Audit

Finding out what you actually have, before anyone spends money changing it.

What it is

Scope varies with the problem. A measurement audit covers tagging, data layer, consent behaviour, conversion definitions, platform configuration and data quality. A media audit covers account structure, supply paths, audience configuration, fee stacks and the gap between platform-reported and business-recorded outcomes. A data audit covers pipelines, models, cost and governance. Most engagements need parts of more than one.

The method is deliberately unglamorous: read the configuration rather than the documentation, query the raw data rather than the dashboards, and test behaviour rather than trusting settings. Documentation describes intent; configuration describes reality, and the gap between them is usually the finding.

Why it matters

Configuration drifts. Platforms change defaults, people leave, agencies rotate, and settings applied for a campaign three years ago are still applied. Nothing errors, so nothing prompts a review.

Automated bidding has raised the cost of that drift considerably. A misconfigured conversion is no longer a reporting inconvenience, it is a spending instruction, acted on within hours and compounded daily.

What’s involved

• Scoping against the questions you need answered, so the audit is not a comprehensive inventory nobody reads.
• Access and evidence gathering - platform access, container exports, raw data, and the existing documentation for comparison.
• Configuration review across measurement, media and data platforms.
• Behavioural testing - what actually fires, under consent and without it, on the devices your customers use.
• Data quality analysis against source systems, because self-consistency is not accuracy.
• Findings ranked by consequence, with an explicit view on what is urgent, what is worth doing, and what to leave alone.
• Debrief with the people who will act on it, not only the people who commissioned it.

Common challenges

• Auditing documentation rather than configuration. The measurement plan says one thing and the container does another; only one of them is real.
• No access, so no evidence. An audit conducted from screenshots and interviews is an opinion about a system nobody looked inside.
• Findings without owners. Nothing on the list is assigned, so everything on it is optional.
• Auditing the incumbent’s work as a procurement exercise, which produces a document designed to win a pitch rather than to fix a problem.

See also

Louder also offers services in: Audit | Strategy | Design | Implementation | Operationalisation | Training