Paid Media Audit Playbook

Overview

A paid media audit is the fastest way to uncover wasted spend and missed opportunity in your ad accounts. This playbook walks you through auditing Google Ads, Meta Ads, and LinkedIn Campaigns with a structured, data-driven approach. Whether you manage accounts in-house or inherit them from a previous agency, this framework will surface the highest-impact fixes in under a week.

Step-by-Step Framework

1. 1

   Pull a 90-Day Performance Export

   Export campaign, ad-set, and ad-level data for the last 90 days from each platform. Include spend, impressions, clicks, conversions, and cost-per-conversion. Normalise column names into a single spreadsheet so you can compare apples to apples.

2. 2

   Identify Spend Concentration

   Sort every campaign by total spend. In most accounts, 20% of campaigns consume 80% of the budget. Flag any campaign that spent more than 15% of the total budget but delivered a CPA above your target. These are your biggest optimisation levers.

3. 3

   Review Audience Targeting and Overlap

   Check for audience overlap between ad sets, especially on Meta. Overlapping audiences compete against each other in the auction, driving up costs. Use the platform audience overlap tool or export audience compositions to compare manually.

4. 4

   Audit Creative Performance

   Group ads by creative format (static image, video, carousel) and measure CTR and conversion rate for each. Identify creative fatigue by looking for declining CTR over time. Flag any ad running for more than 60 days without a refresh.

5. 5

   Evaluate Conversion Tracking

   Verify that every conversion action is firing correctly. Cross-reference platform-reported conversions with your CRM or analytics tool. Discrepancies above 15% indicate tracking issues that make all other data unreliable.

6. 6

   Build a Prioritised Action Plan

   Score each finding by potential impact (high, medium, low) and effort to fix. Present the top ten recommendations in a single-page summary with estimated savings or revenue uplift for each. This becomes your optimisation roadmap for the next quarter.

Key Metrics to Track

Common Mistakes

Next Steps

Once your audit is complete, schedule a 60-minute review with your team to prioritise the top five fixes. Implement quick wins (pausing wasteful campaigns, fixing tracking) within the first week, then move to structural changes like audience restructuring and creative testing in weeks two through four.