A practical post for people who have inherited a paid-media account from a previous owner — a marketing manager taking over from a predecessor, an in-house team taking over from a departed agency, a buyer in due diligence — and need to form a fast view on whether what they've inherited is healthy.
The full audit is more involved. Thirty minutes won't replace a senior paid-media specialist's view. Thirty minutes will tell you whether the account is in roughly good shape, roughly broken, or somewhere worth investigating in more detail. That's enough to make the next decision.
Five checks, in order. Each takes 5-7 minutes done thoroughly. None require deep platform expertise.
Check 1 — Brand vs non-brand spend split
Open the search-term report (Google Ads) or the campaign list (Meta). Filter or sort to identify campaigns that bid on the brand's own name and obvious variants.
Calculate two numbers:
The percentage of total spend going to brand-keyword campaigns. The percentage of total conversions coming from those campaigns.
Benchmarks: In a healthy paid-media operation, brand spend is typically under 15% of total. Sometimes much less, particularly for B2B or lesser-known brands. If brand spend is over 30% of total, the headline ROAS is significantly inflated by demand the brand would have captured anyway.
Red flag: Brand spend over 40% of total, with brand conversions over 60% of total. This is the smoking gun for an account that's gaming the dashboard. The non-brand performance is much weaker than the headline number.
What to do with this: Calculate non-brand-only ROAS. That's the account's real performance. Compare to whatever target the business is operating against.
Check 2 — Conversion tracking integrity
This is the check that, surprisingly often, finds the biggest issues.
Look at the conversion actions configured in the account. Three things to verify:
Are the conversions actually capturing what the business cares about? Some accounts have "form submission" as the conversion action when the business cares about closed-won deals. The platform's optimisation is pointed at the wrong objective.
Is conversion tracking working? Most platforms now have a "diagnostics" or "tag health" view. Check it. A surprising number of accounts have broken or partially-broken tracking — pixel firing on the wrong page, server-side conversions misconfigured, value tracking returning zero.
Is double-counting happening? If the account has multiple conversion actions configured (form fill + lead + purchase), and each is counted independently, the total conversions reported is higher than reality. The bidding algorithm is being fed inflated signal.
Red flag: Any of: tracking diagnostics showing errors, conversion actions that don't match what the business cares about, conversion values that look implausible relative to the business's actual revenue.
What to do with this: Fix tracking before optimising anything else. Optimisation against bad data is worse than no optimisation.
Check 3 — Audience and targeting hygiene
Open the audience or targeting configuration for the highest-spend campaigns.
Look for:
Excessively broad targeting that should be tighter. "All Google Search users in the UK" is rarely the right target. Specific targeting based on the ICP — relevant industries, job functions, intent signals — usually outperforms.
Excessively narrow targeting that's choking volume. The opposite issue. Layered audience filters that have reduced the addressable pool to a fraction of the relevant market. Sometimes intentional, often a legacy of someone who was over-zealous with negative targeting.
Negative keyword lists or audience exclusions that are old and wrong. Negative keyword lists are usually built early in the account's life and rarely revisited. They often contain exclusions that no longer make sense — products the business now sells, audiences that are now relevant, terms that have changed meaning.
Red flag: Targeting that doesn't reflect the current ICP. This usually means the account is still optimising against an outdated understanding of who the customer is.
What to do with this: A targeting refresh is usually cheap to do, immediately impactful, and a common quick-win for accounts that have been on autopilot for a while.
Check 4 — Creative refresh cadence
Look at the creative library. When was each ad last refreshed?
For Meta and similar platforms, creative fatigue is real and measurable. An ad that performed well at launch will, almost without exception, decay over time as the audience sees it repeatedly. Healthy accounts refresh creative on a regular cadence — typically every 4-8 weeks for the main ads in the highest-spend campaigns.
For Google Search, creative fatigue is less of an issue but ad copy testing should still be visible. Multiple ad variants per ad group, with the platform's optimisation choosing between them. Accounts where every ad group has a single ad copy that's been running for six months are leaving performance on the table.
Red flag: Single ads running for 90+ days without refresh on Meta, or single ad copies in every ad group on Google Search.
What to do with this: Schedule a creative refresh sprint. The lift from new creative is usually meaningful, and the absence of refresh is one of the cleaner signs that the account is being managed reactively rather than proactively.
Check 5 — Spend concentration risk
Pull the spend by campaign for the last 90 days. Sort descending.
Calculate:
Percentage of total spend going to the top campaign. Percentage going to the top three campaigns. Number of campaigns delivering meaningful volume (top 80% of spend).
Benchmarks: Concentration varies legitimately by account size and shape. A small account might have most of its spend in one campaign and that's fine. A medium-to-large account where 70%+ of spend is in one campaign is structurally fragile. A single change to that campaign — a policy update, a quality-score shift, a competitor entering — can move a large share of total performance.
Red flag: The top campaign accounting for 60%+ of spend in an account spending six figures monthly or more.
What to do with this: Concentration risk doesn't mean the account is broken, but it does mean the account's apparent stability is depending on a small number of bets. The 100-day plan for the account, if there is one, should include diversifying the spend toward more resilience.
Putting the five checks together
Done thoroughly, the five checks take roughly 30 minutes. Together they answer:
Is the headline ROAS being inflated by brand spend? Is the conversion tracking accurate? Is the targeting current and well-configured? Is creative being refreshed appropriately? Is the spend distribution reasonable?
The answers tell you whether the account is in healthy operational hygiene or whether the next conversation is going to be uncomfortable.
If three or more checks come back clean, the account is in reasonable shape. If three or more come back with red flags, the account has been on autopilot or has been actively mis-managed. If the picture is mixed, the next step is a full audit by someone with deeper expertise.
This isn't a substitute for that full audit. It's a way of forming a fast view, in 30 minutes (alongside the broader red-flag framework), that helps you scope the deeper work intelligently rather than starting from scratch.
For agency leaders or buyers running diligence on digital businesses with paid-media spend: this is the version of the conversation I'd want a non-specialist on the team to be able to have. The full diagnostic is more involved. The 30-minute version catches the worst of the issues and signals where the deeper work is most needed.