The Real Cost of Free Ad Audits (And What to Get Instead)

If you've ever searched for “free Google Ads audit” or “free Facebook Ads audit,” you've probably noticed that every agency on the first page of Google is eager to look at your account for free. No strings attached. No obligation. Just a friendly, no-cost review of your ad performance.

Sounds generous, right?

It isn't. Free ad audits are one of the oldest sales tactics in the agency world, and once you understand how they work, you'll never look at them the same way again. This guide breaks down exactly why free audits exist, what they consistently miss, how audit pricing works across the market, and what you should look for if you genuinely want to improve your ad performance.

Why Free Ad Audits Exist (Hint: It's Not to Help You)

Let's be direct: a free audit is a sales tool. The agency offering it is not doing you a favor. They are investing 30 to 60 minutes of a junior account manager's time to generate a pitch deck disguised as an audit report.

Here's the typical playbook:

1. You submit your ad account access. The agency now has login credentials or viewer access to your Google Ads, Meta Ads, or both.
2. A junior team member runs an automated tool. Tools like Optmyzr, Adalysis, or even Google's own Recommendations tab generate a list of “issues” in minutes.
3. The results get packaged into a scary-looking report. Red flags everywhere. Wasted spend highlighted in bold. Performance gaps framed as urgent.
4. You get a call to “walk through the findings.” Which is actually a sales call where they present just enough problems to make you anxious, but not enough detail to fix anything yourself.
5. The pitch lands. “We found $X,000 in wasted spend. We can fix all of this for you — our retainer starts at...”

This is not cynicism. This is the documented business model. Most agencies acquire 30 to 50 percent of their new clients through free audit funnels. The economics only work because the audit itself is shallow enough to produce at scale.

What Free Audits Actually Miss

The problem with free audits isn't just bias — it's depth. When you only spend 30 to 60 minutes on an account, entire categories of problems are invisible. Here's what consistently gets overlooked:

1. Conversion Tracking Gaps

This is the single biggest issue in e-commerce ad accounts, and free audits almost never catch it. Broken or misconfigured conversion tracking means every metric in the account is wrong — ROAS, CPA, conversion rate, all of it. We've audited accounts where the Google Ads conversion tag was double-firing on every purchase, inflating ROAS by 80 percent. The previous “free audit” from another agency never checked. They just looked at the surface numbers and called them bad.

2. Product Feed Quality (Google Shopping)

For e-commerce brands running Shopping or Performance Max campaigns, the product feed is the foundation of everything. Incorrect GTINs, missing product categories, poor titles, suppressed products — these issues directly impact impression share and cost per click. Automated audit tools don't connect to your Merchant Center. They can't see feed-level problems. A proper audit checks your feed health, disapproval rates, and title optimization against competitors. Our complete Google Ads audit guide walks through exactly how to evaluate this.

3. Attribution and Data Misalignment

Post-iOS 14.5, Meta Ads attribution is genuinely complicated. Free audits treat Meta's reported ROAS as gospel. A proper audit cross-references platform data against Shopify or GA4 revenue, checks Conversions API (CAPI) event match quality, and identifies where attribution is over- or under-counting. We recently audited an account where Meta was claiming a 5.2x ROAS, but the actual blended ROAS based on verified revenue was 2.8x. The brand had been scaling based on inflated numbers for months. Our Facebook Ads audit guide covers this in detail.

4. Creative Fatigue and Audience Overlap

Free audits rarely analyze creative performance over time. They'll tell you “your CTR is below benchmark” without diagnosing whether that's a targeting problem, a creative fatigue problem, or an audience saturation problem. Each requires a fundamentally different fix. Similarly, audience overlap between ad sets is a silent budget killer that requires manual analysis of the Audience Overlap tool — something no automated audit does.

5. Unit Economics Alignment

An audit without context on your margins, shipping costs, return rates, and customer lifetime value is just pattern matching. A ROAS of 3x might be incredible for a high-margin skincare brand and catastrophic for a low-margin electronics retailer. Free audits never ask about your unit economics because they don't need to — the goal is to sell, not to solve. If you don't know your break-even ROAS, use our free break-even ROAS calculator before evaluating any audit recommendations.

Ad Audit Pricing: An Honest Breakdown of the Market

If you've been searching for “Google Ads audit cost” or trying to figure out what a fair audit price looks like, here is the honest landscape:

The pricing gap between free and paid is significant, but so is the value gap. A $500 audit that finds a conversion tracking error saving you $3,000 per month in wasted spend pays for itself six times over in the first month alone. A free audit that misses that same error costs you $36,000 over the next year.

The question isn't whether you can afford a paid audit. The question is whether you can afford the problems a free audit won't find.

Real-World Examples: Free Audit vs. Paid Audit Findings

To make this concrete, here are three scenarios drawn from actual accounts we've audited (details anonymized). In each case, the brand had received a free audit from another agency before coming to us.

What a Genuinely Useful Audit Looks Like

Whether you hire BTB Media or someone else entirely, here is what a genuinely useful audit should include. Use this as a checklist when evaluating any audit provider:

• Conversion tracking verification — Not just “is a tag installed?” but “is the tag firing correctly on every conversion event, with the right value, deduplicated across platforms?”
• Platform-to-backend revenue reconciliation — Comparing what Google and Meta report against what Shopify, WooCommerce, or your ERP actually recorded.
• Product feed audit (for Shopping/PMax) — Disapproval rates, title optimization, category accuracy, GTIN coverage, and competitive benchmarking.
• Account structure analysis — Campaign architecture, naming conventions, ad group segmentation, and whether the structure supports the bidding strategy being used.
• Creative performance timeline — Not just current metrics, but how creative performance has trended over weeks and months. Fatigue curves, winner/loser patterns, and testing velocity.
• Unit economics integration — Recommendations framed against your actual margins, AOV, LTV, and break-even ROAS — not generic benchmarks.
• Prioritized action plan with revenue estimates — Not a list of 50 things to fix, but a ranked list of 5 to 10 high-impact changes with estimated revenue impact for each.

How BTB Media Approaches Audits Differently

We are transparent about where we sit in this market. BTB Media is a performance marketing consultancy focused exclusively on e-commerce and D2C brands. We offer audits, consulting, and account management. Here is what makes our audits different:

• E-commerce specialization. We don't audit SaaS accounts, lead gen accounts, or local service businesses. Every framework, benchmark, and recommendation is built for product-based online businesses.
• No pressure to retain. Our audit deliverable is designed to be useful whether you hire us for ongoing management or not. You get a written report with specific, implementable recommendations. Take it to another agency, give it to your in-house team, or use it as a hiring brief — it works regardless.
• Revenue-first prioritization. We don't list 50 problems sorted by category. We rank every finding by estimated revenue impact so you know exactly where to start.
• Cross-platform analysis. Most e-commerce brands run both Google and Meta. We audit them together, because the interaction between platforms — attribution overlap, budget allocation, audience duplication — is where the biggest opportunities hide.

How to Decide What's Right for Your Business

Not every brand needs a paid audit. Here is a simple framework for deciding:

A free audit might be enough if: You are spending less than $5,000 per month on ads, you are managing your own account, and you just want a quick sanity check to see if anything is obviously broken. Go in with eyes open about the sales pitch that will follow.

A paid audit is worth it if: You are spending $10,000 or more per month, you suspect your current setup isn't performing as well as it should, you are considering switching agencies, or your ROAS has been declining without a clear explanation. At this spend level, even a 10 percent efficiency improvement from a $1,000 audit saves $12,000 or more annually.

An enterprise audit makes sense if: You are spending $100,000 or more per month across multiple platforms, you have an internal team or agency managing the accounts, and you need a strategic-level review that covers attribution modeling, organizational efficiency, and cross-channel budget optimization.

Frequently Asked Questions