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.
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name: Paid Acquisition Audit
description: 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.
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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.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Search term reports for Google; placement and frequency reports for Meta and display.
4. Current daily budgets and impression-share-lost-to-budget per campaign.
5. Organic rank for the brand terms being bid on, and whether competitors bid on the brand.
6. Target CAC or payback period, if the business has one.
### Step 2: Draw the break-even line… load the full skill through Skill Me