Get a free analysis of current online ad campaign effectiveness

What a real free analysis covers

A campaign-effectiveness analysis worth the word “analysis” looks at four things in order. Skip any one and the diagnosis is incomplete.

Campaign structure comes first. Are search, shopping, and Performance Max separated by intent, or stacked on top of each other competing for the same queries. Is branded traffic isolated into its own campaign with its own budget cap, or buried inside a generic non-brand campaign where it inflates ROAS and hides the leak. Structure problems account for more wasted spend than bid problems do, and a tool that only looks at bids will miss them.

Conversion tracking integrity is second. If the conversion count in Google Ads, GA4, and Shopify do not agree within ten percent of each other, the bidding algorithm is steering on a broken signal. Every dollar after that point is spent on a misread of reality. The Tracking Stack reference is the contract that closes that gap.

Search-term and audience quality is third. On Google, that means reading the last ninety days of search terms the way a stranger would and counting how many describe products the business does not sell. On Meta, that means checking placement breakdowns, age and gender splits against the actual buyer profile, and whether Advantage+ is feeding the algorithm a clean seed audience or scraping the bottom of the funnel.

Bidding-strategy fit is fourth. Target ROAS on a campaign with twelve conversions a month is statistically meaningless. Maximize Conversions on a budget-capped campaign is a different campaign than the dashboard pretends it is. The fit between strategy, conversion volume, and budget is where most automated audits stop reading.

A real analysis answers all four. A free version exists. I built it.

What automated audit tools miss

There are a dozen free “Google Ads grader” tools online. They score the account against a generic template and produce a PDF with a number on the front. The number is meaningless because the template is generic.

What those tools cannot see: whether the conversion actions are configured against the right pages, whether enhanced conversions are firing with hashed email payload, whether the offline-conversion uploader is running on a cadence, whether Performance Max is cannibalizing branded search inside the asset group reports. None of that surfaces through an API scan because the API does not expose the diagnostic context.

What those tools also cannot see: the business behind the account. A 4x ROAS on a furniture brand with a six-month repeat cycle is a different number than a 4x ROAS on a one-time-purchase supplement brand. The first is leaving money on the table by underbidding. The second is barely breaking even after refunds. A tool that does not know which brand it is grading cannot tell you which one you are.

The grader PDFs read confident because they are templated. They are not analyses. They are sales documents for the agency that built the grader.

How to request the real one

The free 25-page Setup Audit PDF on this site is the version I send senior-operator-grade. It is the same checklist I run on every paid audit, written so a founder can walk it section by section against their own account. Account structure, match-type discipline, conversion setup, audience layering, and Performance Max guardrails are each a section. Reading it through once exposes most of the same issues a thousand-dollar agency audit would surface, with the difference being the founder owns the diagnosis at the end.

The PDF is the asynchronous version. The synchronous version is a thirty-minute review I run on accounts that look like a fit after the audit form. Fill the form linked above, attach the access details below, and the PDF lands in inbox immediately. The review slot, if I have capacity, lands within forty-eight hours.

No upsell pitch attached. No “strategy session” disguised as a demo. The audit is the deliverable. If the account ends up needing more than the free analysis, the engagement levels at /pricing cover what each tier includes.

What to send when requesting one

A useful analysis needs three inputs from the requester:

Read-only access to the account. For Google Ads, that is account-level read-only via Google Ads manager link, not screenshots. For Meta, that is Business Manager partner access to the ad account with view-only permissions. Screenshots hide the diagnostic context that lives one click deeper.

The KPIs the business is steering on. Target CPA, target ROAS, blended new-customer cost, or whatever number the founder reviews at month end. The analysis is worthless without knowing what good looks like in the business. A 3x ROAS is excellent in one vertical and bankrupt in another.

Business context in three sentences. What the product is, what the AOV runs, what the gross margin band looks like, and whether the business runs on first-purchase profit or lifetime value. That is the difference between an analysis that reads the dashboard and an analysis that reads the company.

The Wasted Spend Calculator at the top of the audit page is a useful pre-step. Run the numbers through it before requesting the analysis and the conversation starts with the dollar figure already on the table.

On a Shopify decor brand whose Meta account I cross-checked recently, the founder had been told the 2.57x Meta ROAS over the prior quarter was good news. The free analysis surfaced two things the founder had not asked about. The Meta side was running just over a thousand dollars in spend against seven purchases, while the Google PMax side on the same brand was carrying most of the channel mix at a different ROAS the founder had never reconciled across the two platforms. The honest read was that the question was not whether Meta was efficient. The question was whether the cross-platform attribution had ever been audited. It had not.

What you should expect to walk away with

A real free analysis produces three deliverables.

A written diagnosis of the top three leaks in the account, ranked by recoverable dollars. Not a list of forty findings nobody will read. Three, ranked, with the dollar figure attached to each.

A specific recommended sequence for the next thirty days. Not “consider testing” or “evaluate optimization opportunities.” A sequence: fix this on day one, fix this on day seven, measure the delta by day thirty. Sequence matters because most accounts cannot absorb six changes at once without contaminating the signal.

A clear read on whether the account needs a senior operator at all. Plenty of accounts at low spend levels are better off with the PDF and a weekly cadence than with a managed service. The honest version of the analysis says so. That answer is the one most agencies will not give because it disqualifies them from the next call. I will. The solo vs agency comparison at /vs/agency covers when each engagement model fits.

A free analysis worth the word covers all four layers: structure, tracking, search-term and audience quality, and bidding-strategy fit. The grader PDFs do not. Send the read-only access, the KPIs, and the three-sentence business context through the form linked at the top of this page and the senior-operator version lands in inbox immediately. The thirty-minute review follows if the audit form reads as a fit.

/wasted-ad-spend/ is the canonical reference.