Paid Search Account Audit

Every paid search audit I have been handed compares the account's CTR and CPC with a published "industry benchmark" and calls the gap the problem. It never is. The benchmark is someone else's customers, someone else's prices and someone else's tracking. The only numbers that can judge an account are its own: what a conversion is worth to you, what each campaign and term cost per conversion, and where the account is spending on things that cannot convert while starving the things that do.

This skill audits in a fixed order, because each step makes the next one readable. Tracking first: if the primary conversion is a page view or a test never fired, every CPA below it is fiction. Waste second: campaigns and search terms with clicks and nothing to show. Starved winners third: campaigns under your target that lose impressions to budget. Landing pages last, because a good keyword on a bad page looks like a bad keyword. Every threshold is an engine rule and says so.

When to use

The user is reviewing an account they run, inheriting one from an agency or a predecessor, judging whether an agency is doing its job, or trying to explain a CPA that went the wrong way.