Process
The guardrail system, documented end to end
Every Pilotads engagement runs the same four-stage system: a priced audit, a sequenced rebuild, a weekly routine with a written change log, and a monthly report that counts waste in euros. This page is the long version, including the parts agencies usually keep vague: who does the work, what you can see, and what happens when a month goes wrong.
Stage 1: What does the audit produce?
Ninety checks across six sections, each failure priced in euros per year from your own click and conversion data. The median account we audit leaks 21% of monthly budget. Deliverables: the findings report, a fix plan sorted by recovered euros per hour of work, and a 60-minute walkthrough. Fixed at €1,900, ten business days, read-only access; the full scope is on the audit page, and the self-serve version is our audit walkthrough guide.
Stage 2: How does the rebuild get sequenced?
Measurement first, always: bidding on broken conversion data contaminates every later judgment, which is why Consent Mode v2 repairs and GA4 event rebuilds precede any keyword work. Then search-term hygiene, then structure, then bidding targets reset from post-repair data. The order is visible in both teardowns: the HR-tech account fixed counting in weeks one and two, and everything after inherited clean numbers.
Stage 3: What runs every week?
- Search-term review, every account, every week; negatives added to themed shared lists
- Budget pacing checks twice weekly, alerting at ±20% of plan
- One ad test live per campaign, one variable at a time, losers archived
- Tracking verification after every site release the client ships
- Every action written into the change log in plain language, same day
The change log is the artifact we are most attached to. It reads like a flight log: date, action, reason, expected effect. New clients often say a month of it taught them more about their account than a year of prior reporting.
Stage 4: What is in the monthly waste report?
One page, five numbers: euros leaked and recovered this month, CPA against the written target, spend pacing, conversion count against the same month last year where history exists, and the single biggest planned change for next month. Plus the uncomfortable line when there is one. A miss is stated as a miss, with its diagnosis; the 2026 market context, where median CPL fell for the first time in five years, sets the bar for what "fine" is allowed to mean.
Which decisions never happen silently?
Four things always land in writing before they happen: bidding strategy changes, budget moves above 10% of plan, new campaign types (a PMax or AI Max test runs the capped protocol), and anything touching measurement. Everything else is the weekly routine, logged after the fact. This split keeps accounts fast without making them surprising.
Frequently asked questions
The three people on the about page, directly. Ines runs the weekly routine on most accounts, Femke owns measurement and the waste report, Jorren leads audits and quarterly reviews. Nothing is delegated to juniors or offshored; at 34 accounts, the roster is deliberately capped so this stays true.
Everything, always. The account lives in your Google Ads login, the change log is a shared document updated with every action, and the monthly waste report arrives by the fifth working day. Most clients skim the log monthly and read the report line by line; both exist so trust never depends on memory.
The report says so on page one, with the diagnosis and the corrective plan beside it. Paid search has variance: auctions shift, competitors spend, seasons turn. The written CPA target is judged on trend, and two consecutive quarters outside it release you from any notice period.
Yes, and it usually works well. The guardrail system produces artifacts an in-house team can read and challenge: the change log, the negative lists, the test verdicts. About half of our audit clients execute fixes entirely in-house, and some later hand back only the weekly routine.
See the system on your account
Start with the audit; the rebuild plan and routine follow from what it finds.
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