Forensic Ad Audits

Brands and agencies spending meaningful budgets on Facebook and Google who sensed something was "off" but could not pinpoint why. Gyms mostly, plus ecommerce stores and coaching businesses. Enough of them that the findings stopped surprising me.

Accounts were cluttered with legacy campaigns, overlapping audiences, and random experiments. Reporting was noisy. No one could answer simple questions like "what actually works?" or "where are we wasting money?" One gym owner I met at a conference had been through three agencies and told me straight out that he doesn't trust marketers. He was right to feel that way. Every one of those agencies had left something broken behind in his account.

Two layers. The free one: give me 30 minutes in the account and I'll show you where you're lighting your money on fire, no charge upfront. That half hour in the gym's account turned up an incorrectly installed pixel, campaigns optimizing for objectives nobody chose on purpose, ads running with no link to the site at all, and one link that was simply broken. That's the standard shape of the accounts that come to me, and the same four findings repeat across gyms, ecommerce, and coaching businesses. The paid layer is the structured audit: pull the account exports, segment by campaign objective, audience, device, and funnel stage, reconcile performance back to revenue, flag misattribution traps and creative blind spots, and hand over a prioritized action plan instead of a slide deck.

• Ad platform exports
• Pixel and conversion-event verification
• Spreadsheets and SQL-lite analysis
• Pattern-finding against real revenue

In many accounts, found 10 to 30% of ad spend that could be reallocated or cut without hurting revenue, and often increasing it. The 30-minute version finds the plumbing: pixel, links, objectives. The full audit finds the structural waste. Short, focused changes produced outsized lifts in ROAS and stability.

Gave founders and marketing leaders confidence that their spend was finally mapped to reality. Teams had a concrete roadmap for next tests instead of chasing the latest hack. The gym owner got something else out of it, which was proof that the agencies he had already paid left the basics broken.

Most performance problems live in the account structure. The pixel, the objectives, the links, the audience overlap. Those get checked last because they're boring and because everyone assumes somebody already did it. Often nobody did. You can't scale an account you don't understand.