An independent read on your marketing performance.
A fixed-scope audit of your paid accounts, measurement and agency delivery. Commissioned when the board wants to know whether the money is working and whether the reporting can be trusted.
Every audit comes down to two questions: is the money working, and can the reporting be trusted?
Most audit conversations start the same way. Spend has grown, the monthly report looks healthy, and the numbers in it are hard to line up with the revenue. The CEO wants to say what the marketing budget returned last quarter and cannot say it with confidence.
An independent digital marketing audit answers that. Sam Park reviews the accounts, the measurement and the agency reporting from the client’s side of the table, then writes up what the evidence shows in commercial terms. Boards commission it when a budget grows. Incoming marketing leaders commission it when they inherit accounts they did not build. Companies commission it before deciding on an agency renewal.
What gets audited.
Google Ads & paid accounts
An independent Google Ads audit built from the account itself: structure, settings, search-term hygiene, bidding strategy, audience overlap and the change history. Meta and other paid platforms are reviewed the same way. The question throughout is where the money goes and what it buys.
Tracking & attribution architecture
Conversion tracking, tag configuration, analytics and attribution settings are verified against real transactions and enquiries. If the tracking is wrong, every performance number downstream is wrong with it. This layer is examined before any channel is assessed.
Agency scope & reporting integrity
A review of the agency relationship itself: what the contract promises, what the accounts show was delivered, and whether the monthly report matches the platform data. Fees, scope and reporting choices are examined by someone with no interest in the outcome.
Organic foundations
Where organic search is part of the mix, the audit covers technical foundations, content performance and how the channel is measured. That includes how visible the brand stays as AI-generated answers reshape search. Deeper AI-visibility work belongs with the AI search audit.
Evidence first. Judgement second.
Evidence from the accounts, not the dashboard
The audit is built from the raw material: account structures, change histories, search-term reports, billing records and tag configurations. Dashboards describe performance and accounts prove it. Where the two disagree, the audit says so.
Measurement verified before performance is judged
No channel, agency or campaign is assessed until the numbers it is being assessed on have been checked. Many underperforming accounts have a measurement problem underneath the media one. Fixing the media first, on broken data, produces confident errors.
Findings argued in writing
Every finding is tied to specific evidence in the accounts, so it can be checked, challenged or handed to the agency for a response. The document stands on what the data shows.
The judgement comes from 10+ years of running these accounts. Someone who has managed paid media at scale knows where the problems usually are and what a well-run account looks like.
What you receive.
Written findings
A full findings document covering paid accounts, measurement, agency delivery and organic foundations. Each finding is stated plainly and anchored to the evidence behind it. It reads as a factual record.
A board-ready summary
The commercial picture in plain English: what is being spent, what it is returning, where the reporting can be trusted and where it cannot. It is written for directors who will never open a Google Ads account, and it is short enough to read before the meeting.
Prioritised fixes
A sequenced list of what to change, ordered by commercial impact. Tracking repairs come first, then account restructures, then any scope and reporting changes for the agency. Your existing team or agency can act on all of it.
The audit has nothing to sell you.
Sam earns no media margin and resells no services. The engagement ends when the findings are delivered, and there is nothing to sell after.
That works in both directions. If the agency is doing good work, the audit documents it and the board gets the reassurance it paid for. If the problem is inside the business, in the brief or the targets or the tracking, the audit says that too.
For decisions that are expensive to get wrong.
The audit suits Australian companies with meaningful paid media spend and a real question about it: a board approving next year’s budget, a CEO weighing an agency renewal, or a new CMO who wants an independent baseline before owning the numbers. It is also the diagnostic phase ahead of a broader engagement, and many fractional CMO and executive advisory arrangements begin with exactly this review.
The pattern behind the method is common. Reported performance and commercial reality drift apart, and a measurement fault is underneath. One engagement started exactly there, with an account whose numbers could not be reconciled. Once the measurement was rebuilt and the spend restructured against it, the result was a 90% reduction in cost per acquisition alongside 8x organic growth. The fix started with the audit.
The judgement behind the findings comes from 10+ years advising hundreds of brands, with $15M+ in client revenue driven along the way. More on that record is on the about page. eCommerce boards who want the governance framing first can start with the whitepaper eCommerce Marketing Effectiveness, which sets out the questions an audit exists to answer.
Asked before most audits.
What access does the audit need?
Read-only access to the ad accounts, analytics and tag management, granted to a named account and revoked the moment the audit ends. Nothing in the accounts is changed, paused or edited during the review.
Contracts, invoices and recent agency reports are also useful, since part of the audit is comparing what was promised, what was billed and what the accounts show.
Does our agency need to know about the audit?
That is the client’s call, and both approaches work. Some companies commission the audit on their own access. Others tell the agency openly, which usually goes well.
Either way the process stays professional. Findings are put factually and agencies are given the evidence behind anything critical.
What if the agency is actually doing a good job?
Then the audit says so, in writing, with the evidence. That is one of the most useful outcomes it can produce. A documented independent endorsement ends an internal argument and lets the board look at whatever the real constraint is.
How is an audit different from ongoing advisory?
An audit is a fixed-scope engagement with a defined finish line: findings delivered, summary presented, complete. Ongoing arrangements such as executive advisory or a fractional CMO role are continuing relationships with standing responsibilities.
Some clients go on to one of those after an audit, but the audit is complete in itself and there is no obligation to continue.
What does the audit cover, and what does it not?
It covers paid media accounts, tracking and attribution, agency scopes and reporting, and organic foundations where relevant. The scope is agreed in writing before work begins. It does not include implementing the fixes. The deliverable is a prioritised list your team or agency can act on, with the reasoning documented.
Deeper specialist work, such as an AI search visibility audit, is scoped separately.
Let’s talk about what’s next.
For executive advisory, fractional CMO, AI search strategy or speaking enquiries.
[email protected]