Andrew Nelson Google Ads audits

Google Ads audits · Medspas in & near downtown Toronto

Some of your Google Ads budget is working beautifully. Let's find the rest.

A free, 30-point audit of your account, gone through by hand by someone who knows how differently medspa advertising behaves.

You'll get a written findings document, then an unhurried 30‑minute walkthrough where I share my screen and talk you through what I found. No retainer, no obligation, nothing to install, and no one will chase you afterwards.

5 free audits · 5 remaining

Free, in exchange for letting me count your findings
anonymously in an aggregate pattern set. I've written out exactly what that means.

Finding · sample Severity: high
Observed A broad-match keyword for skin tightening matched to searches for at-home devices, creams, and certification courses.
Why it matters You bought each of those clicks at ad rates, but none of them came from someone who was ever going to book a consult.
Fix Rebuild on phrase match, add a negative list covering DIY, retail, and training intent. Same budget, materially tighter traffic.
Effort About an hour, once. You can do it yourself — my audit tells you how.

Illustrative example. This is the shape a finding takes — it is not any real clinic's account. Your audit contains findings drawn from your own data.

A

My Offer To You

Five free audits — and what I'm asking in return

I'm building a picture of how medspa accounts in this city are really run — where the money goes, what trips most of them up, and what the good ones are already doing right. There's no way to learn that from the outside, so the first five are free. Here's the whole trade, in plain terms. I'd far rather you knew exactly what you were agreeing to than found it tucked away in a footnote later.

What you get

  • A written findings document — every issue, ranked by what it is costing you, with the specific fix for each.
  • A 30-minute walkthrough over video where I share my screen and show you the account, not a slide deck.
  • A prioritised list you can hand to whoever manages the account — your agency, your marketing coordinator, or yourself.
  • A straight answer on whether your spend is working. Sometimes it already is, and that's a perfectly good outcome — I'll say so plainly.
  • Everything in writing, and it's yours. Act on it with me, without me, or whenever you get to it.

What I'm asking in return

Permission to count your account in an anonymised pattern set. Concretely, I record findings as data points — "account had broad match enabled with fewer than twenty negative keywords" — and nothing else. Specifically, I will neither record nor publish:

  • Your clinic name, location, or website
  • Screenshots, exports, or account IDs
  • Spend, revenue, or any dollar figure
  • Your search terms, keywords, or ad copy
  • Anything that could be traced back to you

What gets published is counts across all five — "four of five accounts had no negative keyword list at all." You can withdraw any time before publication and I'll drop your account from the set, no questions and no awkwardness. And if you'd rather not take part at all, that's completely fine — the audit is available paid instead.

B

The index · 30 points

Everything I'll look at

This is the whole list, with nothing held back for the sales call. No tool generates it — I go through the account by hand, because the things that matter most in a medspa account are exactly the ones a generic PPC scanner waves through as fine.

B1

Structure & targeting

6 points
01Campaign type mixWhat is Search, what is Performance Max, and what PMax is absorbing that Search was already winning more cheaply.
02Location targeting and radiusWhether you're paying for Scarborough and Mississauga clicks on a downtown clinic, and whether the setting is "presence" or the far looser "presence or interest".
03Ad schedule against front-desk hoursAds running at 2am send enquiries into a void. Whether your schedule matches when someone can actually answer.
04Device behaviourMobile share of spend against mobile share of booked consults — these come apart more often than people expect.
05Audience signals and remarketing listsWhether lists are populated and large enough to serve, or long since expired.
06Budget split across treatment linesWhether spend is distributed by margin and demand, or by whichever campaign was built first.
B2

Keywords & search terms

7 points
07Match type exposureBroad match without a negative framework behind it is the single most common way money leaves a medspa account.
08Search terms report, last 90 daysRead literally, line by line. This is the least glamorous part of the audit and reliably the most valuable.
09Negative keyword coverageJobs, salaries, training and certification, DIY and at-home, wholesale and equipment, "how to become".
10Brand and competitor termsWhether you're defending your own name, and whether bidding on the clinic down the street is paying for itself.
11Neighbourhood and "near me" coverageYorkville, King West, Liberty Village, Queen West, the Financial District — high-intent, comparatively cheap, and frequently missing.
12Price and cost intent"How much does X cost" is a buying signal. Most accounts either ignore it or send it to a page with no prices on it.
13Internal competitionDuplicate keywords bidding against each other across ad groups, inflating your own cost per click.
B3

Ads & policy exposure

6 points
14Prescription-drug term exposureGoogle treats injectable brand names as prescription drug terms. Where they appear in your ads, keywords, and landing pages — and what that is costing you in disapprovals.
15Healthcare certification statusWhether your account needs Google's healthcare and medicines certification for what you're advertising, and whether you have it.
16Before-and-after imagery in assetsYour best-performing creative is also a policy risk in Display and Performance Max. Where it's sitting in your asset library.
17Responsive search ad strengthHeadline and description coverage, pinning that is strangling the algorithm, and assets marked "low".
18Extensions and assetsSitelinks, callouts, location, call, and price assets — free real estate that most accounts leave half-built.
19Message matchKeyword to ad to landing page. Every break in that chain costs you both Quality Score and conversion rate.
B4

Landing pages & booking path

6 points
20Destination pagesWhether each treatment has its own page, or every ad lands on a homepage and asks the visitor to go find what they searched for.
21Mobile load speed on the real destinationMeasured on the actual page your ads point to, on a phone connection, not a desktop score.
22Form frictionField count, required fields nobody wants to answer, and anything that fails on a phone keyboard.
23Taps from click to held appointmentI count them. Every extra step between the ad and a confirmed slot is measurable drop-off.
24Click-to-call and whether calls get answeredPhone is still how a lot of consults get booked. I check the setup, and I check what happens when the phone rings.
25Trust signals at the point of decisionPractitioner credentials, real photography, pricing transparency, and what a first-time visitor sees before deciding.
B5

Measurement

5 points
26What is counted as a conversionAnd what is counted twice. Inflated conversion numbers train the bidding algorithm on fiction.
27Primary versus secondary actionsIf newsletter signups are primary, Google will faithfully buy you newsletter signups instead of consults.
28Call conversion trackingWhether calls are tracked at all, and whether the minimum call length is set somewhere meaningful.
29Enhanced conversions and consent modeConfigured correctly, or configured in the way that silently drops a share of your data.
30Reconciliation against your booksReported conversions versus consults that actually appeared in the chair. This gap is where most accounts are being flattered.
C

Context

Why medspa accounts are harder than most

A generic PPC audit will tell you your Quality Score is low and leave it there. It won't tell you any of the six things below, because they only show up in this category. If your ads have felt harder to get right than they ought to be, this is usually why — and it's rarely anyone's fault.

01 The policy trap

Google classifies injectable brand names as prescription drug terms. Depending on certification, you may be able to bid on them while being unable to use them in your ad copy — or on the page you send the click to. Accounts either collect disapprovals or self-censor into vague copy that converts worse. Both are expensive, and neither shows up as a problem in the interface.

02 Your best creative is the restricted kind

Before-and-after imagery is the most persuasive asset you own, and it runs into content restrictions in Display and Performance Max. Most clinics find this out only after the assets are built and paid for. There are compliant ways to carry the same proof — they just have to be designed in from the start.

03 The conversion isn't the treatment

You're buying a consultation, not a procedure. An account optimised for raw form fills will happily buy you people who wanted a price and left. The tracking has to distinguish a consult that showed up from a form that got filled in — otherwise the bidding algorithm optimises toward your worst leads.

04 Downtown is a small, expensive catchment

Clicks here are among the priciest in the country, and the catchment is tighter than most people assume — they'll cross a few neighbourhoods for a clinic, not the GTA. A default radius spends a meaningful share of your budget on people who were never going to make the trip.

05 The phone is still the booking channel

A large share of consults get booked by voice, and calls from ads are the most commonly untracked conversion in this category. If calls aren't tracked, your best-performing campaigns look like your worst — and get their budget cut.

06 Seasonality is real and predictable

Demand for aesthetic treatments moves with the calendar in ways your budget usually doesn't. Flat monthly budgets overpay in the quiet months and run out during the weeks that matter.

Ad policies change. I verify the current state of each of these against Google's live policy documentation at the time of your audit rather than working from memory.

D

Process · about a week end to end

How it works

You send the request

The form below takes about a minute, and I read every one myself. If it looks like a fit I'll reply with a short read-only access request for your Google Ads account — the standard agency link, which you can revoke in one click whenever you like.

1 minute · reply within 1 business day

I go through the account

All thirty points, by hand, plus your landing pages and booking flow from a phone the way a real patient would meet them. This part needs nothing from you at all — no meeting, no questionnaire, no digging out old logins.

3–4 days · nothing needed from you

We walk through the findings

You get the written document first, so you can read it in your own time before we talk. Then thirty minutes on video going through the account together, at whatever pace is useful. At the end I remove my access unless you'd like me to stay on.

30 minutes · document sent in advance

E

Being upfront

Whether this is worth your time

There are five slots, and I'd rather they went where I can be most useful. So here's my read on that, which should save us both a call neither of us needed.

A good fit

  • You're a medspa, aesthetic clinic, or cosmetic dermatology practice in or near downtown Toronto.
  • You've been running Google Ads for at least three months — there needs to be data to read.
  • You're spending somewhere north of roughly $1,500 a month, so the findings are worth more than the effort.
  • You can grant read-only account access, or get it granted.
  • You want to know either way — including if the answer turns out to be "your agency is doing a good job."

Probably not right now

  • You haven't started running ads yet, so there's nothing to read. Do get in touch anyway — I'm happy to point you somewhere useful.
  • What you really need is leverage in a conversation with your current agency. That's a fair thing to want, but I'd rather not be in the middle of it.
  • You need someone to take the account over on Monday. An audit is a diagnosis rather than a handover, so it would only slow you down.
  • You're well outside the GTA. The neighbourhood-level work is most of the value here, and it wouldn't travel.
  • Account access isn't yours to give right now. I can't audit what I can't see — but do come back when that changes.
F

Who you'd be talking to

It's just me

I'm Andrew. I run Google Ads for a small number of local service businesses, and I've been working specifically on medspa and aesthetic-clinic accounts — building the campaigns, writing the ads, and dealing with the policy restrictions that make this category harder to advertise than almost anything else local.

There's no team, no account manager, and no junior doing the work while a senior name sits on the invoice. You talk to me, the audit is written by me, and if you decide to carry on afterwards, I'm the one in your account.

The reason the first five are free is straightforward, and I'd rather say it than dress it up: I want a real, current picture of how these accounts are being run in this city, and there's no way to get that from the outside. You get the audit; I get a data point. That seems like a fair swap to me, and if it doesn't to you, no hard feelings.

Based in
Toronto
Focus
Medspa & aesthetics
Free slots
5 of 5 open
Retainer seats
3 available
Reply time
1 business day
G

Questions

The things people usually ask

What's the catch on "free"?

The catch is stated in full in section A: I count your account in an anonymised pattern set, recording findings as data points with nothing identifying attached. That's the entire consideration.

Beyond that, I'd be glad if one or two of the five wanted ongoing help afterwards — I have three retainer seats open. But the audit isn't contingent on it in any way, and if the answer is "your account is in good shape," I'll happily tell you so and leave you to it.

Do I have to give you access to my account?

Yes — read-only, through Google's standard account access link. I can see the account and take notes; I can't change anything, spend anything, or lock you out. You revoke it from your own settings in one click, and I remove my access after the walkthrough by default unless you ask me to stay on.

My agency manages the account. Is this going behind their back?

That's entirely your call, though I'd gently suggest telling them. Most good agencies are relaxed about a second set of eyes, and the audit is far more useful to you if whoever implements the fixes has been in the loop from the start.

What I won't do is write a hit piece. If your agency is doing good work, the document will say so warmly and in detail — that outcome is just as useful to you as the other one, and a good deal cheaper.

What will you actually publish about my account?

Counts, across all five accounts together. Sentences of the form "four of five accounts had no negative keyword list" or "three of five were running Performance Max without brand exclusions." No names, no locations, no figures, no screenshots, no search terms, nothing that narrows it down to you.

You'll be able to withdraw at any point before publication and I'll drop your account from the set.

How long does it take?

About a week from access being granted to the walkthrough call. Roughly a minute of your time at the start and half an hour at the end, with nothing at all in between. I know how little of your week is actually yours.

What happens if I want you to fix the things you find?

Then we talk about it after the walkthrough, not during it. I take on a small number of accounts on a flat monthly fee — I have three seats open — and I'll quote at that point, once I've seen what's actually involved. It depends on how many campaigns there are and whether you want me managing the account or advising whoever does.

You're equally welcome to take the document and implement it yourself or hand it to your existing agency. It's written to be actionable either way.

What if I'm not in downtown Toronto?

If you're elsewhere in the GTA, please send the form anyway — a lot of the work still applies. Much further afield and the neighbourhood-level analysis stops earning its keep, and I'd rather not take a free slot from someone it fits better.

Can I get the audit without joining the pattern set?

Of course — as a paid engagement. Just say so in the notes and I'll send you the fee, no explanation needed. The five free slots are specifically the ones that come with the data permission.

Request an audit

Five slots. One of them could be yours.

A minute now, half an hour in about a week, and you'll know exactly where you stand. That's the whole commitment — and you can stop at any point without explaining yourself.

  • 01I read every form myself and reply within one business day, either way.
  • 02If it's a fit, I send a read-only access request you can revoke any time.
  • 03You get the written findings to read at your leisure, then a 30-minute walkthrough.

Prefer to just email me? andrew@andrewnelson.dev
No newsletter, no sequence, no follow-up campaign. Ever.

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