Paid media audits for London businesses often reveal the same issue: budgets are spread across platforms without a clear framework connecting spend to revenue. Teams run campaigns on Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, and programmatic display—each with its own reporting dashboard, its own attribution window, and its own definition of a conversion. Without a unified audit process, optimization becomes reactive and budget decisions default to whichever platform reported the highest ROAS last month.
A paid media audit is not a performance review. It is a systems check that evaluates whether your campaign structure, tracking, and reporting infrastructure support confident budget allocation.
Where do you start a paid media audit?
Begin with account structure. Open each platform and verify that campaigns map to clear business objectives. Are brand and non-brand campaigns separated? Are geo-targeting settings accurate for your London market—targeting Greater London versus the full UK? Are audience lists applied correctly, or are campaigns running broad without exclusions?
Next, review tracking integrity. Check that conversion actions are consistent across platforms. A lead form submission on Google Ads should match the same event in GA4 and your CRM. Mismatches here mean your reporting is unreliable before you even begin analysis. For London businesses operating in competitive verticals like fintech, property, or legal services, even a small tracking gap can misallocate thousands in monthly spend.
Finally, assess keyword and audience overlap. When multiple campaigns target the same audience segments or compete on the same queries, you create internal competition that inflates CPCs without improving outcomes. This is especially common in London’s high-CPC market where legal, finance, and B2B keywords regularly exceed ten pounds per click.
How do you evaluate performance across platforms?
Build a single view that normalizes metrics across all active platforms. Pull cost, impressions, clicks, conversions, and revenue into one reporting layer. Platform-reported ROAS is not comparable across Google, Meta, and TikTok—each uses different attribution windows and counting methods. Normalize to a shared standard using GA4 data as the baseline.
Identify the 20 percent of campaigns driving 80 percent of revenue. For underperforming campaigns, check whether the issue is targeting, creative, or landing page before pausing spend. A campaign with strong click-through rates but low conversion rates points to a landing page problem, not a targeting problem.
When should you run a paid media audit?
Book a free strategy call - we'll audit your current setup and identify the highest-impact fixes.
Conduct a full audit before any quarterly budget review and after any significant change in market conditions—new competitor entry, pricing shifts, or platform policy changes. For London businesses scaling beyond fifty thousand pounds in monthly media spend, monthly mini-audits focused on tracking integrity and budget allocation prevent the slow drift that erodes ROAS over time.
The goal is not to find problems. It is to build a repeatable system that catches inefficiencies early and keeps every pound working toward measurable outcomes.