A gym owner had already tried several agencies
One gym's ad account had ads running without a link to the website. The account also had an incorrectly installed pixel, unsuitable campaign objectives and a broken link. Those faults gave the owner concrete things to investigate before paying for another round of advertising experiments.
I met the owner at a conference. He'd already been through several agencies and told me he didn't trust marketers. My recollection was about three agencies. I offered to look through his account for 30 minutes without charging him upfront, and those were the faults I found.
The owner could check each finding in his own account.
The wider audit work covered brands and agencies buying Facebook and Google ads, including gyms, ecommerce stores and coaching businesses. Their unresolved question was how their advertising spend connected to the business it was supposed to produce.
The accounts couldn't answer which campaigns paid
The accounts I audited had accumulated legacy campaigns, overlapping audiences and experiments that made the reporting difficult to interpret. Owners were paying for activity without a clear answer to which campaigns earned their budget.
A campaign's purpose matters to that question. An owner selling memberships, for example, needs to know how advertising relates to membership revenue. An account report showing activity doesn't, by itself, answer that business question. That distinction explains why the gym's campaign objectives belonged in the inspection alongside its links and tracking.
The problem extended beyond an untidy campaign list. Each unresolved setting made it harder to interpret the next result. A report could invite a discussion about audiences or creative while an ad's destination still needed checking.
My audit started with what the account was doing and what the business wanted it to do. The owner needed a reason to keep, repair or stop an activity. Another experiment would be difficult to judge while the existing account remained unexplained.
The first look found four faults
The gym inspection was the free first look. The paid audit was a fuller investigation of performance and revenue. The first could reveal faults worth fixing before anyone had completed the second.
The four findings point to different questions. The left column records what I found; the right column explains what an owner should ask next.
| Recorded finding | Diagnostic question |
|---|---|
| Incorrectly installed pixel | Is the tracking setup recording the business action it's supposed to record? |
| Unsuitable campaign objectives | Does the campaign's chosen objective match its intended business purpose? |
| Ads without a website link | Can a person follow the intended route from the ad to the website? |
| A broken link | Does the destination work when someone follows it? |
A pixel is part of the website tracking setup. Its presence alone leaves the question of whether it's installed correctly. The same distinction applies to a link: a destination entered in an account still needs to work for the person using it. The gym had problems at both points.
The objectives needed their own explanation. I described the campaigns as pursuing strange objectives. The record doesn't establish which settings were selected or why, so the next step is to check the objective against the business purpose.
Those faults were visible in this gym's account. Their cost would require further evidence. Repairing an obvious fault and measuring the business effect of that repair are separate jobs.
About one ad account in twenty clears my bar.
The full audit used exports and revenue records
The structured audit pulled account exports and separated performance by campaign objective, audience, device and funnel stage. Those are different ways to examine a total that could otherwise conceal which activity deserves attention.
The analysis used spreadsheets and lightweight SQL work, with ad-platform exports as inputs. The useful work was comparing the account's performance with real revenue. A total for the whole account couldn't explain the contribution of each campaign or distinguish activities serving different purposes.
Reconciliation also required looking for misattribution traps and creative blind spots. Attribution is the assignment of credit for a result. A campaign being credited with revenue raises a further question about how that credit was assigned. Matching records supports a spending decision, but the match alone doesn't prove that the campaign caused every sale attributed to it.
The handoff was a prioritized action plan. It connected findings to proposed fixes and further tests, so an owner could decide what to address first.
The audit identified spend to move or cut
The reported opportunity in many accounts was to reallocate or cut 10 to 30% of ad spend without hurting revenue. The case record also reports that revenue often increased. The range describes the wider audit work, not a measured result for this gym.
The record doesn't supply the individual account exports, the number of accounts behind the range, or a before-and-after revenue series. It therefore gives a reported range of opportunities, with limited evidence for independently checking the revenue claim. It can't tell a new owner how much an audit will save them.
An identified opportunity also differs from a completed budget change. Calling spend reallocatable says there was a reason to consider moving it. Claiming realized savings would require evidence that the change happened and that revenue held up afterward.
The documented handoff gave owners a ranked list of fixes and a comparison of campaign spend with attributed revenue. The gym example adds a narrower, concrete outcome: its owner could see specific faults in an account that several agencies had worked on. That supports a diagnosis. The available account of the inspection doesn't establish which agency introduced which fault, a recovery amount or a subsequent revenue increase.
Account faults need checking before more experiments
The gym had problems that a new ad would leave unresolved. A different image wouldn't repair a broken destination. More campaign activity would still leave the tracking installation and objective choices to investigate.
That's the lesson I take from the inspection. Check the account's basic operation before interpreting another experiment as evidence about the offer or the audience.
Creative still belongs in the fuller audit. A campaign can need better creative as well as a working destination, and the case record explicitly includes creative blind spots among the things to investigate. The point of checking structure is to make the next test interpretable.
An agency handoff should leave the next person able to explain the account's objectives, destinations and measurement. Assuming somebody else checked them is how a fault can survive a change of agency. The gym's account shows why those assumptions deserve an inspection.
An audit should answer an unresolved spending decision
This work fits an owner spending on Facebook or Google who can't explain which campaigns pay for themselves, or an agency taking responsibility for an account whose history is unclear. A first inspection can identify visible faults. The fuller audit addresses the harder question of how performance relates to revenue and what to change next.
An owner with a documented account structure, verified tracking and a clear account of campaign revenue may have little to gain from repeating the same audit. I'd start with the decision that remains unresolved before recommending another engagement.
Ask whoever audits the account to connect each proposed action to a finding. A broken link has an observable repair. A budget reallocation needs a reason for moving spend and a way to assess what happens after the move. An attribution gap needs to remain visible until the evidence resolves it.
The gym owner had specific account faults to address. Another business may have different ones. The useful output is an explanation of its own account and a ranked plan it can act on.