I've audited hundreds of thousands of dollars in B2B ad spend. Every account wastes budget somewhere.
You don't need me in the account to find the obvious leaks. You need 30 minutes and this checklist.
Before you start
Pull up your account with three tabs open: the campaign view, the search terms report (Google) or demographics report (LinkedIn), and your CRM's lead list for the last 30 days. You're checking the story these three tell against each other, not just staring at one dashboard.
Minutes 0 to 10: Tracking, first
Don't look at performance yet. If tracking is broken, every number after this is noise.
- Confirm conversion actions are actually firing. Load your site in an incognito window, complete a test conversion, and watch it show up in the platform within a few minutes.
- Check that leads counted in the ad platform match leads showing up in your CRM for the same date range. A gap here means something is dropping between the form and the CRM, and no targeting fix will solve it.
- Confirm you're not double-counting. Duplicate pixels or overlapping conversion actions inflate results and make bad campaigns look fine.
Minutes 10 to 18: Where the money is actually going (Google)
Open the search terms report and sort by cost.
- Scan the top 20 terms by spend. Flag anything that's a phrasing near-miss for your actual offer. These are silent budget leaks.
- Check match types. Broad match with no negative keyword list is the single most common way B2B accounts bleed spend on irrelevant traffic.
- Look at impression share lost to budget. If it's high on your best-converting campaign, you're leaving cheap, proven conversions on the table.
Minutes 10 to 18: Where the money is actually going (LinkedIn)
- Check the demographics report against your actual ICP. Job titles, company size, and seniority drift over time as the algorithm optimizes for delivery, not fit.
- Confirm you're not running Audience Network unless you've deliberately decided to. It expands reach at the cost of placement quality.
- Compare cost per lead by campaign objective. Lead gen forms and website conversions often perform very differently for the same audience, and most accounts never test both.
Minutes 18 to 25: The creative gut check
- How many ad variations are actually live per ad group or campaign? One or two ads getting all the budget with nothing testing against them means you're guessing, not learning.
- When was the creative last refreshed? B2B creative fatigues slower than B2C, but six-plus months on the same three ads is still too long.
- Does the ad's specific claim match what the landing page says in the first five seconds? Mismatches here kill conversion rate even when the click was well-targeted.
Minutes 25 to 30: The one number that matters
Pull cost per lead by campaign, then pull close rate by campaign from the CRM. Rank campaigns by cost per closed deal, not cost per lead.
The campaign with the cheapest leads and the campaign with the most revenue are rarely the same one. This is usually the single biggest finding in any audit, and it's the one number most dashboards never show side by side.
What to do with what you find
Don't touch budget yet. Fix tracking gaps first, since they invalidate everything else. Then fix the obvious leaks: bad search terms, drifted targeting, stale creative. Only after that, revisit budget allocation based on cost per closed deal, not cost per lead.
I won't promise this replaces a full audit. It won't catch attribution issues that need CRM-level access, or landing page problems that need a proper conversion audit. But it'll catch the obvious leaks in about the time it took you to read this.
👉 Want the deeper version, with someone else's eyes on it? Book a free 30-minute audit and I'll walk your account live.