Performance automation
PPC Performance Agent
A supervised AI PPC operator for small businesses that want Google Ads and Meta Ads to spend against what actually converts. The agent learns the company, watches campaign performance, tracks budget pacing, and recommends or executes controlled changes inside clear guardrails.
The problem
Most small businesses do not fail at PPC because they need more dashboards. They fail because conversion tracking is thin, lead quality is unclear, budgets drift toward platform defaults, and campaign decisions are made too late or with too little context.
The platforms optimize for the signal they are given. If the signal is a cheap form fill instead of a qualified lead, booked job, sale, or profitable customer, the budget learns the wrong lesson.
Who it is for
Owner-led businesses, local service companies, niche ecommerce brands, consultants, clinics, B2B services firms, and lean teams that spend enough on paid media to need active management but do not want a bloated agency process.
Best fit when the business has a clear offer, a real conversion event, and the discipline to review lead quality instead of judging PPC only by clicks and form fills.
This is supervised automation, not black-box budget control.
The agent can monitor, diagnose, recommend, and apply approved low-risk changes. Bigger moves stay gated: new campaigns, major budget increases, targeting shifts, offer changes, and creative direction require human approval.
Setup Sprint: $7,500
Fixed-fee setup for the account audit, tracking review, conversion taxonomy, agent memory, budget guardrails, reporting view, approval workflow, and first 30-day optimization plan.
Typical duration: 2-3 weeks. Ad spend is paid directly to Google, Meta, or any other media platform and is not included in the setup fee.
Monthly Retainer: from $2,500/month
Ongoing supervised optimization after setup. Includes weekly recommendations, campaign hygiene, experiment planning, budget pacing, lead-quality review, reporting, change log maintenance, and approved execution.
3-month minimum after setup. Monitoring-only support starts at $1,500/month for accounts spending under $5K/month.
Retainer tiers
Under $5K ad spend
$1,500/month. Monitoring-only support for smaller accounts that need guardrails, reporting, and decision support before heavier optimization makes sense.
$5K-$15K ad spend
$2,500/month. Weekly optimization loop for active Google Ads and Meta Ads management, budget pacing, lead-quality review, and supervised changes.
$15K-$30K ad spend
$3,500/month. More active testing, campaign hygiene, search term review, creative fatigue review, and cross-channel budget recommendations.
$30K-$60K ad spend
$5,000/month. Higher-touch operating rhythm for larger budgets, faster issue response, more experimentation, and tighter performance governance.
$60K+ ad spend
Custom. Priced after account review based on campaign complexity, platforms, reporting requirements, approval risk, and execution load.
Media budget
Paid separately. Client ad spend stays on the client's platform billing accounts and is not included in Carney's setup or retainer fees.
Setup sprint
Account and tracking audit
Review Google Ads, Meta Ads, GA4, tags, pixels, landing pages, conversion events, UTM discipline, CRM handoff, and where lead quality data does or does not flow back into the ad platforms.
Conversion taxonomy
Define which events matter: qualified lead, booked call, purchase, quote request, consultation, repeat customer, offline sale, revenue value, and disqualified lead reasons.
Company memory
Build the agent's working memory: offers, margins, geography, customers, exclusions, seasonality, service areas, proof points, brand constraints, winning claims, and bad-fit traffic.
Budget guardrails
Set daily and monthly caps, change thresholds, pacing rules, approval requirements, stop-loss rules, and what the agent may change without asking first.
Optimization rules
Create first-pass rules for search terms, negatives, creative fatigue, cost-per-lead drift, conversion-rate drops, landing-page mismatch, audience waste, and campaign budget reallocation.
Reporting view
Create a practical weekly view of spend, conversions, conversion quality, CPA, ROAS or revenue proxy, budget pacing, experiments, and recommended next actions.
How the agent operates
- Observe: pull campaign, ad set, keyword, search term, creative, landing-page, and conversion data.
- Interpret: compare performance against company memory, budget limits, lead quality, and prior tests.
- Recommend: explain what should change, why it should change, expected risk, and what evidence supports the move.
- Execute: apply approved low-risk changes or prepare high-risk changes for review.
- Learn: write decisions, outcomes, exclusions, and performance lessons back into the account memory.
Monthly retainer
Weekly optimization review
Review spend, conversion quality, search terms, creative fatigue, budget pacing, landing-page performance, and recommended changes.
Campaign hygiene
Keep negatives, placements, underperforming creative, budget leakage, tracking issues, and account clutter from quietly draining performance.
Experiment planning
Plan controlled tests for offer angle, geography, audience, keyword theme, landing page, creative, bid strategy, and budget allocation.
Lead-quality feedback loop
Connect sales or owner feedback back to campaign decisions so the agent does not reward cheap leads that waste time.
Budget pacing
Monitor spend against monthly targets and flag when the account is underspending, overspending, or starving the best-performing campaigns.
Decision log
Maintain a plain-English change history so the business knows what changed, when it changed, why it changed, and whether it worked.
Setup Sprint
$7,500 fixed-fee setup after account review. Best for getting the tracking, memory, guardrails, first optimization rules, and operating rhythm in place before any automation touches budget.
Typical duration: 2-3 weeks. Includes account audit, conversion taxonomy, agent memory, budget guardrails, reporting view, owner approval workflow, and first 30-day optimization plan.
Monthly Retainer
From $2,500/month, scaled to ad spend and execution risk. Best when the business wants the agent monitored, tuned, and held accountable through a weekly performance loop.
Includes weekly recommendations, campaign hygiene, test planning, budget pacing, lead-quality review, reporting, change log maintenance, and supervised execution.
Ad spend is paid separately. 3-month minimum after setup.
What it will not do
It will not guarantee lower acquisition costs, invent conversion data that does not exist, spend without a cap, ignore platform policies, or replace strategy. The value is discipline: better signal, faster diagnosis, controlled execution, and a memory-backed learning loop.
Use this when paid media needs an operator, not another dashboard.
The first goal is not maximum automation. The first goal is to stop wasting budget, clarify what counts as a real conversion, and build a repeatable PPC operating system that gets smarter each week.