Media Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide to Optimizing Your Paid Media Strategy in 2025

With so many advertising platforms, so many established formats, and so many types of segmentation, objectives, and bidding systems, it's easy to lose sight of which variables and elements of a campaign are truly driving business growth. Therefore, a paid media audit is key to optimizing advertising investment, identifying opportunities for improvement, and ensuring that every dollar invested is aligned with your business's strategic objectives.

At Bunker DB, we believe in the power of data to make smart, performance-based decisions. Below, we guide you through a 7-step process for conducting an effective audit of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other paid media.

What is a Media Audit?

A paid media audit is a detailed analysis of paid media investment, evaluating the efficiency of advertising campaigns, the quality of traffic generated, and the return on investment (ROAS).

This process allows you to:

• Identify which campaigns are generating real impact.
• Optimize budget segmentation and distribution.
• Detect investment leaks in unprofitable media.
• Improve creative strategy and ad relevance.

Step-by-Step Guide to Performing a Paid Media Audit

1. Identify all active Paid Media sources

The first step is to map all active campaigns on the various paid media platforms. Prioritizing the largest-budget media outlets will allow you to save analytical time while maintaining statistically reliable results:

• Google Ads (Search, Display, Shopping, YouTube)
• Meta Ads (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger)
• TikTok Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Programmatic Advertising (DV360, Sizmek, The Trade Desk)
• Retail Media (Amazon, Mercado Ads)

2. Centralizes information and normalizes data

For efficient auditing, it's essential to centralize all data in a single analysis platform. At Bunker DB, we use artificial intelligence technology to consolidate information from multiple sources and standardize it for further analysis.

• Extract data from each advertising platform.
• Unify key metrics: ROAS, CPC, CTR, conversion rate, CPA.
• Create cross-platform comparative analysis dashboards.

3. Evaluate the structure of the campaigns

Campaigns are often created incrementally, with a combination of logics that may conflict with each other. Evaluate whether your campaign structure follows these best practices:

• Separation by objective: Performance (sales, leads) vs. Branding.
• Funnel organization: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion.
• Segmentation strategy: Custom audiences vs. prospecting.
• Ad structure: Creatives aligned to each funnel phase.

If you find duplicate campaigns, campaigns with unclear objectives, or campaigns with overlapping segmentations, this is your opportunity to optimize.

4. Review the performance of your ads and audiences

Each platform behaves differently, and it's clear to us that audiences respond differently depending on the medium. The uses and customs of each medium, their specific codes for interacting with advertising, are often very different. Analyze:

• Top 5 best-performing campaigns (most efficient ROAS and CPA).
• Audiences that generate higher conversions (lookalikes, retargeting, first-party data).
• Ad formats with better engagement (text, image, video).
• Frequency and saturation curves: Are you showing too many of the same ads?

If you identify patterns of underperformance, you can adjust targeting or test new ad formats.

5. Analyze attribution and incremental impact

The traditional last-click attribution model often fails to reflect the true impact of each advertising channel. Consider:

• Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) to measure the real contribution of each medium.
• Incrementality experiments to validate whether a campaign is actually generating additional sales.
• Multi-touch attribution models (data-driven).

Cases like Ebay in 2014 and Airbnb in 2021 have shown that reducing investment in Paid Search doesn't always mean a drop in sales, but can instead optimize the budget toward more profitable media.

6. Evaluate the impact of creativity on results

A paid media audit should focus not only on investment metrics, but also on the quality of the creatives used.

• Are your ads aligned with your target audience?
• Do you have enough variety in formats (static, video, carousel)?
• Do your creatives meet each platform's guidelines?

Using AI-based analytics to identify winning creatives can improve your campaign performance by up to 20%.

7. Adjust your bidding strategy and budget

A key optimization in Paid Media is budget allocation and bidding strategies. If a campaign is consuming a lot of budget without results, adjust the bidding strategy or consider reallocating your investment:

• How much are you spending per channel? Is there an imbalance in investment?
• Which campaigns have the highest return? Can you redirect your budget to them?
• Are you using Smart Bidding and automation? Strategies aimed at Maximize Conversions or Target ROAS can improve efficiency.

How to Audit Your Media with Bunker DB

With solutions like Bunker DB, you can centralize data, gain real-time insights, and make AI-powered decisions to increase the impact of your advertising strategy.

• You can use our Paid Media module to map your media and campaigns, analyze them, and gain valuable insights into your results.

• You can also use our latest release, ADA. By applying artificial intelligence alongside your centralized data, you can gain insights into your media and campaigns in record time.

Conclusion

An audit is useless without concrete actions. Once you've identified areas for improvement, implement changes and measure their impact. Monitoring must be ongoing. Conduct quarterly audits and use advanced measurement tools to assess their business impact:

• Optimize underperforming campaigns or pause them if they don't add value.
• Refine targeting to avoid overlapping or irrelevant audiences.
• Test new creatives based on performance insights.
• Adjust budgets and bidding strategies to maximize results.

Performing a Paid Media audit is not only a best practice, but a necessity to maximize your return on investment in digital advertising. Through this structured process, you can identify investment leaks, improve the efficiency of your campaigns, and optimize every dollar spent.