A paid media audit is not a report. It is a diagnostic. The output should be a prioritised list of what is broken, what is inefficient, and what is missing, with enough specificity to act on immediately. Most audits I see are the opposite: a tour of the account with a list of observations and no clear sense of what actually matters. This is how I approach one and what I typically find.
The audit has four parts, and they have to be done in order because findings in each layer inform interpretation of the next. Tracking. Structure. Creative and messaging. Economics and performance. If you start with economics and the tracking is broken, you are making decisions based on fiction. Fix the foundation first.
Check that every conversion event you care about is firing correctly, firing once, and representing something meaningful. Pull a sample of attributed conversions and reconcile them against your CRM or order management system. If there is a significant gap in either direction, more attributed conversions than actual outcomes, or more actual outcomes than attributed, find out why.
Look for deduplication issues if you are running both pixel and server-side tracking. Look for conversion events that are tracking the wrong things, thank-you page views counted as purchases, or email signups counted as trials. Check whether conversion windows are appropriate for your sales cycle.
For B2B accounts, check whether there is any offline conversion data flowing back to the platform. The absence of offline conversions in a B2B account with a long sales cycle is itself a significant finding.
Look at the campaign and ad set structure and ask whether it reflects the business's actual acquisition priorities or whether it reflects decisions made at a different stage that were never revisited. Common structural problems: brand and non-brand mixed in the same campaigns, markets with materially different performance bundled together, remarkably few or many ad sets, audience overlap between ad sets, campaigns with budgets too small to give Smart Bidding meaningful data.
Check bidding strategies against conversion volume. A Target CPA campaign generating fewer than 50 conversions per month does not have enough data to converge reliably. A Maximise Clicks campaign with no bid cap can run through budget in ways that have no relationship to intent or conversion probability.
How many active ad creatives are there? When were they last refreshed? Is there evidence of creative testing, multiple concepts running simultaneously with variation in message, not just in visual execution? What does the landing page experience look like for a first-time visitor from a paid click?
Check message match between the ad and the landing page. Check whether the CTA is appropriate for the intent level of the traffic. Look for signs of creative fatigue: declining CTR on the same creative over time, high frequency relative to audience size.
With clean tracking and a clear structural picture, look at the performance data with fresh eyes. What is the blended CPA and how has it trended over the past six months? Which campaigns are efficient and which are not, and can you explain why? What is the relationship between spend and conversion volume, are you seeing diminishing returns?
For ecommerce, is ROAS above break-even when you account for actual margins? For B2B, is cost per qualified lead within a range that makes acquisition economics work given deal size and close rate? These questions often cannot be answered from platform data alone, they require context from the business.
Not everything the audit surfaces is equally important. Broken tracking is always a priority because it affects everything downstream. Structural problems that are actively wasting budget are next. Creative and landing page improvements follow. Strategic questions about channel mix and budget allocation come last, you need clean data and efficient structure before you can make those decisions well.
This is a specific piece of work I do regularly for growth-stage companies. If you want one done on your account, get in touch.