A performance marketing audit checks whether your advertising spend, measurement and landing experience support the outcome you actually need. Its output should be a prioritised decision list with evidence, rather than a long collection of unexplained screenshots.
Agree the business question
Start with the product or service, target market, spend, sales cycle and the action that matters. For a lead business, distinguish an enquiry from a qualified opportunity and a closed sale. For ecommerce, define revenue consistently, including how refunds and other adjustments are handled.
The audit should also record what is outside scope. Reviewing a small account in one market is different from reviewing several stores, ad platforms and countries. Agree those boundaries before access is shared.
Review access and measurement
Read-only advertising and Analytics access is the starting point. Additional website or Tag Manager access may be needed to inspect an implementation. An audit does not require permission to change bids or publish new tags merely to view reports.
List each conversion action and its business meaning. Compare reported outcomes with the operational records available, while allowing for attribution and timing differences. Check obvious duplicate paths, missing events and whether the bidding goal matches the commercial goal. See the duplicate conversion guide for a test matrix.
Review campaigns and the landing journey
- Budget and structure: where spend goes, whether segments are interpretable and which decisions lack evidence.
- Traffic relevance: available search terms, locations, audiences and exclusions against the agreed market.
- Message and offer: whether the ad promise matches the page and the business can fulfil it.
- Landing experience: whether a visitor can understand the offer and complete the intended action on mobile.
- Reporting: whether the owner can identify spend, qualified outcomes, data gaps and the next decision.
What the findings should look like
Each finding needs an observation, supporting evidence, likely business consequence, recommended action and verification step. Separate a confirmed fault from a hypothesis. A rising acquisition cost could reflect competition, offer changes, lead quality or measurement; the graph alone does not establish the cause.
An illustrative finding might be: “The success event fires again when the confirmation page is refreshed. Restrict the success event to an accepted submission and repeat the refresh test.” That is a sample finding, not a statement about a particular client’s account.
Price, delivery and implementation
Pixel Pulse Media’s published account and site audit price is $110 for the first audit, with a standard rate of $150. The standard delivery target is five working days after the required access and scope are confirmed. Larger or more complex reviews are scoped before booking.
The audit delivers the findings. Campaign changes, development and tracking implementation are separate work unless included in the agreed proposal. You keep the report whether you implement it yourself, use your existing provider or ask Pixel Pulse Media to help.
See the performance marketing audit service. If your main question is crawling, indexing or site usability, compare the website audit. For generated-answer mentions and citations, choose the AI visibility audit.