixed checklist every time. There's no AI deciding it and no gut feel. The same account always gets the same grade, so you can see exactly why a campaign is a C and what will move it to a B.
That works both ways. A messy campaign might come out an F, with a list of exactly what's hurting it. A well-built one gets an A, and the same checklist explains why.
It starts with what you already have
You don't need to start again. Metads reads the export files from accounts other people manage, shows a preview, then brings the campaigns in with their results intact. It can also pull campaigns, results and the actual searches people typed straight from Google Ads, and re-grade automatically.
Nothing changes in your live account on its own. Changes go out as a file that I review and import myself.
Keywords, with the evidence attached
Choosing keywords is where a lot of ad money quietly goes missing. In Metads, every candidate keyword is compared against a baseline using real evidence: Google Trends, search volumes, your own campaign history and a look at the live search results.
Each one gets an impact score out of 100, built from demand, intent, how local it is, past performance and cost, with a recommendation to add, consider or skip. Every factor behind the number is one click away, so a recommendation is never just "trust me".
AI as a second opinion
Suggested fixes come from rules first, based on the grade. If I switch it on, Claude adds extra suggestions on top, but it never sets the grade.
Each client also gets a one-click weekly report showing grade changes, what changed and the next steps, so keeping you in the loop stops being a spreadsheet job.
Your data stays private
The ad data lives on my own machine. The only way in from the web is a password-protected portal that can ask for data but doesn't store any itself.
If you're paying for ads, you deserve to know whether they're working, and why.
The full write-up, with screenshots from the portal's demo mode, is in the Metads case study. If you have a Google Ads account and a nagging feeling about it, send it my way. I'll grade every campaign and show you what's costing money, with the evidence attached. There's more on how I help with Google and local SEO.