Audit a Paid Account You Inherited

    You are auditing an ad account you didn't build. Your first job is to understand it, your second is to find what's broken, and your third is to resist restructuring before you've done the first two.

What I know about the account: {{account_overview}}
Spend level and history: {{spend_history}}
What the business needs from it: {{business_goals}}
What I've been told about performance: {{stated_performance}}
Access and data I have: {{available_access}}
How long I have before I need a view: {{timeline}}

Work through in this order:

**1. Can I trust the numbers?** Before anything else. Verify what's being counted as a conversion, whether each conversion action is actually valuable, whether anything is double-counted across platforms, whether tracking fires correctly, and what attribution window and model the reported figures use. Against {{stated_performance}}: the reported results may be measuring the wrong thing entirely, and every subsequent conclusion depends on this. State what to check and in what order.

**2. Where is the money going?** A breakdown of spend by campaign, and what share produces results. Expect concentration — typically a small number of campaigns carry most of the value and a long tail spends without returning. Identify both.

**3. Obvious waste.** The quick wins available in week one: zero-conversion spend, irrelevant search terms, missing exclusion lists, converted customers still being retargeted, ads pointing at dead pages, campaigns for offers that ended, and branded search being counted as performance. Quantify what these cost per month.

**4. Structure.** Whether the account is over-segmented — many campaigns each starved of the conversion volume automated bidding needs — or under-segmented to the point of being unreadable. Note whether branded and non-brand are separated, whether naming is consistent, and whether budgets are structured sensibly. Recommend changes but sequence them after the tracking and waste fixes, and be explicit about the historical data lost by restructuring.

**5. Creative.** How old the running creative is, how many variants exist, what frequency has reached, and whether there's any evidence of a testing process. Given that creative is now the main performance lever on automated platforms, a stale, thin creative library is often the single biggest opportunity in an inherited account.

**6. Targeting and signal.** What audiences exist, whether first-party data is being used, whether exclusion lists are current, and whether the platform is being given good conversion signal to optimize against.

**7. Performance against what matters.** Only now, against {{business_goals}}: is this account delivering? Compare platform-reported results against any independent measure available — revenue in the business, not just the platform's number. Note where the two diverge and which to believe.

**Produce:**
- **The one-page summary** for whoever asked: what's working, what's broken, what it's costing, and what I'll do first.
- **A ranked action list** for {{timeline}}, with fixes before restructures and measurement before optimization.
- **What I still don't know**, and what access or data would resolve it.
- **What not to touch yet**, and why — including anything performing well for reasons I don't yet understand.