The owner of a dental clinic in Almaty is going through his Instagram DMs. Three messages in a row open with "Hello, I'm a media buyer, I can take on your project", and he closes them half-read. The fourth opens differently: "A couple of notes on your ads and your site. The ad says a cleaning costs 15,000 ₸, the site says 18,000 ₸, and leads from the form never reach your ad account." That one gets a reply. It is about his clinic, and he can check every word in a minute.
Behind a message like that is an audit: 40 minutes with a checklist and an hour to write it up. With no referrals or reviews yet, this is how you can show your work before anyone pays. Even if the owner never answers, the audit becomes the second case in your portfolio without clients, and in the Start track it is the week 5 assignment.
In short
- The owner sees your work before paying for it, so he takes no risk.
- Without account access you look at the site, the Meta Ad Library, 2GIS and Google search: 40 minutes with a checklist.
- The output is one page: five findings ordered by loss, each with the fact, the consequence and the action, plus one offer.
- No promises in numbers: you have seen neither the ad account nor the business's economics.
Why owners reply to an audit
"I'll run your ads" messages all look alike because none of them contains his business. An audit contains nothing else. It shows that you know where to look, can tell what matters from what doesn't, and are willing to say what you would fix first. And the owner doesn't have to take your word for it: he opens his own site on his phone and sees what you saw.
What you can check without account access
Before you have met, the audit is built only from what anyone can see:
- The site. You open it on a phone, the way someone coming from an ad would, and submit the form.
- The Meta Ad Library. It shows every active ad from any Page, along with the date each one started running. Spend on ordinary ads is not shown there.
- 2GIS. The company listing: address, hours, phone, website link, photos, replies to reviews. Compare it with what local platforms in Kazakhstan expect.
- Google search. The company name, and the main service plus the city: who else shows up for those searches.
A client's ad account, GA4 and CRM are opened only with the client's written consent, once they have given you access themselves. That is the next stage, after a conversation. Never ask for someone's login and password: the client grants access to your own account.
For tracking, install two Chrome extensions. Click the Tag Assistant icon and it lists the Google tags on the open page, so you can see whether GTM and GA4 are there. Meta Ads Data Advisor, formerly Meta Pixel Helper, does the same for the Meta pixel: the number on the icon is how many events the pixel fired on that page, and an icon with no badge means there is no pixel. You need to be logged into Facebook to use it.
The 40-minute checklist
| Block | What to look at | How | It's a finding if |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site, 10 min | Above the fold: within five seconds it is clear what is sold, to whom, and what to tap | Open on a phone from the ad's link | No price, no button, three different calls to action |
| The form | Submit the form under your own name | No confirmation, the phone number can be mistyped, nobody calls back within a day | |
| Speed | PageSpeed Insights, mobile report | LCP over 4 seconds | |
| Tracking, 10 min | GTM, GA4 and the Meta pixel | Tag Assistant and Meta Ads Data Advisor | No GA4, the pixel fires only PageView |
| The lead event | Submit the form with the extensions on | Not a single event fires after submission | |
| Ads, 10 min | How many ads and since when | Meta Ad Library, country Kazakhstan, search by Page name | One ad with one image running since spring |
| Where the ad leads | Open the site from the ad | The ad promises one thing and the page says another: a different price, a different service | |
| Tags on the link | Open the ad's link from the Ad Library and look at the page address | No utm_source and utm_medium, or they don't follow the scheme, e.g. utm_source=Instagram | |
| Search and 2GIS, 5 min | Results for the name and for the service plus city | Google on a phone | A competitor's ad shows first for the company's own name |
| The 2GIS listing | Find the company in 2GIS | No hours or photos, the link goes to a dead site | |
| Competitor, 5 min | One competitor on the same points | Same order, quickly | The competitor has what the client lacks: a price above the fold, replies to reviews |
Forty minutes is a hard limit. When a block's time runs out, move on to the next one: you will have five findings anyway.
Submit the form under your own name with your real number. If they call, say plainly that you were testing the form and are preparing a review; that is how the conversation starts. Note how long it took them to call: if nobody calls within a day, that is a finding too.
The scheme to compare the tags against is in the lesson on UTM tags. If the address has no tags at all, write it down as a question for the owner: they may have been added in the ad account through the separate URL parameters field, and tags added that way may not show in a link opened from the Ad Library. Tags that are visible but don't follow the scheme are a finding.
The 4-second threshold comes from PageSpeed Insights, which rates an LCP above 4 seconds as poor. LCP is the moment the largest block above the fold appears on screen, an image or a headline.
Five findings, ordered by loss
In 40 minutes you will find more than five things. Five go into the audit, and their order matters more than their number. You don't know how much money each one costs, because you haven't seen the ad account. So rank them by two questions: how many people the problem touches, and how close it sits to the lead.
- First, whatever stands in the way of everyone who tapped the ad: those clicks are already paid for.
- Next, whatever keeps both the ads and the owner from seeing leads, so the budget is spent blind.
- Then whatever loses some of the people: slow loading, a form with no confirmation.
- Last, whatever hands competitors the people who were looking for the company on their own.
Each finding has three parts. The fact is what you saw, ideally with a screenshot. The consequence is one sentence on the step where a person drops out. The action is what to do and roughly how long it takes.
Thirty findings over ten pages read as "everything you do is wrong". The owner can't tell where to start and puts the file aside. Five findings in order read as a plan, and everything else you found is material for the call.
Example: auditing a dental clinic
The clinic from the start of this lesson runs an Instagram ad for "Professional cleaning for 15,000 ₸". The clinic, figures and dates in this example are made up. Here is the audit page:
What was checked. The site on a phone, the ads in the Meta Ad Library, the 2GIS listing and Google search, 7 October.
The ad and the site show different prices. The ad promises a cleaning for 15,000 ₸ and leads to the home page, where the price list says 18,000 ₸. Someone coming from the ad can't find the promised price and can't tell whether the offer is real, and the click is already paid for. Add a block with this offer and point the ad straight at it: 2-3 hours for whoever maintains the site.
Leads from the site never reach the ads. After the form is submitted, the Meta pixel fires no events, and there is no GA4 on the site. Meta can't learn from site leads, and you don't know how many bookings the ads brought in. Set up a lead event in GTM and send it to the Meta pixel and GA4: one to two working days.
The home page loads slowly on a phone. PageSpeed Insights shows an LCP of 6.8 seconds. For almost seven seconds, someone from the ad is looking at a half-loaded first screen. Compress the photos above the fold and remove the header video: 3-4 hours of developer time.
The 2GIS link goes to an old site. The address in the listing doesn't open. Anyone who finds the clinic on the map and wants to see prices gets an error. Change the link in the 2GIS business account: 10 minutes.
Someone else's ad shows first for the clinic's name. In Google, a search for the clinic's name puts another dental clinic's ad above your site. A person who was looking for you specifically sees a competitor first. Run a search campaign on your own name with a small daily budget: 2 hours to set up.
What I propose. Within a week I will set up the lead event from finding 2 and write a brief for your developer on findings 1 and 3. If that works for you, let's have a 20-minute call on Thursday or Friday and I'll walk you through it on screen.
The first finding affects everyone who tapped the ad. The second doesn't lose anyone right now, but until the event is set up, nobody knows whether the ads bring bookings, and the budget is spent blind. The third loses those who didn't wait for the page to load; the fourth and fifth, those who searched for the clinic themselves. Two more findings didn't make the page: two ads with the same image have been running since June, and the 2GIS listing has only three photos. Save them for the call.
There is no price in the offer. You name it after the call, once the scope is clear; you work it out with an estimate that sets the scope.
How to send it
Don't send a file first; send text: the top two or three findings and a question about whether to send the full page. Nobody wants to open a file from a stranger, but two lines about his own ads the owner will read right in the notification.
Write to the person who decides: the owner, via the business account's DMs, WhatsApp from the site, or LinkedIn. The general contact form and info@ go to an administrator, and your review may never reach the owner. A template for the first message and a table for tracking replies are in the lesson on finding your first projects.
Mistakes that make an audit fall flat
- Criticising taste. The owner hears "an ugly banner" as a verdict on his own choice, and there is nothing left to discuss. Describe what gets in the way of the lead instead: "on a phone, the banner covers the booking button".
- Promising numbers. "After the fixes a lead will cost 500 ₸" has nothing behind it: you haven't seen the ad account and don't know the clinic's economics, meaning what a patient brings in and how many leads make it to the chair. If leads come in at 1,500 ₸, the promise was yours. Promise the work and how you will verify it: "the lead event will reach Meta and GA4, and I'll show you on a test lead".
- Auditing a business with no site and no ads. There is nothing to look at, and the owner already knows he has no site. What such a business needs is a launch, and that is a different document.
Checklist before sending
Questions
Isn't a free audit just working for nothing? No. Two hours on an audit is your marketing, like a post or a case study. The work starts with the fixes, and that is what gets paid.
What if the owner fixes everything from my audit without me? Then he has the hands but no budget for a contractor right now. You keep a case study, and he'll remember who found those problems for him.
How many audits should I do a week? With the write-up, an audit takes almost two hours, so do full ones for one or two businesses you genuinely want to work with. For ten outreach messages a week, one finding per business is enough.
Exercise: one audit this week
Pick a business near you that has a site and at least one active ad in the Meta Ad Library. Set a timer and go through the checklist in 40 minutes. Write the page: two lines on what you looked at, five findings ordered by loss, each with the fact, the consequence and the action, and an offer with the scope, the deadline and the next step. Run it against the pre-send checklist and send the top two or three findings to the owner.
The weak spot of a first audit is the consequences. The owner will skim past "bad for business", but he will recognise "someone from the ad can't find the price the ad promised", so every consequence should name the step where a person drops out. If your first finding only touches some of the people, say the reviews on 2GIS, walk the path from the ad to the form once more: the owner has already paid for every click on that path. And if the next step in your offer reads like "get in touch if anything", the owner has nothing to say yes to. Name two days for a call.
Summary
- Turn the audit you sent into your second case study using the template from the portfolio lesson: what you found, what you offered, what the owner said.
- From what you found, put together ten outreach messages, one finding per business: that is the next task in the track.
- If the owner agreed to a call, work out the price of the fixes before it, from a work list with hours.
- Keep track of which findings get replies: in a month you will see which ones to open with.