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Paid media audit for MENA and GCC brands
The playbooks that work in Western Europe misfire in the Gulf, and the misfire is usually invisible in the reporting. This audit is built for accounts running in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the wider region, by someone who bought media there for years.
Regional ad budgets are growing faster than the expertise to spend them well, which is the condition under which accounts quietly get worse while the reported numbers get better.
I spent several years inside Starcom and the Publicis network across MENA, then moved to the platform side at Criteo. I've sat on both sides of the same auction, and I've written the kind of monthly report I now get asked to review. That's the vantage point this audit comes from.
What's structurally different about the region
1. Audiences exhaust faster
In Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or Kuwait, the pool of users matching your customer profile is a fraction of the equivalent in the US or Western Europe. Retargeting audiences exhaust quickly, frequency climbs, and you end up serving the same person eight to twelve ads a week. The budget looks efficient because the CPA holds, but you're buying the same conversion repeatedly.
2. Social is a discovery engine, not a retargeting channel
Consumers across the region use Instagram and TikTok to find products rather than to be reminded of them. A large share of your site visitors arrive already carrying intent. Retargeting them taxes your own organic reach and books the result as paid performance.
3. Attribution conventions favour the agency
A great deal of regional activity still runs on 7-day click, 1-day view attribution. In markets with short sales cycles and near-universal mobile usage, view-through credit inflates retargeting numbers substantially. Somebody scrolling past a banner is not somebody the banner persuaded.
4. Trading arrangements are less examined
Regional agency arrangements are often structured as a percentage of spend, which means the agency's revenue rises when your budget rises, whether or not the extra budget worked. That isn't dishonest, but it is an incentive, and it deserves the same scrutiny in Dubai and Riyadh that it now gets in London.
I've written up how to test your own chain in is your agency marking up your media.
The 10-point checklist works on any account, in any market, in about 30 minutes.
What the audit finds most often
Across retail, travel, beauty, and real estate accounts I've reviewed in the GCC, one pattern recurs: 60 to 75% of budget sits in retargeting or conversion-stage campaigns, with under 30% going to prospecting. Short-term ROAS looks excellent. New customer acquisition is flat. Brand search volume isn't growing. And the agency's recommendation for next quarter is to increase retargeting spend.
That's an observation from my own audit work rather than a published study, and it's the reason the first thing I pull is always the spend split by objective. The full argument is in why MENA brands over-invest in retargeting.
The diagnostic you can run today: pull 90 days of data and split spend and conversions by campaign objective. If more than half your budget sits in retargeting or conversion campaigns aimed at existing visitors, you have a structural imbalance, whatever the ROAS column says.
What you receive
- Up to 3 channels
- Full funnel, prospecting to CRM audiences
- Creative breakdown by format and audience
- Attribution review, including window conventions
- Competitor benchmarking via ad library
- 20 to 25 page report and action matrix
- 60 minute call, 2 week email follow-up
- Delivered in 7 to 10 business days
- Everything in the Full Performance Audit
- Retargeting and audience architecture rebuild
- Ad tech stack assessment: DSP, DCO, and feed
- 90 day roadmap with budget allocation
- Competitive landscape deep-dive
- Stakeholder presentation deck
- 90 minute strategy session
- Delivered in 12 to 15 business days
Both tiers are payable 30% upfront and 70% on delivery. If you're entering the region rather than already spending in it, the Growth Strategy Sprint is the right starting point, because there's no account history to audit yet.
Who this is for
A good fit if
- You spend €5K or more a month in one or more GCC markets
- A regional agency or network runs your account
- Retargeting ROAS looks strong and new customers have flattened
- You're planning entry into Saudi Arabia or the UAE
- You want a European-standard review of a regional account
Not a good fit if
- You need someone to run the account day to day
- You want a media plan rather than a review of the one you have
- You need the audit to support a decision already taken
- You can't grant read-only platform access
Common questions
Which markets do you cover?
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman, plus Lebanon and Egypt. Audits are delivered remotely from Barcelona, with calls scheduled to Gulf Standard Time.
Can you deliver the report in Arabic?
Reports are written in English. Stakeholder presentations in the Growth Strategy Sprint can be adapted for a bilingual audience on request.
Do you audit accounts run by a regional network?
Yes, and that's the most common engagement. I spent several years inside Starcom and the Publicis network in MENA, so the reporting conventions, the trading arrangements, and the language of a monthly review are all familiar. That familiarity is what the audit is for.
Will you tell me my agency is bad?
Usually not, because usually they aren't. Most of what I find is structural: an account built for a business that has changed, or a measurement setup nobody has revisited. The report separates what your agency chose from what the platform defaulted to, which is a more useful distinction than a verdict.
Get a regional read on your account
A free 30 minute call, scheduled to your time zone. Bring your last monthly report and I'll tell you what's missing from it.
Book a free discovery call Or email e.iek@mediaaudit.digital