A full paid media audit takes days. It covers campaign architecture, attribution methodology, creative fatigue, bidding strategy, audience overlap, and a dozen other layers. Most marketing teams don't have the time or the access to do one themselves.
But there are five numbers that cut through most of that complexity. They are available in every major ad platform. Across retail, travel, FMCG, and real estate accounts in MENA and Europe, at least three of these five are in the danger zone in the majority of accounts reviewed.
Here they are.
Weekly frequency, by retargeting campaign
Frequency is the average number of times a single person has seen your ad in a given period. Most platforms report it at the campaign level over 7 days.
When frequency climbs above 4 in a week for a retargeting campaign, you're no longer running advertising, you're running annoyance. Performance data shows CPMs rising, CTR falling, and conversion rates declining. You're paying more to reach the same people with diminishing returns.
Where to find it: Meta Ads Manager (Delivery column), Google Ads (Reach report), DV360 (Frequency report), TikTok Ads Manager (Delivery insights).
Audience overlap percentage
If two of your campaigns are targeting overlapping audiences, they are competing against each other in the auction. You're bidding against yourself, which drives up CPMs and fragments the algorithm's ability to learn.
In fragmented accounts (which describes most accounts I've audited), it's common to find 40–60% audience overlap across active ad sets. This is one of the fastest things to fix, and the CPM improvement after consolidation is usually immediate.
Where to find it: Meta Audience Overlap tool (under Audiences in Ads Manager). For Google and DV360, pull impression share data as a proxy, unusually high impression share on your own brand terms can indicate self-competition.
Learning phase budget percentage
When a Meta or Google ad set enters the learning phase, the algorithm is still gathering data. Performance is unstable, costs are higher than they'll eventually be, and making changes resets the clock. A well-managed account minimises time in the learning phase by consolidating campaigns and avoiding unnecessary edits.
In highly fragmented accounts, lots of small budgets, lots of audience variations, frequent changes, a large proportion of total spend can be sitting in learning at any given moment. This is invisible waste: you're paying for uncertainty rather than performance.
Where to find it: Meta Ads Manager, Delivery column, filter for "Learning" status. Google Performance Planner shows learning phase impact estimates.
ROAS gap: 7-day click vs 1-day click attribution
Most campaigns are measured on a 7-day click, 1-day view attribution window by default. This means a conversion is credited to an ad if someone clicked it in the last 7 days, or viewed it in the last day.
Switch to a 1-day click window, the most conservative, most honest measurement, and pull the same campaign's ROAS. If your 7-day ROAS is 8× and your 1-day ROAS is 2.5×, that gap is telling you something important about how much credit the platform is taking for conversions it may not have caused.
Where to find it: Meta Ads Manager, Attribution Setting column (customise columns to add different attribution windows). Compare side by side.
CPA variance between campaigns with identical objectives
Pull all conversion campaigns with the same objective (purchase, lead, etc.) and compare CPA across them. If two campaigns targeting similar audiences with similar budgets have a CPA of €15 and €48 respectively, one of them has a structural problem, bad creative, wrong audience, misaligned bidding strategy, or a landing page mismatch.
High CPA variance is the fastest way to identify underperforming campaigns that are dragging the account average down while the agency's report focuses on the aggregate. The average looks fine. The individual breakdown does not.
Where to find it: Any platform's campaign view, sorted by CPA or cost per conversion. Segment by objective to compare like-for-like.
What to Do With These Numbers
Run this check on your live account. Take a screenshot. Then look at how many of the five are in the danger zone. If it's three or more, you have a structural problem that a monthly report will not surface. Agency reporting is built around averages and aggregates that obscure exactly these issues.
"The average looks fine. The breakdown is where the problems live."
Download the full checklist: These five numbers are part of the broader 10-Point Paid Media Audit Checklist, a free PDF that covers all ten dimensions of a proper audit, mapped to every major platform.
If you find problems in these numbers and want to understand the root cause, or if you want an independent set of eyes on the full account, that's exactly what a MediaAudit engagement is for.
Want to know where your specific account stands?
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