What a paid media audit should cost, and what you get at each price

Ask five providers what a paid media audit costs and you'll get five answers between zero and twenty thousand euros, all describing work that sounds roughly identical. That spread isn't a market failure. It's four genuinely different products sharing one word.

Here's what separates them, and what you should expect to get at each price.

What you're actually paying for

Strip away the deck and every audit is four things, in ascending order of cost:

• Data extraction. Pulling the numbers out of the platforms. A script can do this, and increasingly does.
• Pattern matching. Comparing those numbers to thresholds. Also largely automatable, which is why free audit tools exist and why they're occasionally useful.
• Judgement. Deciding which breached threshold matters for your business and which is a rule that doesn't apply to you. Not automatable, and this is the bulk of what you pay for.
• Independence. Whether the person telling you what's wrong stands to gain from the answer. Free at point of sale, expensive in every other sense.

Price tracks the last two. Any provider can do the first two.

Free: the sales document

Most free audits come from agencies that want to manage your account. That doesn't make them worthless, but it does make them a specific genre: a document engineered to find enough wrong to justify a change of agency, and not so much wrong that the account looks unsalvageable.

You can predict the findings before you read them. Account structure needs rebuilding. Tracking is incomplete. There's untapped opportunity in a channel the agency happens to specialise in. The recommendation at the end is always the same recommendation.

“A free audit answers the question the auditor wants you to ask.”

Take them, read them, and treat them as competitive intelligence about the agency rather than diagnosis of your account. If three agencies pitch you and all three flag the same specific problem, that problem is probably real. That's a genuinely useful way to use free audits.

What to refuse

Any free audit that requires edit access to your account. Read-only is sufficient for diagnosis, always. A request for edit rights before you've signed anything is a request you should decline.

Under €500: the tool report

At this price you're buying automated pattern matching with a light human pass. Software connects to your account, checks it against a fixed rule list, and generates a scored report. Some of these tools are good, and for a small account they're the right answer.

What you get is a list of rule breaches. What you don't get is anyone deciding whether those rules apply to you. A tool will flag your 60-day conversion lag as a tracking problem. It doesn't know you sell kitchens.

Worth buying if

You spend under about €3,000 a month, you run a single channel, and you want a competent checklist run against your account without paying for someone's time. Below that spend level, a consultant's fee is a meaningful share of your media budget, which is hard to justify.

€500 to €1,500: one channel, done properly

This is where a person reviews your account and reaches conclusions about your business. Expect one channel in real depth: campaign structure, spend efficiency, audience logic, creative performance, and whether your conversion tracking is telling the truth. Expect a report in the range of 10 to 15 pages, and a call where someone talks you through it.

The useful test at this band is whether findings arrive with numbers attached. “Frequency is high” is an opinion. “Frequency is 6.2 against a 4.0 ceiling, here's the report where you can see it, here's what it's costing you” is a finding. My own Snapshot Audit sits at €697 for exactly this scope, and I'd apply the same test to anyone else's.

What you shouldn't expect at this price is cross-channel analysis, attribution modelling, or competitive benchmarking. One channel, examined properly, is a fair day's work.

€1,500 to €3,500: the full cross-channel audit

Multi-channel work costs more for a reason that isn't just hours: the interesting findings live in the gaps between platforms. Google and Meta will each claim the same conversion. Your programmatic spend will show a ROAS that assumes nobody would have bought otherwise. No single-platform view catches any of that.

At this band you should get up to three channels, a genuine attribution review covering pixels, server-side events, and your analytics setup, creative analysis by format and audience, competitive benchmarking from the platform ad libraries, and a prioritised action matrix rather than a list. Twenty to twenty-five pages, and a longer strategy session.

This is where the gaps in your monthly report become visible, because the audit reconstructs the numbers independently instead of re-presenting what the platforms reported.

€5,000 and up: consultancy and enterprise

Above roughly five thousand euros you're usually buying one of three things: a very large account where the work genuinely takes weeks, a supply-chain or contract audit requiring legal and financial review, or a consultancy brand name you can put in front of a board.

All three can be worth it. The middle one especially: if you buy programmatic at scale, a supply-chain audit is a different discipline from a performance audit, and the published transparency work suggests it pays for itself.

Note what that study does and does not say. It's about the UK programmatic supply chain, not about Google or Meta self-serve buying, where you transact directly with the platform and there's no comparable chain of intermediaries. Anyone quoting supply-chain leakage figures at you to sell an audit of your Google Ads account is stretching the evidence.

How the cost compares to what you already pay

The right frame isn't “is this expensive.” It's “what share of a year's management fees is this.” Agency management is commonly priced as a percentage of spend.

Run your own numbers. If you spend €40,000 a month and pay 12% in management, that's €4,800 a month, or €57,600 a year, to the people who built the account. A one-off independent review at €1,597 is under 3% of that annual fee. If it finds nothing, you've spent 3% of your management cost confirming your agency is doing well, which is information worth having at renewal.

There's also a structural point in that pricing model worth sitting with: when the fee is a percentage of spend, the agency's revenue rises when your budget rises, whether or not the extra budget worked. That isn't dishonesty, it's an incentive. I've written about how to test it in is your agency marking up your media.

Five tests for any audit proposal

The honest summary

Under €3,000 a month in spend, use a tool or run the checklist yourself. Between €5,000 and €30,000, one channel audited properly at €500 to €1,500 is the efficient choice. Above €30,000 a month, or across more than two channels, the cross-channel audit earns its fee mostly by finding the double-counting between platforms. Above six figures a month, add a supply-chain review to the performance one, because they answer different questions.

And whatever you pay, the test of a good audit is the same: you should be able to verify every finding yourself, in your own account, in the ten minutes after you read it.