Our Helpful Start-of-Year Account Audit Frameworks

All paid ad strategies contain inefficiencies, and one of our most important jobs as account managers is to guard against this through monitoring and optimizing. The beginning of the year is often an appropriate time to take stock by conducting an efficiency audit, or account audit, mapping out the largest impact optimizations you could make as you move into a new year. 

With new budgets, updated business goals, and fresh platform changes, it’s easy to move straight into execution mode, however, we would encourage you to step back for a minute by reassessing your foundations. The result will often be wasted spend, misaligned targeting, and underperforming campaigns that are difficult to scale.

Recent conversion rate surveys suggest that the average conversion rate on Google Ads sits around 7.5%.  We know that in many cases it takes more than one visit to bring a user through from awareness to conversion (due to multiple clicks on the path to eventual conversion), but that number suggests that many visitors will never actually convert.

This blog is your roadmap to help improve your conversion rate – we’ll break down practical frameworks to help you run an account audit on your ad strategy to give you the best chance for a healthy and improving conversion rate for the new year! 

Why Conduct an Ad Strategy Account Audit in Q1?

Q1 sets the tone for the entire year. It’s when strategy, budgets, and performance expectations all get reset. That makes it the ideal time to step back and run an account on your paid media efforts, with a clean lens.

Here’s why an early-year account audit matters:

• Annual planning is underway: Forecasts, targets, and KPIs are being redefined. Your ad strategy needs to align with broader business goals from the start.
• Budgets are shifting: Whether you’re scaling up or reallocating spend, it’s critical to ensure every dollar is moving toward high-impact campaigns.
• Platform updates can disrupt performance: Changes to Google’s smart bidding algorithms, bringing ads to Gemini, Meta’s AI-driven campaign structures, or new ad formats can make last year’s strategy feel outdated fast.
• Cross-platform alignment often drifts: With multiple channels in play, Q1 is your opportunity to realign messaging, targeting, and reporting for consistency and efficiency.

Running an account audit now helps you spot inefficiencies early, avoid costly mistakes, and build a strategy that performs year-round.

Framework 1: Performance Baseline Assessment

Before you optimize anything, you need to understand where you’re starting from. A performance baseline gives you the context to make smart decisions, rather than decisions based on gut feel or isolated metrics.

What to Look at

• Core KPIs by platform: Review last year’s performance across your key metrics such as ROAS, CPA, CTR, CVR, or ad spend. Look at them broken down by platform, campaign type, and funnel stage.
• Planned vs. actual outcomes: Compare your initial projections or media plans to what actually happened. Look for campaigns that overperformed or underdelivered.
• Trends over time: Identify seasonal patterns, spikes, or anomalies. Were they driven by promotions, platform changes, or external factors?

Why It Matters

Without a clear performance baseline, it’s easy to misdiagnose problems or overlook opportunities. For example, a drop in ROAS might look like poor campaign performance, but zooming out could reveal a spike in high-funnel traffic that’s paying off later.

How to Do It

• Pull a 12-month lookback for each major account and platform (by month).
• Segment campaign performance by objective and audience intent.
• Use tools like pivot tables and graphs to visualize trends, benchmark results, and flag anomalies across your portfolio.

Pro Tip: Include qualitative notes alongside the numbers, such as platform changes, strategy shifts, or creative launches that may have influenced performance. Context is everything.

👉 Establishing this baseline ensures that every optimization decision you make from here is grounded in reality rather than assumptions.

Framework 2: Budget and Spend Efficiency Analysis

Once you’ve established a performance baseline, the next step is to examine how effectively your budget is being used. Even high-performing campaigns can drag down ROI if spend is misallocated or poorly paced.

What to Look At

• Budget across platforms: Which platforms perform best?
• Impression share loss due to budget: Identify where a limited budget is holding back visibility, especially on high-performing platforms or campaigns.
• Overspending on low performers: Flag platforms and campaigns with high spend but weak returns (low ROAS or high CPA).
• Spend concentration: Review whether your budget is overly concentrated in a single platform, campaign type, or audience segment.
• New platform opportunities: Adding a new platform to the mix can really boost overall performance – the obvious example is to add Microsoft Ads where you are already doing Google Ads. Much cheaper clicks, similar performance and access to non-Google audiences often means you can take your best performing Google Ads campaigns and copy them directly into Microsoft Ads for immediate improvements. 

Why It Matters

Mismanaged spend allocations are one of the most common and costly issues in paid media and it’s often your single largest performance lever.  Underspending can limit growth, while overspending on inefficient campaigns quickly erodes ROI. An account audit helps rebalance your budget to maximize impact.

How to Do It

• Export platform-level and campaign-level spend data for the past 6–12 months.
• Identify trends in budget pacing and spend efficiency (ROAS, CPA).
• Segment by campaign objective and audience intent to spot inefficiencies.
• Make adjustments to your budget plan and use AdPulse to view real-time pacing and automate alerts when spend drifts from plan.

Tip: Create a simple matrix mapping campaigns by cost and return. High-cost, low-return campaigns should be paused, optimized, or reallocated.

Framework 3: Campaign Structure and Hygiene Review

Even the most strategic campaigns can underperform if the underlying structure is messy or outdated. A clean, scalable setup is the foundation for efficient optimization, accurate tracking, and reliable reporting.

What to Look At

• Naming conventions: Check for consistency in how campaigns, ad groups, and creatives are labeled. Clean naming makes analysis and automation much easier.
• Campaign hierarchy: Ensure your account structure reflects logical segmentation by product line, funnel stage, geography, or audience type.
• Ad group segmentation: Evaluate whether ad groups are too broad (diluting relevance) or too specific (splitting traffic unnecessarily).
• Paused and legacy campaigns: Remove or archive old campaigns cluttering the account. They can slow down reporting tools and create confusion.
• Targeting settings: Review geo-targeting, audience exclusions, and device modifiers to make sure they still align with the current strategy.
• Conversion tracking setup: Confirm that tracking is working correctly across platforms. Mismatches between events, tags, or goals can skew performance insights.

Why It Matters

Poor structure creates inefficiencies that compound over time. It leads to misfired targeting, lost data fidelity, and wasted time when optimizing or reporting. A structured audit helps ensure your campaigns are built for scale, not chaos.

How to Do It

• Conduct a structural account audit of each account, starting with campaign-level settings.
• Review naming conventions and apply a standardized format if needed.
• Map each campaign to its objective and audience to check for overlaps or gaps.
• Use AdPulse to filter, sort, and bulk-edit campaigns based on hygiene factors like naming, performance, and status.

Framework 4: Platform-Specific Optimization Opportunities

Every ad platform evolves constantly, regularly introducing new features, bidding models, creative formats, and automation tools. What worked last year might now be underperforming or even obsolete.

A platform-specific audit helps you surface underused levers and missed opportunities unique to each channel.

What to Look At

Google Ads

• Smart Bidding strategies: Are you using the right strategy for each campaign objective (e.g., Maximize Conversions vs. Target ROAS)?
• Responsive Search Ads (RSAs): Ensure all ad groups are using RSAs, and check asset performance to identify weak headlines or descriptions.
• Search terms report: Look for irrelevant queries still slipping through. Audit negative keyword lists and close variant performance.
• Shopping feed health: Validate product feed accuracy, category mapping, and performance by item ID.
• Performance Max campaigns: Check asset group relevance, audience signals, and how PMax is impacting other campaign types.

Meta Ads

• Advantage+ campaigns: If you’re not testing them, you’re behind. Evaluate performance vs. manually structured campaigns.
• Audience overlap: Use Meta’s audience diagnostics to reduce cannibalization.
• Creative fatigue: Review frequency and engagement metrics. Rotate out underperforming ads and test new formats.
• Event tracking: Verify pixel and Conversions API are tracking post-iOS changes accurately.

LinkedIn Ads

• Matched Audiences: Review which lists are stale or underperforming. Refresh targeting with updated CRM data.
• Lead Gen Forms: Analyze drop-off rates and compare performance with landing page conversions.
• Bid strategy: Consider switching from manual to automated bidding to improve efficiency, especially for high-volume campaigns.

Amazon Ads

• Product targeting: Audit Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands for ASIN performance.
• Placement modifiers: Adjust bids based on top-of-search and product-page placement to improve visibility.
• Campaign type mix: Rebalance between Sponsored Display, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Products based on ROI.

Microsoft Ads

• Import sync from Google Ads: Check for sync issues or unsupported features.
• Audience targeting: Leverage Microsoft-exclusive data, such as LinkedIn profile targeting and In-market Audiences.
• Ad extensions: Ensure all campaigns use the latest extension types, including multimedia ads.

Why It Matters

Platform features change fast. If you’re not regularly auditing how each channel is configured, you’re leaving performance gains on the table, or worse, running outdated strategies that drag down ROI.

How to Do It

• Create a checklist for each platform, aligned with campaign objectives and available features.
• Review platform updates from the last 6–12 months and cross-check adoption.
• Use AdPulse to centralize performance insights across platforms and flag campaigns missing critical configurations.

Takeaways

By taking the time to run a quality account audit that will assess performance baselines, tighten your budget allocation, clean up campaign structures, and align creative with current goals, you’re laying the foundation for a more efficient and scalable ad strategy.

These frameworks give you a comprehensive, repeatable way to uncover inefficiencies, refocus your spend, and unlock new opportunities across platforms. Whether you’re managing a single account or an entire portfolio, starting the year with clarity is the first step toward better results.