Growth Audit

A strategic diagnosis of your paid media and growth engine.
Not a spreadsheet of platform metrics – a roadmap you can act on.

Ex-Tesla (first global growth hire) · €100M+ in paid media managed · 31 countries

Get Started

You’re spending real money on paid media. You’re not sure it’s working.

Your agency sends monthly reports. ROAS looks fine. But when you compare
platform numbers to actual revenue, something doesn’t add up. You’ve tried asking harder questions, but you don’t have the expertise to know if the answers are good.

Or maybe you have an in-house team that’s executing campaigns, but nobody has stepped back to ask the strategic questions: are we on the right channels?
Is this budget allocation defensible? What should we be testing instead of scaling what’s already running?

These are not execution problems. These are strategy and measurement problems.
That’s what this audit is designed to solve.

Who this audit is for

This audit works best if you’re spending €50K+ per month on paid media and need a strategic-level diagnosis your team or agency can’t provide.
Typical clients: Series A-B founders, VPs of Marketing, and CMOs at companies with €2-50M revenue who are scaling acquisition, questioning agency performance, or preparing for a larger strategic engagement.
If you’re earlier stage, an Async Advisory engagement (from €2K/month) might be a better fit.

What the audit covers

I go through your paid media from the account level up to the strategic level.
The goal is not just to find waste, but also to find the gap between where you are and where you should be, and give you a plan to close it.

DELIVERABLE 1:
Account and Measurement Infrastructure

I open every ad account and review campaign structure, targeting logic, bid strategies, creative rotation, and conversion tracking. Then I audit your entire measurement setup: attribution model configuration, pixel implementation, cross-domain tracking, and offline conversion pipelines. Most audits skip measurement entirely. This is where I find the numbers that change every decision downstream.

DELIVERABLE 2:
Channel Efficiency and Budget Allocation

I benchmark each channel against realistic standards for your vertical and stage, informed by €100M+ in directly managed spend. Which channels are earning their budget? Which are coasting on misattributed conversions? Based on what the data actually shows after the measurement audit cleans up the numbers, I recommend how to reallocate. This is where the biggest quick wins surface.

DELIVERABLE 3:
Competitive Landscape

I assess what competitors are doing in paid media: which channels, estimated spend levels, creative approaches. Are you fighting on the wrong channel? Is there a channel they’ve missed? This is context for strategic decisions, not a full competitive intelligence report.

DELIVERABLE 4:
Test Roadmap and 12-Month Strategic Plan

Everything above gets synthesized into a prioritized roadmap. Quick wins for the first two weeks. Structural improvements for months 2-6. Strategic bets for the back half of the year. Every test in the roadmap has a hypothesis, budget estimate, timeline, measurement approach, and kill criteria. At Amboss, this roadmap contained 26 tests projected to unlock €365K per year.

The full scope is customized after I review your intake form. These four themes are the foundation; the depth and emphasis shifts based on your accounts, markets, and strategic priorities.

How the audit works

STEP 1: INTAKE AND ACCESS (Day 1-3)

You fill out the intake form and grant read-only access to your ad accounts, analytics, and any relevant dashboards. I send you a checklist of exactly what I need. No calls required at this stage – I review everything async first so I come to our kickoff with informed questions, not basic ones.

STEP 2: KICKOFF CALL (Day 3-5)

One 45-60 minute call where I ask about your business context, goals,
team structure, and what’s been tried before. This is the strategic context that data alone can’t provide. I need to understand what success looks like for your business before I can evaluate whether your paid media is getting you there.

STEP 3: DEEP ANALYSIS (Days 5-15)

I go through every account, every campaign structure, your measurement setup, your competitive landscape, and your historical performance data. This is the bulk of the work. I’m not running a script over your accounts. I’m doing the analysis manually, informed by pattern recognition from €100M+ in paid media across 31 countries.

STEP 4: DELIVERABLE AND WALKTHROUGH (Days 15-21)

You receive the full audit document: findings, opportunities, risks, budget
recommendations, test roadmap, and 12-month strategic roadmap. We do a 60-90 minute walkthrough call where I present the findings, answer questions, and prioritize next steps together. You also get a recorded Loom walkthrough of the key findings for anyone on your team who wasn’t on the call.

STEP 5: 30-DAY FOLLOW-UP

Thirty days after delivery, we do a check-in call. Have you started executing the quick wins? What questions came up? Do you need help with anything? This is included in the price. Most audits get delivered and then collect dust. This follow-up exists to prevent that.

What an audit finds

CASE STUDY 1: AMBOSS (MEDTECH / B2B)

Full paid media audit across US and international markets. Reported to Head of Performance Marketing.
The audit surfaced two categories of value:

Immediate optimization opportunities: ~€85,000 per year captured from existing account structure, targeting logic, and bid strategy misconfigurations. These were executable within 2 weeks of delivery. An additional ~€80,000 per year in potential optimizations was identified for further investigation, requiring deeper data access or cross-functional coordination to validate.

Forward-looking test roadmap: 26 structured tests designed for the following year. Each test included a hypothesis, budget estimate, timeline, measurement approach, and kill criteria. Combined projected value: up to €365,400 per year depending on test outcomes.

Beyond the core audit, I identified 17 operational documents the team needed for effective performance marketing operations, prioritized by impact, and built the two most urgent (Target KPI Matrix and Campaign Setup Checklist) during the engagement.

This is what the audit deliverable looks like in practice: diagnosis, quantified opportunities, a testing plan you can execute, and operational infrastructure recommendations.

CASE STUDY 2: LASTMINUTE.COM

SEM & Marketing Innovation Manager.
When I joined, paid search architecture across 7 European markets was fragmented, reporting and bidding management workflows were manual, and there was no testing methodology.
This started as an audit and became a full restructure.

Post-restructure results:

  • +158% conversions in Germany
  • +67% ROAS in Germany
  • +54% bookings from paid media globally
  • Built automation tools saving 9+ hours per week

The lesson for audit clients: the biggest value often comes from structural redesign, not campaign-level tweaks.

CASE STUDY 3: TESLA

At Tesla, I restructured the entire paid search architecture from experimental fragments into a coherent strategic plan. The kind of structural diagnosis that surfaces in an audit is the same work I did at $10M/quarter scale.

The paid search audit revealed that the biggest problem wasn’t campaign optimization. It was structural: suboptimal account architecture, wrong measurement, wrong allocation. The quick wins were significant, but the real value came from redesigning the foundation.

Engagement details

TIMELINE
2-4 weeks from kickoff to deliverable, depending on the number of ad accounts and markets. Most audits take 3 weeks.

INVESTMENT
€8,000 – €15,000 depending on scope.

A 3-platform, single-market audit is at the lower end. A multi-platform, multi-market audit with complex measurement infrastructure is at the higher end. I’ll give you an exact quote after reviewing your intake form.

WHAT’S INCLUDED
– Read-only account access review across all active platforms
– Measurement and attribution infrastructure audit
– Channel efficiency analysis with benchmarks
– Budget allocation recommendations
– Competitive positioning assessment
– Structured test roadmap with hypotheses and success criteria
– 12-month strategic roadmap with prioritized quick wins
– 60-90 minute walkthrough call
– Recorded Loom walkthrough for your team
– 30-day follow-up call

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED
– Campaign execution or optimization (I diagnose and recommend, I don’t run your campaigns)
– Creative production or review (I evaluate creative strategy, not design)
– SEO or organic audit (I assess organic at a strategic level if it’s relevant to the growth picture, but deep organic analysis requires a specialist)

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER
Many audit clients move into one of two ongoing engagements:

– Fractional Head of Growth (€5-12K/month) if the audit reveals the need for ongoing senior strategic leadership
– Async Advisory (from €2K/month) if you want continued access to strategic input without the full fractional commitment

Neither is required. The audit stands on its own as a complete deliverable.

FAQs

Agency audits are sales tools designed to win your account. They focus on quick wins to make the case for switching agencies. My audit has no agency to sell you. I’m evaluating your entire paid media strategy – including whether your current agency is doing a good job – from an independent position. I also audit your measurement infrastructure, which most agency audits skip entirely because it’s not their expertise.

Yes, that’s the point. The audit deliverable is designed to be actionable by your existing team or agency. Each recommendation includes enough detail for execution. The 30-day follow-up exists to answer any questions that come up during implementation.

Read-only access is sufficient. I never make changes to your accounts during an audit. I’ll send you a specific access checklist during onboarding that covers exactly what’s needed: ad platform accounts, analytics, any reporting dashboards you use, and conversion tracking setup.

We can discuss a Fractional Head of Growth engagement or Async Advisory based on what the audit reveals. The audit assessment period (weeks 1-2) of a fractional engagement gets skipped if you’ve already done the audit, so you save time and money on the transition.

Yes. This is one of the most common audit scopes. I evaluate your agency’s work against realistic benchmarks, assess whether their reporting is trustworthy, and give you a clear recommendation: stay, renegotiate, switch, or bring it in-house. I also build a framework for evaluating agency work going forward so you’re never in this position again.

Probably not at the full audit scope. At lower spend levels, the audit investment may not produce proportional returns. I’d recommend starting with Async Advisory (€2K/month) where I can review your setup, answer strategic questions, and help you build toward the point where a full audit makes sense.

In €100M+ of paid media managed across 31 countries, I’ve never seen a paid media setup with nothing to improve. If opportunities exist, the question is how large they are and how quickly you can capture them. If the audit somehow found zero actionable recommendations, that would be a useful finding too – it means your team is executing at a high level and the constraint on growth is somewhere else.

Find out what your paid media is actually doing.

Fill out the intake form. I’ll review your situation and send you an exact scope and quote within 48 hours.

Get Started

Prefer to talk? Book a 15-minute call.