A practical field guide for CMOs, UA Directors, and UA Managers who want reviews that actually change things. Built on two real accounts: a $1.19M geo puzzle, and a mature social app navigating a major spend decision.
Last week I audited a live account. $1.79M of spend, 10 campaigns, 19 geos, 27 weeks of data.
The dashboard said everything was fine. Blended ROAS healthy. Weekly syncs calm. The kind of account nobody feels the need to dig into.
Here’s what a closer look revealed:
Five campaigns bidding against each other in the same auction for the same American users in two different channels. The nine best-performing geos in the account are sharing 19.8% of the budget, while one mid-table geo received 63% and is climbing. $55,838 spent on test campaigns, buying installs at 2-5x the price of the proven ones. And a D7 revenue multiplier that moved from 12.3x to 1.4x while the D0 dashboard stayed perfectly steady.
None of this was visible on a dashboard. All of it was sitting in a CSV export the whole time. It took four hours to find.
And that’s just one account. The same month, I reviewed a second one: a mature app doing $2.5M a month, where 89% of revenue comes from payers acquired months or years ago. They had cut UA spend by roughly 80% and were measuring the result with a metric that blended organic revenue into paid math. Separate the two, and the data told a much more hopeful story: the remaining spend was close to break-even and had real room to scale back up, at exactly the moment the payer pipeline needed it most.
Two accounts. Two dashboards saying it’s “fine.” Two very different opportunities underneath.
That’s what a real review is for. Not to catch someone. To find what the dashboard can’t show you.
What you can find below: the full process, step by step, with the real numbers from both accounts at every stage. This is the exact audit I run for clients. You can run it on your own account this week, and I can almost promise you’ll find at least one thing worth acting on.
Let’s gooooooo.
Prefer to skip straight to the playbooks? Everything I’ve written - UA 101, the Creative Bible, the Soft Launch Bible, the AI Bible, the tactics - is in one bundle.
For the people who forward things to their CEO, here’s the whole essay in 60 seconds.
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