You don’t need an agency to find out whether your paid media accounts have obvious problems. You need about a weekend and a checklist that isn’t designed to sell you something at the end of it.
Why Most Audit Checklists Aren’t Actually Useful
Most publicly available audit checklists come from agencies, and agency checklists tend to be structured to surface just enough problems to justify a pitch, without giving away the full diagnostic. That’s not a criticism; it’s just the business model. This one isn’t selling anything at the step-by-step level. Run it fully, yourself, no gatekeeping.
Saturday: Attribution and Account Hygiene
Start with the boring, high-value stuff.
Check whether your attribution model matches your actual sales cycle. If your sales cycle runs 45 days and your attribution window is set to 7-day click, you’re systematically misattributing revenue to the wrong campaigns. This single misconfiguration alone quietly breaks more accounts than any creative or targeting issue.
Audit conversion tracking for duplicates and gaps. Pull your last 90 days of tracked conversions and spot-check a sample against your actual CRM closed deals. Mismatches here mean your reported CAC is wrong, sometimes badly.
Check campaign structure for overlap. Are multiple campaigns bidding against the same audience, competing with each other and driving up your own costs? This is extremely common in accounts that have grown organically without periodic cleanup.
Review negative keyword lists (search) or exclusion audiences (social). Stale or missing negatives are one of the fastest ways budget leaks without anyone noticing on the topline numbers.
Sunday: Performance and Creative
Segment performance by audience, not just by campaign. A campaign that looks mediocre in aggregate often has one audience segment performing well and another dragging the average down. Aggregate numbers hide this constantly.
Check creative frequency and age. Anything running more than 6-8 weeks without a refresh, especially on paid social, is a likely candidate for fatigue-driven performance decline, independent of targeting quality.
Map your funnel drop-off by stage. Where exactly is the biggest percentage loss: impression to click, click to lead, lead to opportunity? This tells you whether the problem is top-of-funnel (targeting or creative) or bottom-of-funnel (landing page, offer, or lead quality).
Compare cost-per-lead trend against cost-per-closed-customer trend. If CPL is improving but cost-per-customer is flat or worsening, lead quality is degrading even though the top-of-funnel metric looks like progress.
What to Do With What You Find
Write down every specific finding with a number attached, not a vague impression. “Attribution window doesn’t match sales cycle, likely misattributing 20-30% of conversions” is actionable. “Attribution seems off” is not.
If you get through this and find yourself stuck on what to actually do about what you found, that’s a reasonable point to bring in outside help; you’ll walk into that conversation with specific findings instead of a vague sense something’s wrong, which changes the quality of help you get.