Paid acquisition audit

Skill SkillMedev/performance-marketing/skills/paid-acquisition-audit

Audit, test, and scale paid channels with rigorous, data-driven playbooks.

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npx -y skills add SkillMedev/performance-marketing --skill paid-acquisition-audit

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Audits paid acquisition channels for wasted spend and untapped scaling headroom - computing break-even ROAS from gross margin, flagging creative fatigue and saturation, and producing a ranked action list with a dollar impact per item. Use when someone asks "where is my ad budget being wasted", "should I scale this campaign", "why did ROAS drop", or is preparing a budget review or planning to increase paid spend. Do NOT use for designing new creative experiments - use ad-creative-testing instead; for assigning cross-channel conversion credit, use marketing-attribution.

SKILL.md

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Paid Acquisition Audit

A paid acquisition audit surfaces where money is bleeding and where the ceiling on profitable spend has not been reached yet. The costly mistake it prevents is acting on blended numbers: a "healthy" account average routinely hides campaigns burning cash below break-even next to starved winners that could absorb double the budget. The output is a ranked action list with a dollar impact per item - never a general report.

Operating procedure

Work the steps in order. Break-even math (Step 2) must precede waste hunting (Step 3), because "waste" is undefined until the break-even line is drawn for this specific business.

Step 1: Gather inputs

Collect before forming any opinion. Label any estimate a guess and revisit it in the findings.

Gross margin on the product sold through ads. This sets break-even ROAS. If unknown, default to 60% for DTC ecommerce or 80% for SaaS and label it a guess.
A 90-day export of spend, impressions, clicks, conversions, and revenue, broken down by channel, campaign, ad set, and ad. Never audit fewer than 30 days - short windows hide weekly patterns.
Search term reports for Google; placement and frequency reports for Meta and display.
Current daily budgets and impression-share-lost-to-budget per campaign.
Organic rank for the brand terms being bid on, and whether competitors bid on the brand.
Target CAC or payback period, if the business has one.

Step 2: Draw the break-even line

Break-even ROAS = 1 / gross margin. A 60% gross-margin product breaks even at 1.67; anything below that is a cash drain, not "top of funnel." Set target ROAS at least 20% above break-even (2.0 for the 60%-margin case). Then:

Flag every campaign below break-even for more than 14 consecutive days. Shorter dips can be auction noise; 14+ days is structural.
Flag every campaign above target ROAS but spending less than 20% of its daily budget - it is under-delivering and needs bid or audience expansion, not applause.

Compute blended CAC and ROAS at the channel level first, then drill to campaign, ad set, ad. Blended-only analysis is the audit failing at its one job.

Step 3: Hunt waste in spend order

Audit line items from highest spend down - a 10% fix on the biggest campaign beats a 50% fix on the smallest. Check these five patterns:

Branded keywords being bid on where organic rank is position 1 and no competitor bids on the brand - cut unless an incrementality test proves value.
Broad-match keywords with negative ROI in the search term report - add negatives immediately.
Placements or audience segments with CTR below 0.3% on display or Meta - pause them.
Ad sets with no clear winner after 500 impressions per ad - kill the losers; they are taxing the auction.
Dayparting gaps where CPA spikes in specific hours or days but budget does not throttle.

Step 4: Check creative fatigue and saturation

Before recommending any budget increase, verify the winner is not already dying:

Creative fatigue: CTR decay greater than 20% versus the creative's own first-two-weeks average, or Meta frequency above 3.5. A fatigued creative fails harder at higher spend - rotate creative first, then scale. Route new concept development to ad-creative-testing.
Channel saturation: Google impression share above 70% means the auction is nearly topped out; incremental spend buys expensive marginal impressions.

Step 5: Score scaling opportunities

A campaign is scalable only if all three hold: ROAS at least 20% above break-even, impression share lost to budget above 15%, and no saturation signal from Step 4 (frequency below 3.5 on Meta, impression share below 70% on Google). Rank qualifying campaigns by expected incremental revenue at 2x current spend using current ROAS as the proxy, then haircut the projection 15-25% for diminishing returns before presenting it.

Step 6: Produce the ranked action list

Deliver findings in three buckets: (1) immediate cuts - negative-ROI spend to pause today; (2) optimizations - bid, budget, or targeting changes within 7 days; (3) scaling bets - budget increases with the expected outcome stated. Every item gets an estimated monthly dollar impact. Items without a quantified impact are noise - drop them.

Audit checklist (ordered by spend impact)

Copy and work top to bottom; each line is a pass/fail with a dollar consequence.

PAID ACQUISITION AUDIT - [FILL: account] - [FILL: 90-day window]
Gross margin: [FILL]%  ->  Break-even ROAS: [FILL]  Target ROAS: [FILL]

[ ] 1. Any campaign below break-even ROAS 14+ consecutive days?   Cut/fix: $[FILL]/mo
[ ] 2. Branded spend where organic is #1 and no competitor bids?  Cut: $[FILL]/mo
[ ] 3. Broad-match terms with negative ROI in search term report? Negatives: $[FILL]/mo
[ ] 4. Placements/audiences with CTR < 0.3%?                      Pause: $[FILL]/mo
[ ] 5. Ad sets with no winner after 500 impressions/ad?           Kill losers: $[FILL]/mo
[ ] 6. CPA spikes by hour/day with no budget throttle?            Daypart: $[FILL]/mo
[ ] 7. Winners fatigued (CTR decay > 20% or frequency > 3.5)?     Rotate before scaling
[ ] 8. Campaigns passing all three scaling gates?                 Scale: +$[FILL]/mo revenue

Worked line: a Meta prospecting campaign spending $9,000/mo at 1.4 ROAS against a 1.67 break-even, below the line for 22 straight days, loses roughly $0.27 of contribution per revenue dollar - pausing or restructuring it is worth about $1,500/mo, and it goes in bucket 1.

Deliverable

Produce a one-page audit brief containing: the top three actions first (never methodology first), the full three-bucket action list with monthly dollar impact per item, the break-even and target ROAS used, and the data window audited. Run the full audit quarterly; run a light version monthly covering only campaigns that changed materially.

Do NOT

Do not audit fewer than 30 days of data - weekly seasonality will masquerade as trend.
Do not apply a universal "good ROAS" number - break-even is a function of gross margin, and a 2.5 ROAS can be unprofitable at thin margins.
Do not recommend scaling a campaign whose creative is fatiguing; higher budget accelerates the decay.
Do not cut branded spend reflexively when competitors bid on the brand - that spend is defensive, and the test is incrementality, not organic rank alone.
Do not report blended averages as findings; the action lives at campaign and ad-set level.
Do not bury the lead in methodology - the action list goes first.

Quality bar

Before the brief ships, verify: every flagged item cites the specific threshold it violated; every action has a monthly dollar impact; the scaling bets each pass all three gates (ROAS margin, budget-limited impression share, no saturation); and the total of bucket 1 cuts is stated as a single reclaimable monthly figure. If budget pacing across the month is the real problem rather than allocation, route to budget-pacing.