Last updated 2026-06-10
Most paid accounts have not been fundamentally examined in years. Budgets renew, dashboards stay green, and meanwhile the platforms changed underneath: automated bidding took over the auctions, cookies stopped feeding the audiences, and AI started assembling the ads. Settings chosen in 2021 are still steering money in 2026, and nobody can say whether they should be.
The audit is iAnalyst's front door, deliberately. Before we recommend anything, we read your accounts the way an analyst reads a balance sheet: line by line, against the numbers your business actually keeps. It produces a document, not a pitch. If the document says your accounts are in good shape, that is what it says.
The audit covers Google, Microsoft, Meta, and LinkedIn spend, and it is the standard first step into our AI-powered PPC and display practice and paid social work. It is also a legitimate ending: plenty of clients take the findings and execute internally.
What the engagement includes
Wasted-spend inventory
Specific line items: search terms, placements, audiences, and geographies that consume budget without returning customers.
Conversion signal review
What the platforms believe a conversion is versus what your business counts, including duplicates, missing values, and offline blind spots.
Automation read
Where smart bidding and AI campaign types are earning their autonomy, and where they are drifting without supervision.
Creative coverage analysis
Testing cadence, fatigue, and the gaps between what you sell and what your ads actually say.
Measurement reconciliation
Platform numbers against analytics against your CRM or books, with an explanation of every major gap.
Prioritized fix list
Findings sequenced by expected impact and effort, written so any competent team can execute them, including one that is not us.
What two weeks inside your accounts looks like
Week one is collection and archaeology: read-only access to ad platforms and analytics, data pulls, and a reconstruction of how the accounts got to their current state. Old experiments, inherited structures, and forgotten settings tell you more about an account than its last 30 days do. We also interview whoever owns the numbers internally, because the gap between what finance counts and what the platforms count is usually where the budget leaks.
Week two is analysis and writing. AI does the sweep work, scanning search terms, placements, and audience overlaps at a scale no human reviewer sustains, and flags the anomalies. Analysts do the interpretation: which flags matter, what they cost, and in what order to fix them. The result is delivered in a working session, not dropped in your inbox.
What we look for, and what we usually find
Patterns repeat across hundreds of accounts. Conversion events that count form fills nobody follows up on. Bidding algorithms optimizing toward the cheapest action rather than the most valuable one. Retargeting reporting conversions it did not cause. Budget splits frozen by history instead of marginal return. Platform recommendations applied automatically because nobody was assigned to refuse them.
We also look for what is working, because the cheapest improvement is usually scaling something already proven. An honest audit names both. And often the headline finding is not waste at all but a measurement problem: the accounts may be fine while the reporting lies about them. You cannot know which until someone reconciles the numbers.
Why the audit comes before everything else
It de-risks the relationship in both directions. You see exactly how we think before committing to ongoing work, and we never have to sell a retainer on promises, because the audit either surfaces enough value to justify one or it does not. The findings document is yours to keep either way. That structure is borrowed from how analysts work everywhere else: position after the research, not before it.
Scoping takes one call: 30 minutes with a senior analyst to establish which accounts, what access, and which questions matter most to your business. If an audit is not the right next step, we will say that on the call and you will have lost half an hour. Book the call when you are ready to have your accounts read properly.