Paid ads are often one of the largest expenses for medium-sized businesses. Click costs rise while efficiency falls. You invest in campaigns but do not see clear growth. A paid ads audit exposes the issues behind this. It shows where you are wasting money, where tracking fails, and where your strongest growth potential sits.
Industry reports in 2024 showed that businesses lose billions each year to poor measurement, ad fraud, and inefficient targeting. Audits are one of the few proven methods to reduce these losses and improve return on ad spend (ROAS).
This article outlines six key areas of a paid ads audit. Each one can be applied by a medium-sized business that wants better control over its ad spend.
If your tracking is broken, you are making decisions on false data. Ads may report conversions that are not sales, or miss conversions that matter. A 2024 analysis highlighted how misaligned tracking between platforms leads to wasted investment.
You need to compare conversions across Google Ads, GA4, and your internal CRM. If there are gaps, address them first. Map tracking to your true business goals, not vanity metrics like page views. Add offline conversion imports if sales close outside your website.
When tracking is reliable, your data reflects business reality. That allows you to bid with confidence.
Invalid traffic wastes money and skews performance. Reports show that up to 30 percent of paid ad spend is lost to bots or low-quality clicks.
You should run placement and geo reports to check where your ads show. If you see unusual spikes in low-value regions or poor engagement from specific sites, exclude them. Adding IP exclusions and reviewing traffic quality regularly protects your budget.
Filtering out invalid traffic increases the quality of your clicks. This helps reduce cost per acquisition and improves ROAS.
Poorly structured accounts are common in medium-sized businesses. Campaign overlap, duplicate audiences, and mismatched keywords create waste. Industry guidance shows that audits often uncover redundant campaigns draining spend.
Review your account structure and naming conventions. Look for campaigns targeting the same audience with different budgets. Remove duplication and tighten keyword match types. Separate high-intent traffic from low-intent traffic so your budget supports what drives results.
A clean structure improves efficiency and makes it easier to scale campaigns without confusion.
High click-through rates with poor conversions show a message mismatch. Ads and landing pages must align. Benchmarks indicate wide variation in conversion rates across industries, which proves that design and message quality matter.
Check whether your ad copy matches the landing page headline and offer. Measure bounce rate, time on page, and form completion. If these metrics are weak, adjust design and test new layouts.
Even small changes such as shorter forms, stronger calls to action, or faster page load times deliver measurable gains. Running structured A/B tests produces reliable evidence of what works.
Many businesses keep spending on old campaigns even when performance drops. An audit forces you to measure return from each campaign and reassign spend based on results.
Pull a 90-day report on campaign performance. Sort campaigns by cost per acquisition and ROAS. Identify where spend produces the strongest results and where it delivers weak returns. Pause or reduce the latter and increase investment in the former.
Shifting budgets toward proven performers is one of the fastest ways to reclaim lost efficiency.
Without structured testing, you guess. With testing, you make decisions based on evidence. Industry best practice stresses the value of simple, systematic experiments.
Set up a basic testing framework. Each test should have a clear goal, a defined sample size, and a set outcome measure. Test one variable at a time. Log results and apply successful changes.
When testing is continuous, your campaigns grow more efficient month by month.
A paid ads audit is not an optional extra. It is a core process for medium-sized businesses that want to grow profitably.
Start with these three steps:
Each step produces clear gains and moves you toward stronger, more efficient paid advertising.
Running audits in-house takes time and expertise. Many medium-sized businesses struggle with technical tracking, traffic analysis, or campaign restructuring. This is where Be Seen helps.
We run paid ads audits across Google, Meta, and TikTok. Our team identifies wasted spend, fixes tracking errors, and builds a clear roadmap to stronger ROI. We specialise in supporting medium-sized businesses that want measurable growth without wasted budget.
If you want to see what an expert-led audit reveals for your business, contact Be Seen today.
The e-commerce sales funnel represents the path customers follow from initial awareness of your brand to completing a purchase. It begins with the awareness stage, where potential customers encounter your ads and develop a first impression of your products. The next stage, interest, occurs when they engage with your content, exploring product pages, reading reviews, and comparing options.
Consideration follows as customers weigh your offerings against competitors, assessing pricing, features, and benefits. Intent is demonstrated when a customer adds items to their cart or initiates a checkout process, signaling readiness to purchase.
The final stage, action, occurs when the purchase is completed. Understanding this journey is critical because inefficiencies at any stage can reduce overall conversions. Ads that fail to resonate or landing pages that confuse visitors can create gaps that prevent potential buyers from progressing through the funnel.
E-commerce sales funnels often experience leaks that reduce the efficiency and profitability of paid ad campaigns:
Identifying these common leaks provides clarity on where improvements are needed and sets the stage for a paid ads audit to systematically optimise your sales funnel and boost conversions.
A paid ads audit reviews campaigns to identify inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement. It evaluates ad performance to see which campaigns, creatives, and keywords drive results. Audience targeting is checked to ensure ads reach high-intent users, while landing pages are assessed for messaging alignment, navigation, load speed, and mobile responsiveness. Attribution models are analysed to measure touchpoint impact, and budget strategies are optimised to shift spend from underperforming to high-performing campaigns. This structured approach helps e-commerce businesses plug leaks, improve funnel efficiency, and increase conversions.
After a paid ads audit, e-commerce businesses can implement targeted optimisations to strengthen the sales funnel:
These post-audit optimisations ensure a more efficient, scalable, and profitable advertising strategy, allowing businesses to maximise conversions and return on ad spend.
Paid ads audits are critical for e-commerce businesses that want to ensure their advertising spend drives meaningful results. By identifying and fixing leaks within the sales funnel, audits provide clarity, efficiency, and measurable improvements in conversion rates. Be Seen is a digital marketing agency specialising in comprehensive paid ads audits. Our team works closely with e-commerce brands to review campaigns, optimise targeting, improve landing pages, and enhance attribution strategies. Partnering with Be Seen ensures that your ad spend achieves maximum impact, converting traffic into loyal customers and supporting sustained growth.
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