Why Most Paid Media Audits Miss the Point
The typical paid media audit is a list of things that look wrong. Low Quality Scores, high CPCs, broad match keywords doing weird stuff. What it rarely does is connect those symptoms to actual revenue impact.
A good audit does three things: it finds where you're wasting spend, identifies what's working that you should double down on, and reveals the structural issues that will keep killing performance no matter what you optimize.
Step 1: Pull a Full Cost Report, Segmented by Campaign Type
Before you touch anything, export your spend data by campaign type for the last 90 days. Separate out brand vs. non-brand, prospecting vs. retargeting, and search vs. social vs. display.
Most accounts have at least one campaign type that's eating 20–30% of budget while contributing almost nothing to conversions. Look for campaigns with high impression share and low conversion rate — these are your first targets.
Quick check: If any single campaign is spending more than 40% of your total budget, it should be generating at least 40% of your conversions. If it's not, you've found your first problem.
Step 2: Audit Your Conversion Tracking
This is the step most agencies skip, and it's the one that matters most. If your conversions aren't tracked correctly, every optimization decision you make is based on bad data.
Check for:
- Duplicate conversion events — firing the same event twice inflates numbers
- Micro-conversions counted as primary goals — page views or add-to-carts don't equal revenue
- Attribution windows — are you comparing apples to apples across platforms?
- View-through conversions — many platforms count these by default; they're almost always misleading
Pull a comparison between platform-reported conversions and your CRM or payment processor for the same period. If the numbers are off by more than 15%, you have a tracking problem.
Step 3: Review Audience Targeting and Overlap
On Meta, audience overlap is one of the biggest silent killers. You end up running five ad sets that are all targeting the same people, competing against yourself in the auction and driving up your own CPMs.
Use the Audience Overlap tool in Meta Ads Manager and kill anything with more than 30% overlap. On Google, check your search term reports and look for expensive non-converting queries that need to be added as negatives.
Step 4: Creative Performance Analysis
Most accounts have 80% of their conversions coming from 20% of their creatives. Pull a creative-level breakdown sorted by cost per result. You're looking for two things: winners to scale and losers to cut.
A creative is a winner if it has a CTR above your account average and a conversion rate within 20% of your best performer. It's a loser if it's been running for 14+ days with spend and hasn't converted at target CPA.
Step 5: Landing Page and Post-Click Experience
Half the time an ad isn't "not working" — the landing page is the problem. Check your page speed (anything above 3s on mobile is costing you conversions), your above-the-fold message match to the ad, and your form or checkout friction.
Pull your platform's Landing Page View metric versus your actual landing page sessions in GA4. A significant gap means your page is loading slowly or breaking for users before they even see your offer.
Step 6: Budget Pacing and Bidding Strategy Audit
Check if your campaigns are hitting daily budget caps before 4pm local time. If they are, you're missing afternoon and evening conversions — often the most valuable. Either increase budget or adjust dayparting.
Review your bid strategies. tCPA and tROAS work well once you have enough conversion data (50+ conversions in the last 30 days per campaign). Below that, use Maximize Conversions or manual CPC. Automated bidding without data is just letting the algorithm guess.
Rule of thumb: Never use target ROAS bidding unless the campaign has 50+ conversions in the last 30 days. Under that threshold, you're constraining the algorithm with bad signal.
Putting the Audit Together
Document every issue you find in a priority stack: what's wasting the most money, what has the biggest upside if fixed, and what's structurally wrong. Work through them in that order.
In our experience, the average account has 2–4 significant issues that are collectively costing 25–40% of their potential ROAS. The audit finds them. The work is in fixing them systematically, not all at once.
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