You do not need to hire anyone to find the biggest problems in a paid media account. You need a checklist, a free afternoon, and the willingness to look.
Below is the sequence we walk through when we open an account for the first time. Run it yourself. Write down what you find. Most of what is wrong will be visible within an hour.
Before you open the account
Pull three things first.
- Total spend and results by month for the past year, from your own records, not the ad platform.
- The one number the business actually cares about. Cost per qualified lead, cost per order, whatever it is.
- The approved budget, so you know what spend is supposed to be.
You are about to compare what the account says against what the business knows. The gaps between the two are the audit.
1. Account structure
Open the campaign list and ask one question. Could a stranger tell what each campaign is for?
What to look for
- Campaigns that overlap. Two campaigns bidding on the same keywords or audiences compete with each other and muddy your data.
- Campaigns with a handful of conversions a month. Automated bidding needs volume to learn. Ten starving campaigns perform worse than three well-fed ones.
- Old experiments still running. Paused in spirit, live in fact.
Consolidation is usually the fix. Fewer campaigns, clearer jobs, more data behind every decision. That thinking is the core of how we approach account builds.
2. Search terms
This is the highest-value ten minutes in the whole audit. Open the search terms report in Google Ads and sort by spend.
What to look for
- Terms that have nothing to do with what you sell. Job seekers, DIY queries, categories you exited years ago.
- One giant term eating the budget. Sometimes it deserves its own campaign. Sometimes it is a match type gone loose.
- Branded terms hiding inside non-branded campaigns. Your brand converts well because people already wanted you. Mixed in, it flatters everything around it.
Read the top fifty terms by spend. Mark every one you would not pay for again. That list is money.
3. Negative keywords
Now check what the account is already blocking.
What to look for
- An empty or nearly empty negative list. That usually means nobody is reading the search terms report.
- No shared negative lists. Without them, the same junk terms leak into every campaign and someone plays whack-a-mole one campaign at a time. Or nobody does.
- Negatives that block good traffic. It happens. A broad negative added in a hurry can wall off an entire category of buyers.
The habit matters more than the list. A weekly pass through search terms that feeds a shared negative list is a system. A one-time cleanup is a mood.
4. Tracking health
Everything downstream depends on this one. If tracking is wrong, every optimization in the account is confidently wrong.
What to look for
- Conversion counts that do not match your CRM or order system. Pick one week. Count conversions in the platform, then count real leads or orders in your own system. They will never match exactly. They should be close.
- Duplicate conversion actions. A form fill that fires two tags counts twice, and the platform happily optimizes toward the inflated number.
- Conversions defined as things that are not outcomes. Page views and button clicks are not revenue. If the account optimizes toward them, it gets very good at producing them.
If the numbers do not reconcile, stop the audit and fix tracking first. Bad tracking is the most common root cause we find, and it is why reporting you can trust sits underneath everything else we build.
5. Budget pacing
Money should move at the speed someone decided, not the speed the platform decided.
What to look for
- Month-to-date spend against the approved budget. Ahead, behind, or on pace? If nobody can answer in one minute, pacing is not being watched.
- The end-of-month sprint. A quiet account that suddenly spends hard in the last week is pacing by panic.
- Budget stuck in yesterday's winners. Check whether your best performer is capped by budget while a weak campaign spends freely. That allocation is a choice, even when nobody made it on purpose.
6. Naming conventions
This sounds cosmetic. It is not. Naming is how reporting works.
What to look for
- Can you tell the channel, the goal, and the audience from the campaign name alone? If not, every report requires someone who remembers.
- One pattern or five? Accounts accumulate naming eras the way houses accumulate paint layers. Each era breaks the filters built for the last one.
- Reports assembled by hand. If someone rebuilds the monthly report manually, inconsistent naming is usually the reason automation never happened.
Fixing naming is unglamorous operational work. It is also the foundation of the operational layer that lets reporting write itself.
7. Attribution windows
The window settings decide which conversions the platform takes credit for. Most accounts have never looked at them.
What to look for
- What each window is actually set to, and whether that was a decision or a default. Write it down. You cannot compare campaigns measured on different rules.
- Windows that flatter the platform. A long window and generous view-through credit will report more conversions without a single extra sale happening.
- Double counting across platforms. If Google, Meta, and TikTok each claim the same purchase, adding their numbers together overstates reality. Compare the sum against actual orders in your own system.
You do not have to pick perfect settings. You have to know what the settings are, keep them consistent, and stop treating platform-reported numbers as gospel.
What to do with what you find
Rank every issue by dollars, not by how annoying it is.
Fix tracking first, because nothing else can be trusted until it is right. Then search terms and negatives, because that is waste leaving the building immediately. Then structure. Then naming and reporting, so the account stays fixed instead of drifting back.
Then put it on a calendar. A weekly pass through search terms, pacing, and conversion counts keeps the account honest. The audit finds the problems. The cadence keeps them from coming back. That cadence is the heart of how we manage accounts.
When you want senior eyes
Run this checklist yourself. It costs nothing and it will find real money.
If you want a deeper pass, that is what our paid media audit is for. Fixed scope, senior hands, and a dollar-weighted plan ranked by what each fix is worth. You keep the plan and everything in your accounts either way, whether you fix it yourself, hire someone else, or work with us.
The Performance Audit is where every engagement starts. No pitch, no pressure, just a clear look at where the money is going.