Ad Performance Audit Guide

Audit your paid advertising campaigns with our step-by-step guide. Identify common mistakes like missing negative keywords, wrong match types, and poor landing pages. Includes platform-specific benchmarks for Google, Meta, and TikTok ad performance.

What's Inside

A complete ad-account audit framework for Google Ads, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) Ads, and TikTok Ads. Each platform has its own checklist covering campaign structure, audience targeting, creative quality, conversion tracking, bid strategy, landing page experience, and budget pacing. Run the audit on your own account or hand it to a freelancer.

Most Costly Ad Mistakes

The guide quantifies how much budget each common mistake typically wastes: no conversion tracking (45% of spend), missing negative keywords, wrong match types, no audience exclusions (22%), creative fatigue at frequency above three, broken pixel events, and poor attribution windows. Knowing which mistake costs the most helps you prioritize fixes.

Platform-Specific Checklists

Google Ads: campaign structure and naming, search-term reports, negative-keyword lists, conversion tracking, quality scores, bid strategy alignment, landing page experience, geographic and device targeting, ad scheduling, and impression-share metrics. Meta: campaign objective alignment, custom and lookalike audience performance, creative fatigue, placement performance, pixel and Conversions API, exclusion audiences (customers, recent converters), ad-set budget distribution, A/B test learnings, retargeting funnels, and attribution windows. TikTok: Spark Ads vs. traditional ads, creative format mix, pixel and events manager, audience targeting, sound and music usage, optimization events, hook rate (3-second view rate), comment sentiment, and automated creative optimization.

Key Metrics & Benchmarks

Industry benchmarks for click-through rate, cost-per-click, conversion rate, ROAS, and quality scores by platform, so you know whether your numbers are healthy, average, or in trouble. Use these to set realistic optimization targets.

How to Use It

Block 90 minutes per ad account, walk the checklist top to bottom, log every issue, and prioritize fixes by estimated impact. Most accounts find 5, 10 quick wins that recover 15, 30% of wasted spend within the first week.