Why your ad accounts need an audit
Ad accounts get messy slowly. You add a campaign for a new product, test a new country, copy an ad set to try a different offer, and turn on a placement Meta suggested. Each change made sense at the time. A year later, the money is spread across dozens of campaigns on three platforms, and nobody can say with confidence which of them are paying for themselves.
An audit is how you get that answer back. It shows where the budget goes, what each part of it returns, and what to change. The work is mostly careful reading:
- export spend and results from every ad platform
- put them on one measure, because Google, Meta, and LinkedIn each name and count things differently
- check the platforms' reported results against the sales and customers your business actually recorded
- break the numbers down by channel, country, and product to find the losers hiding inside the averages
- read how each account is built to find out why those losers lose
- turn all of it into a short list of changes, ranked by how much money each one affects
That's hours of spreadsheet work for a person, and most teams do it once a year at best. It's a good job for an AI agent, because every judgment in it comes from numbers an agent can read directly and from knowing what a customer is worth to your business. Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Here's how it audits your ad accounts.
How Kite audits your ad accounts
Kite starts with what it already knows about your business. Its research covers your products, pricing, customers, and goals, so before it opens an ad account, it knows what a sale or a lead is worth to you and which products and markets matter most.
Next, it reads your numbers. From your connected Google Ads, Meta Ads, and LinkedIn Ads accounts, it reads spend and results for every campaign, ad group or ad set, and ad over the period you choose. From Stripe, Shopify, Google Analytics, or HubSpot, it reads the revenue and customers your business actually recorded. It puts the two side by side, works out your real return on ad spend and cost per customer, and breaks both down by channel, country, and product.
Then Kite looks for the causes. It reads how each account is built, from budgets and bidding to targeting, tracking, and creative, and it explains why the weak parts of the account are weak. The findings come back as one ranked list, with the dollars at stake and the exact change beside each one. After the changes are made, Kite runs the same audit again to show what moved.
- What should a paid media audit include?
- Agree on what a good result is worth
- Read every ad account on one measure
- Check the platforms' numbers against your own records
- How do you break down ad spend and return on ad spend by channel, country, and product?
- Where is your ad budget being wasted?
- Find out why the weak parts of the account are weak
- Turn the findings into a ranked list of changes
- Run the audit again and see what changed
What should a paid media audit include?
A complete paid media audit covers the money, the measurement, and the setup behind them. Kite's audit checks each of these:
- Spend and results by channel. What each platform spent over the period and what it brought in, on one shared measure.
- Return on ad spend and cost per customer. The revenue each dollar of ad spend brings back, and what it costs to win a paying customer, judged against a target you agree on.
- Country and product breakdowns. Where the money goes inside each channel, and which markets and products are profitable.
- Tracking. Whether each platform is counting conversions correctly, and how far its numbers differ from your own records.
- Wasted spend. The campaigns, ad sets, keywords, searches, and placements that spend money without bringing in results.
- Account setup. Budgets, bidding strategies, objectives, targeting, negative keywords, and audiences that compete with each other.
- Creative. Which ads have worn out and which angles still earn results.
- Landing pages. Whether the page behind each ad keeps the ad's promise.
- A ranked list of changes. What to cut, what to fix, and what to give more money, ordered by how much each change affects.
If you only run Google Ads and want to start with a quick pass on your own, the Google Ads audit checklist Coming soon walks through what to look at in an afternoon.
Agree on what a good result is worth
An audit needs a target, because a $90 lead is a bargain for one business and a loss for another. Kite agrees on that target with you before it judges a single campaign.
If you already aim for a return on ad spend or a cost per customer, Kite uses it. Return on ad spend, often shortened to ROAS, is the revenue your ads bring in divided by what they cost, so a ROAS of 3 means every $1 of ads brought back $3 in sales. If you don't have a target, Kite works one out from what it knows about your pricing, your margins, and how many leads usually become customers, and it shows you the math so you can change any number in it.
The target can differ by channel or product. A LinkedIn campaign aimed at large companies might be worth a higher cost per lead than a Meta campaign for a starter plan, because those buyers pay more. Kite asks about these differences up front so every campaign is judged fairly.
Read every ad account on one measure
Kite reads spend and results from every platform you connect and lines them up so they can be compared directly. Each platform describes the same thing differently, and a fair audit needs them side by side.
In Google Ads, Kite reads cost, clicks, and conversions for the account, each campaign, each ad group, and each ad. In Meta Ads, it reads spend, reach, frequency, clicks, and results for each campaign, ad set, and ad. In LinkedIn Ads, it reads spend and results for the account and each campaign, along with each campaign's status, objective, budget, and bid. Kite maps Google's ad groups and Meta's ad sets to the same level, so you can see a Google ad group and a Meta ad set in the same ranked list.
If you sign in with a Google Ads manager account, Kite sees the client accounts under it and asks which ones to audit. Agencies can also run a separate Kite team for each client, so each client's research and settings stay apart.
Related use cases
- Report on paid campaign performance Coming soon Get every ad platform's results in one report, with an explanation of what changed.
Check the platforms' numbers against your own records
The platforms' own numbers aren't enough for an audit, because each platform counts the sales it thinks it caused. When a shopper clicks a Google ad on Monday and a Meta ad on Wednesday and then buys, both platforms can claim the same sale. Add up what each platform reports, and the total is often more than you actually sold.
Kite checks the platforms against the records your business keeps. With Stripe connected, it counts new paying customers and what they pay. With Shopify connected, it reads orders, the products in each one, and their totals. With Google Analytics or HubSpot connected, it reads the campaign or source behind each signup or contact and matches it to a customer, so it can tell which channel brought each one in.
Say you spent $20,000 on ads last month. Google Ads reports $58,000 in sales and Meta reports $38,000, for a combined $96,000 and a ROAS of 4.8. Your Shopify store recorded $70,000 from visitors who arrived through paid ads. Your real ROAS is 3.5, not 4.8. Kite shows you both figures, explains the gap, and judges every campaign against the real one.
This step also catches broken tracking. If LinkedIn reports no conversions from a campaign while Google Analytics shows that campaign's visitors signing up, the problem is the tracking, not the campaign. On LinkedIn, Kite checks whether the LinkedIn Insight Tag is firing from your domain. A campaign shouldn't be cut because its results weren't counted.
Related use cases
- Work out your customer acquisition cost and payback Coming soon Turn ad spend and new paying customers into a cost per customer for each channel, and find out how long each customer takes to earn back.
How do you break down ad spend and return on ad spend by channel, country, and product?
You break ad spend down by putting what each campaign spent next to the revenue or customers it brought in, then grouping the results by channel, by country, and by product. Kite does each cut separately, because each one hides different problems.
By channel. Kite compares Google, Meta, and LinkedIn on the same measure: real return on ad spend for a store, or cost per paying customer for a subscription business. A channel that looks strong in its own dashboard can look ordinary once its results are checked against your revenue.
By country. In Meta Ads, Kite splits results by the country each impression was shown in. It also reads the locations your campaigns target and, from your store or billing records, which countries your customers come from. Say a Meta campaign targets the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, and its cost per customer of $85 beats your $100 target. Split by country, Australia takes 18 percent of the spend at $240 per customer. The campaign is fine. One country inside it is not.
By product. For a store, Kite reads which products are in each order your ads brought in, so it can see which products earn back their ad spend. For a business with several plans or product lines, it groups campaigns by the product each one promotes and matches them to what those customers bought. Ad platforms usually report revenue, not profit, so Kite subtracts what the products cost you when you give it your margins. A bestseller with thin margins can need a much higher ROAS than an accessory to make money.
Related use cases
- Find which products and ads to scale: Find the products and ads that make money after ad costs and can take more budget.
- Choose which ad platforms to spend on: Decide which channels deserve your budget next quarter.
Where is your ad budget being wasted?
Your ad budget is wasted where campaigns, ad sets, keywords, searches, or placements have spent enough to judge and still cost far more than your target. Kite ranks every ad set by cost per result against the target you agreed on and pulls out the bottom fifth, then checks each one before calling it waste.
Those checks matter. An ad set that has spent less than two or three times your target cost per result hasn't had a fair chance yet. One that earns plenty of clicks but few sales may have a landing page problem rather than an ad problem. And one that looks dead in the platform may simply be undercounted. Kite sorts the shortlist into ad sets to cut, ad sets to give more time, and ad sets with something to fix first.
Kite also looks for waste inside campaigns that look healthy on average:
- Searches. In Google Ads, Kite reads the actual searches that triggered your ads and finds the ones that spend without converting, such as job seekers or people looking for something free.
- Placements, ages, and devices. In Meta Ads, Kite splits results by placement, age group, and device. An ad set can make money in the Instagram Feed and lose it in Audience Network, the apps and sites outside Facebook and Instagram where Meta also shows ads.
- Frequency. When Meta shows the same people the same ad more than three or four times while the cost per result climbs, the ad set is paying for repetition.
- Overlap. Two ad sets aimed at nearly the same audience, or two ad groups bidding on the same keyword, compete with each other and push up your own costs.
Related use cases
- Cut wasted ad spend: Turn the bottom of the ranked list into a cut list and move the freed-up money to what works.
- Find negative keywords for Google Ads Coming soon Find the searches your Google Ads should stay away from and add them as negative keywords.
Find out why the weak parts of the account are weak
Performance numbers show where an account is losing money, and the account's setup usually shows why. Kite reads how each account is built and ties every finding back to a campaign that's underperforming.
In Google Ads, Kite reads each campaign's budget, the bidding strategies your campaigns share, the keywords and audiences they target, and your negative keyword lists along with which campaigns each list is attached to. It also reads each keyword's Quality Score, Google's rating from 1 to 10 of how well the keyword, the ad, and the landing page match what the searcher wanted. Kite might find that the negative list you built to block job seekers covers two of your three search campaigns but not the newest one.
In Meta Ads, Kite reads each campaign's objective, budget, and bid strategy, and each ad set's targeting, optimization goal, and schedule. A common finding is a campaign meant to drive purchases with an ad set optimizing for link clicks, so Meta finds people who click instead of people who buy.
In LinkedIn Ads, Kite reads every campaign group, campaign, and ad with its status, targeting, budget, and bid. It sees whether LinkedIn rejected an ad in review, so a campaign that stalled for that reason doesn't get mistaken for one that failed.
Kite also reads the creative and the landing page. It sorts your current ads into the angles that still earn results and the ones that have worn out. When an ad gets clicks but few conversions, Kite reads the page it sends people to, the way a visitor arriving from that ad would. It might find that an ad promising a free trial lands on a page where the trial button sits below three screens of text.
Related use cases
- Find out why your ads aren't converting: Work out whether the ad or the landing page is the weak link, and fix the one that is.
- Refresh your ads based on what's working: Replace worn-out ads with new versions built from the angles that already earn results.
Turn the findings into a ranked list of changes
The audit ends with one list of changes, ranked by how much money each one affects. An audit that lists forty problems in no order is hard to act on, so Kite puts the change that saves or earns the most at the top.
Each entry names the platform, the campaign, and the exact ad set, keyword, or setting. It shows what that part of the account spent, what it brought back, and the reason for the change in a sentence, such as "Australia took $3,600 of this campaign's $20,000 last month at $240 per customer against a $100 target." You can read the whole list in a few minutes and disagree with any line.
What happens next depends on the platform and the kind of change:
- LinkedIn Ads. Kite pauses wasteful campaigns and ads on its own, because pausing only stops spending, and it tells you what it paused and why. It proposes budget, bid, and schedule changes with the current and new values side by side, and anyone on your team can approve them.
- Google Ads and Meta Ads. Kite reads these accounts and names the exact change, and your team makes it in Google Ads or Ads Manager.
- Creative. Kite writes the replacement ads from your best-performing angles and real customer evidence, checks every line against each platform's limits, and makes the images and short videos to go with them.
- Landing pages. Kite rewrites a weak page or builds a new one. On a site Kite hosts, it publishes the page once you approve it, and it can also publish through a connected content system such as Webflow.
Kite records each finding, the numbers behind it, and what your team decided in your team's knowledge base. The next audit starts from that record instead of from scratch.
Run the audit again and see what changed
An audit is most useful when you run it again, because ad accounts drift back toward waste as ads wear out, audiences shift, and new campaigns launch. Kite re-runs the same audit against the same targets, so each one can be compared with the last.
You can put it on a schedule. A full audit once a month or once a quarter catches structural problems, and a lighter weekly check catches an ad set that has started to slip before it spends much. Each run compares spend, real return on ad spend, and cost per customer with the previous one, confirms whether the changes your team made held up, and adds anything new to the list. The results go to the Slack channel you choose, your inbox, or a conversation in the Kite web app.
Related use cases
- Get a weekly marketing report in Slack: See ad spend and results next to your website traffic and pipeline every week.
What you get
A target for each channel
The return on ad spend or cost per customer you agreed on, with the math behind it.
A view of your real return
What each platform claims next to what your revenue records show, and the gap between them explained.
Breakdowns by channel, country, and product
Where the money goes inside each channel and which markets and products earn it back.
A list of wasted spend
The ad sets, keywords, searches, and placements that cost money without bringing in results, separated from the ones that need more time or a fix.
The reasons behind the weak spots
The setup, tracking, creative, or landing page problems that explain each one.
A ranked list of changes
What to cut, what to fix, and what to give more money, each with the dollars at stake and the exact change to make.
The work itself
Paused LinkedIn ads, approved LinkedIn budget changes, new ad copy and visuals, and rewritten landing pages.
A repeat audit
The same checks on a schedule, so you can see what improved and what's drifted since.
How to get started
Tell Kite what you want to know. You might ask, "Audit our Google and Meta ad accounts and tell us where the money is going," or "We spend $15,000 a month on ads. Which countries and products are actually paying for themselves?" You can work with Kite in the Kite web app or in Slack.
Kite needs your ad accounts for this job. Connect Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or all three, and Kite sends a connection link the first time it needs each one. To check the platforms against your real revenue, connect the place your sales are recorded: Stripe for subscriptions, Shopify for a store, or HubSpot for deals your sales team closes. Connect Google Analytics as well if you want Kite to match each customer to the campaign that brought them in.
Kite then proposes the target it plans to judge against, the period it plans to read, and the accounts it plans to include, so you can adjust any of them before it starts. It comes back with the audit and a ranked list of changes. Kite asks before it changes a live LinkedIn budget or publishes a landing page. As you come to trust its judgment, you can give it more room to act on its own.
Integrations used to audit your ad accounts
An ad account audit runs on two kinds of data. Your ad platforms tell Kite what each campaign spent and what it claims to have brought in. Your revenue and analytics records tell it what actually happened.
Read spend, results, and setup from your ad platforms
Kite reads cost, clicks, and conversions for every campaign, ad group, and ad, along with your budgets, bidding strategies, keywords, search terms, Quality Scores, and negative keyword lists. Your team makes the changes in Google Ads.
Kite reads spend, reach, frequency, and results for every Facebook and Instagram campaign, ad set, and ad, split by country, placement, age, and device, along with each campaign's objective and each ad set's targeting and optimization goal. Your team makes the changes in Ads Manager.
Kite reads spend and results for each campaign along with its status, targeting, budget, and bid. It pauses campaigns and ads that are wasting money, checks the LinkedIn Insight Tag, and proposes budget and bid changes for your team to approve.
Check results against your revenue and analytics
Kite counts new paying customers and what they pay, so cost per customer rests on real payments.
Kite reads orders, the products in each one, and their totals, so return on ad spend and product breakdowns rest on what your store actually sold.
Kite reads the source recorded on each contact and the deals that closed, which matters when sales closes customers after a demo.
Kite reads the campaign and source behind each visit and conversion, which lets it match customers to the ads that brought them in and spot tracking gaps.
Common questions
How often should you audit your ad accounts?
Run a full audit every month if you spend more than a few thousand dollars a month on ads, and at least once a quarter if you spend less. Run a lighter weekly check in between to catch an ad set that has started to slip. Also audit after any big change, such as a new product launch, a new country, or a jump in budget, because those are when spend spreads into places nobody has checked. Kite can run both the full audit and the weekly check on a schedule.
Is $10 a day enough for Google Ads?
It can be enough to learn something, but it's rarely enough to judge many campaigns at once. At $10 a day, you spend about $300 a month. If a click costs $3, that's about 100 clicks. If 3 percent of those visitors convert, you get about three conversions a month, which is too few to tell a good keyword from a lucky one. On a small budget, put the money behind one campaign and a handful of keywords your buyers are most likely to search, so each one collects enough results to judge. Kite can work out what your budget will buy from your actual cost per click and conversion rate, and tell you how long a test needs to run before the result means anything.
How much does an AI ad account audit cost?
With Kite, the audit is part of the product rather than a separate fee. Kite's free plan includes usage, and the Growth plan costs $100 a month and includes $100 in AI credits. Pricing is per workspace, so adding teammates doesn't change the price. You connect your own ad accounts, and Kite doesn't charge a percentage of your ad spend. Current prices are at kite.ai/pricing.
Can Kite audit my competitors' ad accounts?
No one can see inside a competitor's ad account, but Kite can show you what your competitors are running. Its built-in ad research covers your competitors' current ads on Google, Meta, and LinkedIn, including the copy, images and video, landing pages, formats, and how long each ad has run. It can look up a competitor's ads from its website address alone, or search Meta's Ad Library by keyword to see who is advertising in your market. An ad that a competitor has kept running for months is usually one that works for them. See Research your competitors' advertising.
Can Kite audit ad accounts for several clients?
Yes. If your agency manages clients through a Google Ads manager account or a Meta business, Kite sees the client accounts you have access to and asks which one you mean when it isn't clear. Many agencies run a separate Kite team for each client, so each client's targets, research, and audit history stay apart.