An independent read on your marketing performance.
A fixed-scope audit of your paid accounts, measurement and agency delivery — commissioned when the board wants to know whether the money is working, and whether the reporting can be trusted.
Two questions sit behind every audit: is the money working — and can the reporting be trusted?
Most audit conversations start the same way. Spend has grown, the monthly report is green, and somewhere between the dashboard and the revenue line the story stops adding up. The CEO cannot say with confidence what the marketing budget returned last quarter, and everyone positioned to answer has an interest in the answer.
An independent digital marketing audit resolves that. Sam Park reviews the accounts, the measurement and the agency relationship from the client’s side of the table, and reports what the evidence shows — in writing, in commercial terms, to the people accountable for the spend. It is commissioned by CEOs and boards checking a growing budget, by incoming marketing leaders inheriting accounts they did not build, and by companies deciding whether an agency contract deserves renewal.
What gets audited.
Google Ads & paid accounts
An independent Google Ads audit built from the account itself — structure, settings, search-term hygiene, bidding strategy, audience overlap and the change history. Meta and other paid platforms are reviewed on the same basis. The question throughout: where is the money going, and what is it actually buying?
Tracking & attribution architecture
Conversion tracking, tag configuration, analytics and attribution settings are verified against real transactions and enquiries. If the tracking is wrong, every performance number downstream is wrong with it — so this layer is examined before any channel is judged.
Agency scope & reporting integrity
A performance review of the agency relationship itself: what the contract promises, what the accounts show was delivered, and whether the monthly report describes the same reality as the platform data. Fees, scope creep and reporting choices are examined without any interest in the outcome.
Organic foundations
Where organic search is part of the mix, the audit covers technical foundations, content performance and how the channel is measured — including how visible the brand remains as AI-generated answers reshape search. Deeper AI-visibility work sits with the AI search audit.
Evidence first. Judgement second.
Evidence from the accounts, not the dashboard
The audit is built from the raw material — account structures, change histories, search-term reports, billing records, tag configurations — not from the summary slide the agency prepared. Dashboards describe performance; accounts prove it. Where the two disagree, the audit says so.
Measurement verified before performance is judged
No channel, agency or campaign is assessed until the numbers it is being assessed on have been checked. Many underperforming accounts turn out to have a measurement problem underneath the media one — and fixing the media first, on broken data, just produces confident errors.
Findings argued in writing
Every finding is tied to specific evidence in the accounts, so it can be checked, challenged or handed to the agency for response. Nothing rests on opinion or on trust in the auditor — the document stands on what the data shows.
The discipline comes from ten-plus years of operating experience — running the accounts, not just reviewing them. An auditor who has built and managed paid media at scale knows where problems hide, and what a well-run account actually looks like.
What you receive.
Written findings
A full findings document covering paid accounts, measurement, agency delivery and organic foundations — each finding stated plainly and anchored to the evidence behind it. It reads as a factual record, not a persuasion piece.
A board-ready summary
The commercial picture in plain English: what is being spent, what it is returning, where the reporting can be trusted and where it cannot. Written for directors who will never open a Google Ads account, and short enough to be read before the meeting.
Prioritised fixes
A sequenced list of what to change, ordered by commercial impact — from tracking repairs that must come first, to account restructures, to scope and reporting changes for the agency. Actionable by your existing team or agency; no part of it requires hiring the auditor.
An audit should not be a sales document.
Most free agency audits are pitches — the findings conveniently match the services the auditor sells. This one is not. Sam earns no media margin, resells no services and has no delivery team waiting for the work the audit might generate. The engagement is not a pitch for ongoing work: it ends when the findings are delivered, and there is nothing to sell after.
That independence cuts both ways. If the agency is doing good work, the audit documents it and the board gets the reassurance it paid for. If the problems sit inside the business — a broken brief, an impossible target, tracking nobody maintained — the audit says that too. The value is a read on reality from someone with no position in it.
For decisions that are expensive to get wrong.
The audit suits Australian companies with meaningful paid media spend and a genuine question over it: a board approving next year’s budget, a CEO weighing an agency renewal, a new CMO who wants an independent baseline before owning the numbers. It also serves as the diagnostic phase ahead of a broader engagement — many fractional CMO and executive advisory arrangements begin with exactly this review.
The pattern the method is built on is common: reported performance and commercial reality drifting apart, with a measurement fault underneath. One engagement began as precisely that — an account whose numbers could not be reconciled — and ended, once measurement was rebuilt and spend restructured against it, in a 90% reduction in cost per acquisition alongside 8x organic growth. The fix started with the audit, not the media.
The judgement behind the findings comes from 10+ years advising 1,000+ brands, with $15M+ in client revenue driven along the way. More on that record is on the about page. eCommerce boards wanting the governance framing before commissioning anything can start with the whitepaper eCommerce Marketing Effectiveness — it sets out the questions an audit exists to answer.
Asked before most audits.
What access does the audit need?
Read-only access to the ad accounts, analytics and tag management — granted to a named account and revoked the moment the audit ends. Nothing in the accounts is changed, paused or edited during the review.
Contracts, invoices and recent agency reports are also useful, since part of the audit is comparing what was promised, what was billed and what the accounts show.
Does our agency need to know about the audit?
That is the client’s call, and both approaches work. Some companies commission the audit quietly on their own access; others tell the agency openly, which tends to be healthy — a good agency has nothing to fear from an independent review and often welcomes one.
Either way the process stays professional. Findings are put factually, agencies are given the evidence behind anything critical, and the audit is never used to ambush anyone.
What if the agency is actually doing a good job?
Then the audit says so, in writing, with the evidence — which is one of the most useful outcomes it can produce. A documented independent endorsement ends an internal argument, protects a good agency from unfair blame, and lets the board redirect its attention to whatever the real constraint is.
An audit with no stake in the answer is free to reach it.
How is an audit different from ongoing advisory?
An audit is a fixed-scope engagement with a defined finish line: findings delivered, summary presented, done. Ongoing arrangements such as executive advisory or a fractional CMO role are continuing relationships with standing responsibilities.
Some clients go on to one of those after an audit, but the audit is complete in itself and carries no obligation to continue.
What does the audit cover — and what does it not?
It covers paid media accounts, tracking and attribution, agency scopes and reporting, and organic foundations where relevant — the scope is agreed in writing before work begins. It does not include implementing the fixes: the deliverable is a prioritised list your team or agency can act on, with the reasoning documented.
Where deeper specialist work is warranted, such as an AI search visibility audit, that is scoped separately rather than smuggled in.
Let’s talk about what’s next.
For executive advisory, fractional CMO, AI search strategy or speaking enquiries.
sam@sampark.com.au