"Google are bandits." It's not the kind of thing you'd expect from a certified Google Partner agency - but Karen Young says it with a smile, and she means it.

Karen is the founder of Ethos Metrics, the ethical pay-per-click agency built on a simple, provocative idea: the platforms are incentivised to maximise their own profit, not yours, and that gap costs advertisers more than they realise. In this episode she explains how the system really works, why most default settings benefit the platform over the advertiser, and how a smart business can take back control.

We cover where AI is genuinely improving paid advertising and where it's just noise (plus a few horror stories of letting it run unsupervised), why LinkedIn is often the better bet for consultancies, the difference between vanity metrics and the numbers that actually matter, and how to know whether PPC is even right for your business before you spend a penny.

Karen also shares the story behind Ethos - why she built a deliberately small agency of "corporate escapees," and why being honest to a fault has become her sharpest point of difference.

A genuinely useful listen for any founder who's been burned by paid ads, or assumed they were beyond reach.

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