For Canadian Businesses Spending $1,000+ a Month on Ads
Spending more. Not sure it's working. Nobody can quite explain why.
That is not a reporting problem. In most accounts it is a measurement problem sitting underneath a budget problem. We will show you which one you have — in a written audit of your own accounts, in two weeks, at no charge.
What You Get
A written audit of your live accounts, not a proposal
What Happens Next
One 20-minute call, then we work from your account data
What We Won't Do
Pitch you during the audit, keep the report, or contact you again if you say no
Led personally by Charanjit "CJ" Suman, MBA — 10+ years in enterprise marketing strategy
A Diagnostic, Not a Pitch
Three questions. If you can answer all three, you probably don't need us.
Most executives assume a paid advertising problem is a performance problem. Usually it is a measurement problem wearing a performance problem's clothes. These three questions separate the two.
Question One
“Which specific campaign produced our last ten customers, and what did each one cost?”
If You Can't Answer It
You have an attribution problem, not a performance problem
What That Usually Means
Reported ROAS is measuring form fills, not revenue. Optimising against it makes results worse, not better.
Question Two
“What percentage of last quarter's spend went to search queries we would never bid on deliberately?”
If You Can't Answer It
You have a waste problem you cannot see
What That Usually Means
Negative keyword gaps and loose match types are the most common and most recoverable form of leakage.
Question Three
“What is our blended cost per customer across all channels, not per channel?”
If You Can't Answer It
You are optimising channels in isolation
What That Usually Means
Per-channel ROAS can improve while blended CAC gets worse. Most reporting hides this.
The Method
Twenty-three things we check. Here they all are.
Published in full because a methodology you cannot see is a methodology you cannot evaluate. If you want to run this yourself, everything below is doable with account access and a few hours.
Waste
6 pointsMeasurement
6 pointsAuction Position
4 pointsEfficiency
4 pointsConversion
3 pointsTwenty-three points. No proprietary black box. The value is in knowing what the answers mean.
What a Finding Looks Like
One example, anonymised.
Audit Finding
Ontario professional services firm, ~$8,000 monthly Google Ads spend
What We Found
41% of search spend over 90 days went to queries containing the words ‘jobs’, ‘salary’, ‘careers’ and ‘free’ — job seekers and researchers, not buyers.
Why It Happened
Broad match keywords with no negative keyword list, running on automated bidding that was optimising toward form fills — including a careers page enquiry form.
What It Meant
Reported cost per lead looked acceptable. Cost per qualified enquiry was roughly double what the account owner believed.
What We Did Not Claim
That fixing it would double their leads. We don't know that. We know what the spend was going to, and what it wasn't producing.
Market Context
This is not a competitive problem. It is a supply problem.
AI Overviews compress the organic results that used to absorb part of search demand. That demand does not disappear. It enters the paid auction, where supply is fixed.
Cross-industry Google Search average. Source: Digital Applied, Q1 2026.
Up 12% year over year — steepest since 2021
87% of industries recorded increases
Clicks to organic fall 46.7% when an AI Overview appears
A Way of Thinking About It
Cheaper platforms are not lower quality. They are earlier in the funnel.
Reddit at $0.59 and Google Search at $5.42 are not competing for the same click. One reaches a buyer forming a view, the other a buyer ready to act. A programme running only capture channels pays peak price for every customer, because it never influenced them earlier.
ChatGPT Ads is missing from this chart deliberately. The platform launched in February 2026, opened self-serve access in May, removed its $50,000 spend minimum, and reached a $1 billion annualised run rate inside 200 days. There is no reliable published CPC benchmark yet, and any agency quoting you one is estimating. We treat it as a test line with defined kill criteria, not a forecast line in a budget.
Sources: Digital Applied cross-platform study 2026, Launchcodex, WordStream/LocaliQ, Hootsuite.
Before You Get in Touch
This is not for everyone. Here is who we are not the right fit for.
You spend under ~$1,000 a month on ads
At that level there is rarely enough spend for account structure to matter much. You are better served by a one-off audit and running it yourself.
You need results this month
Attribution rebuilds and structural fixes take a quarter to show clean numbers. Anyone promising faster is optimising for the sale, not the outcome.
Your strategy is already decided and you need hands
We are not an execution shop. If the plan is set, a freelancer will cost you less and serve you better.
Your landing pages are off-limits
Landing page quality is the primary lever on paid performance in 2026. If we cannot touch them, we are optimising around the biggest constraint and neither of us will be happy.
The Ad Spend Audit
Find out what you are actually paying per customer.
We review your live accounts against the twenty-three points above and hand you a written report: what is being wasted, what is being measured wrongly, and what to change first. Built by CJ personally, not delegated. You keep the report whether or not you hire us.
Outcome
A written audit of your accounts: findings and a prioritised punch list, not a proposal
Process
One 20-minute call to understand your business and get read-only account access. Then we work from your data
Risk
No charge. No pitch during the audit. You keep the report. If you say no, we do not contact you again
Questions Before You Commit
Straight answers, no hedging.
A written report on your live accounts covering the twenty-three points listed above, at no charge and with no obligation. You keep it regardless of whether you engage us. There is no upsell embedded in the document.
Read-only access to your ad platforms and analytics. We do not need billing access, we do not make changes, and access can be revoked the moment the audit is delivered.
Because it is the only honest way for a new firm to demonstrate capability. We have no case studies to show you yet. What we can do is look at your accounts and tell you something true that you did not already know. If that is useful, a conversation follows. If not, you still have the report.
Roughly two weeks from account access to written report. Longer if the account is large or the tracking is unusually broken — we will tell you if that is the case rather than rushing it.
No. The audit is delivered as a document with findings and recommendations. If you want to discuss an engagement afterwards, you raise it. We will not chase.
Then we will tell you that, and you will have verified that your accounts are in good shape — which is worth knowing. It is an uncommon outcome but not an impossible one, and we would rather report it than manufacture a problem.
No. Some clients take the report to their existing agency and ask them to fix what it found. That is a legitimate outcome and we have no objection to it.
CJ Suman personally. There is no junior team and no offshore delivery layer. That is a constraint on how many audits we can run at once, and it is also the reason the findings are specific.