How to audit your advertising

An advertising audit answers four questions in order: what you spent, what arrived, whether what you paid for actually ran, and what happened to the enquiries once they came in. Start with the bank statement rather than the dashboards, because the dashboards were built by the people being audited. Work through it in the order below. Write findings that name the line, the number, the evidence and the fix, so the document survives the meeting it is presented in.

Start with what you spent, not with what worked

Ask for twelve months of advertising spending by medium and by month, from the accounts, in one sheet. Not from the agency's report. From the ledger.

Most owners cannot produce this in an hour, and the gaps are the first finding. Production costs invoiced separately and never counted. A platform charging a card nobody has reviewed. Two agencies both billing for the same social media work. A hoarding renewed automatically last April.

Do this before you look at any performance data. Once you see a channel's results, you stop reading the invoices carefully.

The order to work through

1. Spend. Twelve months, by medium, by month, from the ledger, with production and agency fees separated from media.
2. Enquiries. From your own register or CRM, by month and by source. If the only record is a WhatsApp inbox, that is finding number two.
3. The reconciliation. Platform-reported conversions against enquiries that actually exist. Expect a gap and understand its shape before judging anybody.
4. Delivery. Did every line you paid for run? Check the photographs, tear sheets and logs. Proof of execution is the checklist.
5. Traceability. For each line, how would you know it worked? List every line with no mechanism. That list is next quarter's work.
6. Response handling. How fast was each enquiry answered, how many were never called back, how many got a second attempt. Pull twenty real records and read them.
7. Quality. Which sources produced enquiries that were ever going to buy. Ask the salespeople, source by source, before showing them the spend.
8. Cost. Cost per enquiry and cost per order by source, with an honest line for what cannot be assigned.
9. Contracts and ownership. What renews automatically, who owns the ad accounts, the website, the analytics and the lead data, and what notice you have to give.

The sequence matters. Owners who start at step eight argue about numbers built on records they have not checked.

The reconciliation, and why the numbers will never agree

Step three upsets people, so it helps to know in advance that a gap is expected.

Ad platforms count a conversion when they can connect an action to a click or a view of their own advertisement. Two platforms will therefore claim the same order, and adding their reports together produces more sales than your accounts show. A slice of every journey is missing anyway, because of cookie limits, consent choices and clicks arriving through messaging apps with their tags stripped. Some conversions are modelled, which means estimated. And a "conversion" may have been configured as a form view or a tap on a phone number rather than an enquiry that reached a human.

So do not treat the gap as fraud. Treat it as a measurement problem to be written down, and use your own register as the count of record. A business that reports enquiries from one source, rather than conversions from five dashboards, has already fixed the biggest reporting problem it has.

What a finding looks like

A finding is not "improve tracking" or "creative could be stronger". Those are opinions with nowhere to go. A finding names five things: the line, the number, the evidence, the fix and the person.

Weak. "Outdoor did not perform well this year."

A finding. "Eleven hoardings ran between January and August at a cost recorded in the ledger under three different heads. All eleven carried the same phone number, so no site can be judged. Four sites have no mid-cycle photograph and two of those were dark for part of the cycle, on the media owner's own admission by email. Fix: one number per site on the next order, monitoring photographs in weeks two and five written into the order, and no renewal of the two sites that went dark. Owner: the marketing coordinator, before the next cycle in November."

Another. "Of twenty enquiry records read at random from May, six were first contacted more than a day later and four were never contacted at all. Three of the four came from the medium with the highest cost per enquiry. Fix: every enquiry acknowledged the same working day and a named person responsible each evening for what is still open. Owner: the sales head, from next Monday."

Notice that the second finding has nothing to do with advertising and will make more money than any media change on the list.

The result most owners do not expect

The common conclusion of an honest advertising audit is not "switch from print to digital". It is "stop buying more enquiries until you answer the ones you already have".

That is an uncomfortable thing for an agency to write, because the recommendation costs the client less rather than more. It is also, in a business with unanswered calls, the only recommendation that survives contact with the facts.

The second most common conclusion is that half the spending cannot be judged at all, because nothing was traceable. That is not a reason to stop advertising. It is a reason to put a mechanism on every line of the next order.

A worked example

For example, a modular kitchen showroom in Bengaluru spends across search advertising, Meta, one hoarding, a home decor magazine and two lead marketplaces. The figures are illustrative.

The ledger shows three invoices the owner did not know about: a renewed listing, a landing page subscription and a photography bill charged to the campaign. The platform reports claim 210 conversions; the enquiry register shows 74 real enquiries. Reading twenty of those, eleven were first called the next day, and the two highest-spending sources produced the enquiries that were called last.

The audit's first recommendation is not about media at all. It is a same-day response rule and a named owner. Its second is a number per source. The media reallocation, which is what the owner asked for, is third on the list and the smallest of the three in value.

What to do next

Set aside one week and start with the ledger. If you get no further than a clean twelve-month spending sheet and twenty enquiry records read end to end, the week has paid for itself.

If you would rather have it done from outside, tell us what you need. We will read it and talk to you, then send the scope, the fee and the term in writing.