Hello from Kindling

Hey 👋, we're Kindling. Nice to meet you.

If you found this blog, you probably already know the feeling. You log into your ad account on a Monday morning, and something is off. CPA crept up. Spend looks weird. A campaign you trusted is suddenly acting like a stranger. You want answers fast. You don't want to spend the next four hours pulling reports and squinting at trend lines until your eyes go fuzzy.

That's the problem we built Kindling to solve.

What we do, in plain English.

You upload three CSVs from your Google Ads account. We give you a real audit in under 60 seconds. Not a vibes-based scorecard. Not a list of generic tips you've already read a hundred times. An actual breakdown of where your money is going, where it's getting wasted, and what shifted in the last few weeks that you might have missed.

Three files. One report. That's the whole thing.

Why don't we ask for your account?

Most audit tools want the keys to the kingdom. OAuth login. Read access. Sometimes write access. Your data gets ingested, stored, modeled, and kept around for who knows how long. We didn't want to build that. You shouldn't have to trade your account credentials for a few minutes of insight.

So Kindling doesn't connect to your ad account. At all. Ever.

You export three CSVs from the Google Ads UI. You drop them on our page. We crunch them and show you what we found. The second you close the tab, your data is gone. No database row with your name on it. No dashboard you have to remember to log out of. No "we use your data to improve our models" fine print buried at the bottom of a terms page.

Privacy-first isn't a marketing line for us. It's how the whole thing is built.

Why a snapshot isn't enough.

Here's the other thing that bugged us about most audit tools.

They tell you what's true today. Your CPA is $42. Your impression share is 62%. Your waste rate is 18%. Cool. But a number with no direction is half a story. A 28% budget-lost impression share that was 40% last week is a totally different problem than 28% that was 12% last week. One is recovery in progress. The other is a fire that just started.

Kindling reads day-segmented data, which is a fancy way of saying we look at how things changed day by day instead of just lumping it all together. We don't just check the totals. We check the slope. When did your CPA start climbing? Which search terms are accelerating your waste? What broke two weeks ago that nobody flagged?

That's the audit. The trend is the answer.

Who is this for?

If you run ads for a living, this is for you. If you manage a client account and want a second pair of eyes before your next call, this is for you. If you're an in-house marketer who inherited an account and just wants to know where to start, this is also for you.

We built Kindling for the people who actually have to do the work. Practitioners. Not procurement.

What's free?

Your overall audit score is free. Your top search term wasters, the actual queries with real dollar amounts attached, are free. You can see what your account is doing and whether it's getting better or worse without paying us a cent.
The deeper findings, the ranked action plan, and the dollar-impact estimates on every recommendation sit behind a small paywall. But you'll know if Kindling is worth your time before you ever see a checkout page. That's how it should work.

What's next on this blog?

We're going to write about the stuff we wish someone had written when we were learning. How to read a search terms report without losing your afternoon. Why Quality Score is a tax, not a grade. What "Smart Bidding learning phase" actually means. The tracking gotchas that quietly make every other number lie to you.
Mostly we just want to be useful. If there's something you'd like us to cover, tell us. We read everything.

Thanks for stopping by. Go ahead and run your free audit. Let us know what you find.

[→ Start your free audit](#)