How do I audit an ad account I just inherited?

Day one: measurement, not performance

The temptation is to open the campaign view and start forming opinions. Resist it for a day. Every opinion formed now rests on numbers you have not verified, and if the measurement is wrong then so is everything downstream.

• Which conversion actions exist, and which are counted in the primary conversion column. Accounts routinely count newsletter signups and purchases in the same number, and nobody has noticed for a year.
• Duplicate events. A browser pixel and a server-side event for the same purchase, without a shared event ID, count the sale twice. Test and staff orders firing real events do the same job in reverse.
• Attribution window and model on each platform, written down. You cannot compare anything until you know what you are comparing.
• Timezone and currency on the account against the store. A mismatch produces a permanent one-day smear that people spend months explaining.
• What the purchase value contains: order total with tax and shipping, or subtotal? That changes every ratio before attribution even starts.
• The change history. Who changed what, and when. Half the mysteries in an inherited account are solved on that one screen.

Then reconcile one week of platform-reported revenue against the store. Not to make them match, because they will not, but to establish what the normal gap looks like. The reasons are in why do Meta and Google both claim the same sale.

Day two: structure and spend concentration

• Spend by campaign over 90 days, sorted. This single view usually contains most of the story.
• Spend against conversions at the ad level. Anything with real spend and nothing to show for it is the first list you hand back.
• Search terms on Google and Amazon. Find the queries paying for irrelevant traffic, and check whether a negative keyword list exists at all.
• The branded and non-branded split. If branded search is being counted as growth, the account is more expensive than it looks.
• Whether Performance Max is absorbing branded search that would have converted for free and reporting it as new demand.
• Overlapping audiences bidding against each other, and exclusions that were never applied.
• Budgets that are capped rather than limited, geo targeting nobody has revisited, and dayparting inherited from a different business model.

Day three: creative and copy

• How long each running asset has been live, and its frequency. Inherited accounts are full of ads that died months ago while nobody was watching.
• How many assets carry the spend. Usually far fewer than the account contains.
• Responsive search ad completeness: how many headlines and descriptions exist, and whether pinning has quietly reduced an RSA to a single ad. See can AI write my Google Ads copy.
• Whether the landing pages still exist, still work, and still say what the ads promise.
• What competitors are running, as a baseline for what you are up against rather than as a shopping list.

What not to do in week one

The pressure to demonstrate value quickly is real, and it produces the two most common inherited-account mistakes.

• Do not rebuild. It throws away delivery learning and the historical comparison you need to prove the account improved under you. Earn the right to restructure by understanding what the structure was for.
• Do not change attribution and structure in the same week. You will never be able to read the before and after, and neither will whoever you report to.
• Do not pause everything that looks bad on the surface. Some of it is bad. Some of it is the only thing holding up a product line nobody mentioned.
• Do not promise a number before the measurement is verified. That is how a fixable tracking bug becomes your performance problem.

The deliverable

The output of an audit is not a list of observations. It is a ranked list of changes with money attached to each one, plus the single measurement fix that changes everything downstream. If you cannot say what a finding is worth, it is not a finding. It is a note.

Most of the work above is retrieval and sorting. Muze reads Meta Ads, Google Ads, Amazon Ads and read-only Shopify through one connection, so the ranked spend view and the reconciliation come out of a session rather than a week of exports. Every proposed change previews first, which is the right default for an account you do not know yet. The Google-specific walkthrough is how to audit a Google Ads account.

Related questions

What should I check first in an inherited ad account?

The conversion actions and the attribution settings. If you do not know what the account is counting, you cannot judge any of its numbers, and every recommendation you make inherits the previous owner's assumptions along with the account.

How long should an account audit take?

A focused pass over measurement, structure and creative takes a few days for one account. What takes longer is waiting for enough data to be confident about causes rather than symptoms.

Should I rebuild an inherited account?

Rarely, and not in the first month. A rebuild costs you the delivery learning and the historical baseline, which are the two things that let you demonstrate the account got better on your watch.

How far back should I look?

Ninety days for spend patterns and structure, thirteen months if you need to see seasonality. Anything older is telling you about a different business.

Can an AI assistant run the audit for me?

It can do the retrieval, the ranking and the reconciliation, which is most of the elapsed time. It cannot know your margins, your stock position or your commercial context, so the findings still need somebody to weigh them.

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