The first thing I check in any ad account
Most audits start with the campaigns. Mine starts one layer down: do the numbers even agree with each other?
Pick one week. Pull spend and purchases from three places — the ad platform, the MMP, and your own warehouse or dashboard. Line them up. If they match within a few percent, good; the rest of the audit is about performance. If they don’t, everything built on top of them is guesswork, and that’s what we fix first.
A few things that come up again and again:
- The MMP and the ad platform disagree on spend. I’ve seen this off by 6× on a live account. Usually a reporting integration is double-counting or reading the wrong field.
- Purchase events fire twice. One from the SDK, one from a server callback, no de-duplication between them. Revenue looks great; it isn’t.
valuevsvalue_2. The SDK is sending the price in one field and the platform is optimising on the other, so the algorithm is bidding on noise.- A metric with the wrong denominator. Cost-per-something looks like it’s improving because the thing you’re dividing by quietly changed.
None of this is glamorous and nobody briefs you to do it. But it’s the difference between “we reallocated budget and CPP dropped 40%” being a real result and being an artefact of a tracking bug.
The fix is usually a day or two of work: reconcile the sources, kill the duplicate events, agree on definitions, write it down. Then — and only then — we start moving money.
If you’re not sure your numbers are trustworthy, that’s the free call: book 30 minutes and I’ll tell you what I’d check first.