Independent paid media audit services covering spend reconciliation, ROI verification, agency fees, governance and benchmarking. Six weeks, four phases, one written report your stakeholders can act on.
A paid media audit is an independent review of a company’s paid advertising spend, performed by a firm that does not buy media, sell software, or take agency commissions. The auditor reconciles platform data against invoices, tests fee structures and agency incentives, verifies reported performance against business outcomes, and quantifies any leakage in financial terms.
It is the same discipline a financial auditor applies to a set of accounts — applied instead to the largest discretionary line item on most marketing P&Ls: paid media. Where a financial audit asks “did the numbers in the ledger match what actually happened?”, a paid media audit asks “did the dollars in the media plan match what was actually delivered, billed, and reported?”
The deliverable is a written report — not a dashboard, not a subscription. It documents findings, quantifies the financial impact of each, and recommends specific changes to controls, contracts, or buying practices.
See the paid media audit methodology for the evidence chain, testing standards and report structure behind an engagement.
Every engagement combines some or all of the practices below. Scope is agreed in the engagement letter and priced as one project.
Trace every dollar from media plan to invoice to delivered impression. Verify that what was paid for matches what was served, billed, and reported. Surface fee stacks, undisclosed rebates, and reconciliation errors.
Learn more → 02Connect campaign performance to revenue your finance team can recognise. Test for double-counted conversions, modeled-attribution drift, and demand the advertising did not actually create.
Learn more → 03Audit how your agencies and partners get paid. Identify bonus structures that reward volume over outcomes and clauses that misalign incentives with your P&L.
Learn more → 04Test the governance around your paid media spend — approval workflows, segregation of duties, agency oversight, and exception escalation.
Learn more → 05Benchmark your agency fees, media rates, and performance expectations against category peers. Walk into the next renegotiation or RFP with quantified leverage.
Learn more →Most firms that claim to verify paid media earn money from the platforms or agencies they review. We don’t. Our independence is structural, not stated.
We never plan, buy, or place media. Our revenue cannot grow when your spend grows.
We accept zero rebates, kickbacks, or revenue share from platforms or ad-tech vendors.
We do not sell dashboards, tooling, or licensed analytics. The deliverable is a written report.
Our fee is set in the engagement letter. It does not vary with what we find or what we recommend.
A standard paid media audit follows a fixed structure. Scope is set in the engagement letter; the timeline rarely slips.
30-minute call to understand your media stack, agency arrangements, and audit objectives. Followed by an engagement letter, NDA, and a written scope.
Read-only access to your platforms. We pull historical performance data and gather contracts, rate cards, invoices, and reporting files. We confirm completeness before analysis begins.
We reconcile platform data to invoices and verification tools. We test buying practices, fee structures, performance metrics, and any deviations from agreed terms. Findings are quantified in financial terms.
Drafting, internal review, and a final partner-led readout. You receive a written audit report, supporting schedules, and a presentation to your designated stakeholders.
CFOs, controllers, procurement leaders, and audit committees — usually triggered by one of three events.
The traditional “media audit” emerged in the era of broadcast and print buying — a price-and-pool benchmarking exercise focused on whether an agency was buying inventory at competitive rates. A paid media audit applies the same auditing discipline to today’s digital-first media spend, where the questions are no longer just about price but about delivery, attribution, fee stacks, supply-path transparency, and incentive alignment.
A standard engagement runs six weeks: one week for access and data collection, three weeks for reconciliation and analysis, and two weeks for drafting and the final readout. Larger scopes — multi-market, multi-agency, multi-year — can extend to eight or ten weeks. The timeline is set in the engagement letter and rarely slips.
Engagements start at $100,000 USD for a standard six-week project. Most scopes fall in the $175,000–$450,000 range, depending on the number of channels, markets, and years under review. Fees are fixed in the engagement letter and do not vary with what is found. See full fee detail.
Yes. We require read-only access to platforms and copies of contracts, invoices, and reporting files — most of which sit with the agency. We handle the request professionally and under NDA. In our experience, a well-run agency welcomes a credible third-party review; an agency that resists one is itself a finding.
We recommend clients have at least $2M USD in annual paid media spend for the audit to be cost-effective. Below that level, the recoverable value and optimisation opportunities are unlikely to justify the engagement fee.
A written audit report with supporting schedules, a partner-led readout to your designated stakeholders, and a list of specific, prioritised recommendations. No dashboards, no ongoing subscription, no software to log in to. The findings belong to you.
Our partners reply personally to every enquiry. Expect a response within one business day.