What gets reviewed
- Measurement — conversion definitions, duplicate and double-counted actions, offline import health, enhanced conversions coverage, and whether the account is bidding to revenue or to form fills.
- Structure — brand versus non-brand separation, query-to-ad-group intent match, Shopping and Performance Max overlap, and whether the topology makes incrementality visible.
- Economics — cost per qualified outcome by segment, contribution margin by product or service line, and the categories quietly subsidizing the blended average.
- Creative — RSA asset coverage and testing cadence, message-to-landing-page continuity, and the backlog of tests that were never run.
- Budget protection — pacing rules, anomaly alerts, URL monitoring, and the failure modes that let a broken landing page burn a week of spend.
The wasted-spend model
Percentages do not move a budget conversation. Dollars do. Every finding is mapped to spend that produced no qualified outcome in the trailing 90 days, then annualized so the number can be defended in a finance review.
That model separates three kinds of waste: spend on queries that never convert, spend on converting queries priced above their contribution margin, and spend lost to measurement error where the outcome happened but the platform never learned about it. The third category is usually the largest at enterprise spend and the least visible on a dashboard.
Structural findings are ranked by impact, not by effort
It is easy to hand a client twenty quick wins and call it a plan. A senior review ranks by revenue consequence, which frequently puts the hardest item — rebuilding conversion tracking, or splitting a consolidated campaign that hides its own performance — at position one.
Each finding carries the same three fields: what is happening, what it costs, and what changes if it is fixed. Anything that cannot be stated in those terms does not belong in the deck.
What you receive
- A findings deck presented live by the strategist who performed the review.
- A wasted-spend figure in dollars, with the queries and segments behind it.
- A 30/60/90 priority map with owners, sequencing, and measurement criteria.
- An opportunity list: impression-share gaps, category-level value sizing, and the creative testing backlog.
How to use the output
The deck is written to survive being forwarded. A CMO should be able to send it to a CFO and have the cost of inaction land without translation, and an in-house team should be able to execute the first 30 days without further consulting.
There is no obligation attached. Roughly half of audit recipients implement internally, which is the correct outcome when the internal team has the capacity.
Questions we get
- How is this different from a free grader tool?
- A grader reads account settings and returns a score. A senior audit reads intent, economics, and measurement together, then quantifies what the gaps cost in dollars and sequences the fixes by revenue impact.
- Who performs the review?
- A senior strategist who manages accounts at this spend level. The findings are presented by the person who did the work, not handed off to a salesperson.
- Do we have to give account access?
- Read-only access is enough. No changes are made to a live account during a diagnostic.