Start a conversationThe free automated audit every agency offers is a lead magnet. This is the other thing: a paid, fixed-scope examination of a live account by the person who has to defend the conclusions. Where the money went, whether the reported conversions correspond to anything real, and what I would change in what order.
Overview
A PPC audit is a structured examination of a live paid media account against the commercial result it is supposed to produce, ending in a ranked account of what to change and in what order. The surface is wider than most audits cover: account structure and campaign taxonomy, bidding strategy and the portfolio effects it actually has, conversion tracking integrity and offline conversion import, audience and exclusion hygiene, negative keyword architecture, budget pacing and wasted spend, creative and landing page alignment, and measurement (whether the conversions the platform reports correspond to anything in the CRM). Search terms, placements and Performance Max asset groups are read in full rather than sampled.
What you are buying here is the engagement, not the definition. It is fixed scope and it ends in a written document: an executive summary naming the three decisions worth making, the evidence behind every finding, and a change list ordered by the spend each item wastes or leaves unclaimed. What happens next is your choice (implement it in-house, hand it to the agency you already pay, take it into a B2B paid media strategy engagement, or move to full paid media management or channel-level Google Ads management with me). The audit is not written to sell any of those.
Who it's for
Spend is traced to what it bought, not to what the campaign was named. Search terms and placements read in full rather than sampled, Performance Max asset groups and channel splits pulled apart, brand separated from non-brand, and the recurring waste categories priced in money: irrelevant queries, display expansion nobody enabled deliberately, and audiences the account has been paying for twice.
Most accounts I open count something they should not. Duplicate conversion actions, a thank-you page firing on refresh, view-through conversions folded into the same total as clicks, lead forms counted before sales has seen them. The test is reconciliation: take a month of reported conversions and find them in the CRM. The size of that gap is usually the finding that moves the budget.
A target cost per acquisition is a constraint, not a wish, and it has portfolio effects: campaigns starved by a shared budget, learning periods restarted by every edit, Performance Max quietly absorbing brand search it did not earn. I check what each strategy was set to achieve, what signal it is being fed, and whether anyone has revisited the target since the business changed shape.
A written document with an executive summary naming the three decisions worth making, evidenced findings, and a change list ordered by the spend each one affects against the effort to fix it. Then a walkthrough with whoever will implement it, including the incumbent agency where that is the arrangement. Raw exports come with it, so any claim can be checked rather than trusted.
What's included
Campaign taxonomy, brand and non-brand separation, search terms and placements read in full, and the wasted spend quantified in money rather than flagged as an issue type.
Conversion actions deduplicated and audited, offline conversion import checked end to end, and a month of reported conversions matched against what your CRM actually holds.
What each strategy was set to do, what signal it is being fed, where shared budgets starve campaigns, and how much of Performance Max is buying demand you already owned.
Every finding ordered by the spend it affects and the effort to fix it, written so your team or your agency can start on Monday, plus a walkthrough to argue it through.
Not sure which of these you actually need?
Request a discovery callProcess
1
Read-only access to the ad accounts, analytics and CRM reporting, plus agreement on which channels are in scope.
2
Structure, search terms, placements, bidding, budgets and creative examined account by account.
3
Conversion tracking tested end to end and a month of reported conversions matched to the CRM.
4
Ranked change list, executive summary and a working session with whoever implements it.
FAQ
A free audit is a lead magnet. It runs a checklist against platform defaults, scores you against them and books a sales call. It cannot tell you that your best-converting campaign is buying demand you already owned, because that needs somebody to read the search terms and talk to your sales team.
No. Read-only access is enough and I ask for nothing more while the audit runs. Nothing is edited, paused or restructured by me during the engagement, so the period I am measuring is not one I have interfered with.
Not by default. The audit is fixed scope and stops at the change list, so you can implement in-house or hand it to the agency you already pay. If you would rather I ran the account afterwards, that is a separate decision and a separate fee.
Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Meta Ads and YouTube Ads, singly or as a portfolio. Auditing one channel alone is cheaper and often less useful, because the interesting failures (double-counted conversions, budget pulled towards whichever channel reports most generously) live between them.
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Send me the channel you spend most on and the number you trust least. I reply personally within 48 hours.
