Context: Hourigan transition — deciding who owns Google Ads going forward.
How well is the current agency doing?
Grade: B-, roughly 78%.
The strategic decisions are right. The account was migrated cleanly from 28 paused legacy campaigns to a focused PMax-plus-Brand-Search structure. Enhanced Conversions, Customer Lifecycle Optimization, and conservative auto-apply settings are all on. Google's aggressive 14-item "Grow your business" auto-apply list is correctly all-off. That's the work of someone who knows what they're doing strategically.
The day-to-day hygiene is C-tier. Brand search is budget-capped at $280/day (a rookie mistake — every dollar there recaptures existing demand). 732 negatives have been stuffed into the brand campaign and one is actively blocking [grow fragrance discount code], a purchase-intent query. Four of six conversion actions are showing "Misconfigured" status. Every PMax asset group reports "No audience signals provided." Every asset group ad-strength is "Average" instead of "Excellent." Optimization score is trending down.
The pattern reads as: someone set this up correctly six months ago and stopped looking. Consistent with an agency where Google Ads is the second priority behind Meta.
What's the lift to get to A-grade?
Roughly 8–12 hours of focused cleanup, then 2–4 hours/week ongoing. None of the fixes are technically hard — re-fire the conversion tags, prune the negative list, define audience signals from Klaviyo data, expand assets per asset group. The execution layer is the entire job.
Can we just do this through Claude / the Datahub?
Partially. There is no Google Ads management MCP that lets Claude push changes directly — same for Meta. The Datahub already pulls live Google Ads spend, ROAS, and campaign data via Windsor.ai (read-only), and Claude can audit the account through the Google Ads UI via Claude in Chrome (which is how this audit was produced). What Claude cannot do reliably is make sustained edits inside the Google Ads UI — the browser automation works for one-off changes but is fragile for repeated heavy editing.
The model that works: Claude diagnoses and drafts every change weekly, a human executes the changes inside Google Ads. That's the same model an agency uses internally — we'd just cut the middleman.
Recommendation: do it together with a freelance safety net.
Three options, ranked:
1. DIY with Claude + a part-time Google Ads freelancer (recommended). Claude runs weekly audits and drafts every change. A senior freelancer (1099, $500–1,200/mo) reviews recommendations, executes the changes in the UI, and handles anything urgent. Total cost ~$10–15K/year. Institutional knowledge accrues in the Datahub, not in an agency.
2. Hire a Google Ads specialty firm. Competent specialty agencies run $1,500–3,500/mo for an account this size, or 8–15% of spend. Total cost $18–42K/year. You get accountability and senior expertise, but you also get monthly status calls, contract renewals, and the same channel-deprioritization risk Canopy just demonstrated.
3. Keep Google with the new agency. Mike at Hourigan isn't a Google Ads expert. This would mean either Hourigan staffs up for it (unlikely to be world-class) or the channel stays at C-tier hygiene. Worst of both worlds.
Revenue impact of cleanup
Conservative estimates based on what the audit surfaced:
- Uncapping Branded-Search alone: +$30K/year (Google's own +28 conversions/month estimate at your $90 attributed AOV).
- Removing conflicting negatives that block brand-intent queries: +$5–10K/year.
- Adding PMax audience signals (10–20% PMax efficiency lift): +$10–20K/year.
- Fixing the four broken conversion actions (5–10% smart-bidding lift): +$10–15K/year.
Total from visible cleanup: $55–75K/year incremental revenue on roughly flat spend. Separately, there's a $50–100K/year opportunity in a dedicated non-brand Search campaign that doesn't currently exist.
The math: paying an agency $20–40K/year to capture ~$55–75K, or doing it with Claude + freelancer for ~$10–15K and keeping the upside. The second option also leaves the audit framework and playbook permanently in the Datahub, where every future quarter compounds on top of the last.
Full audit with severity-ranked findings, the explicit Quick-Win action list, and the list of Google upsell recommendations to reject is at Google Ads — Full Audit.