I offer a free analysis of advertising accounts to those who contact me, and I am often asked what really happens in that hour. This article answers in detail, so you know what to expect before you even write.
What I look at first: tracking
Before anything else, I check whether the conversion data the account is using to optimize is reliable. It is the most important check, because every later assessment of campaign performance starts from here: if tracking is wrong, even a well-structured campaign will seem to perform badly, and vice versa.
Account structure: where budget waste hides
I check how campaigns and ad groups are organized: whether the budget is fragmented across too many combinations, whether there are overlaps between campaigns competing for the same audience and raising costs for no reason, and whether the geographic or time targeting settings really match where and when the right audience for that business is.
Creatives and messages: what works and what does not
I look at which ads have received the most spend over time and with what result, to understand whether the budget is really rewarding the best creatives or is distributed inefficiently among variants that are never properly compared with each other.
What you receive at the end of the audit
Not a generic report, but a list of concrete priorities, ordered by expected impact: what I would fix first, what second, and why. If you decide to work together, that list becomes the operational starting point of the project; if you decide not to continue, it stays yours anyway and you can use it with anyone else, even handling the fixes yourself.
How it works, and how long it takes
After a first contact, I ask you for read-only access to the advertising accounts and to Analytics, which you can revoke at any time. The analysis itself takes me a few days of work, then we meet for a call of about an hour in which I show you what I found and answer questions, without slides prepared in advance, looking at the real data together.