Free ad spend audit

Find where your ad spend is leaking

Drew checks every Meta and Google ad dollar against your Shopify orders, stock and margin. You see where spend leaks, how much sits in each leak, and which fix is worth the most.

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Free planThen connect Meta and Google and open the audit in Drew. No credit card, and nothing in your ad accounts changes.

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Drew · Ad spend auditLast 30 days

Share of ad spend sitting in each leak

Meta + Google, checked against Shopify orders, stock and margin

Reconciled first. Meta and Google claimed about 38% of Shopify orders, so the numbers below are usable.

  1. Below break-even ROAS31%
  2. Ads on out-of-stock products9%About 1% pure waste; the rest sold into backorder
  3. Search terms that never convert7%
  4. Cold ads reaching existing buyersup to 7%
  5. Brand search counted as acquisition6%
  6. Boosted posts with no purchase goal5%
  7. Dead creatives still spending3%Plus about 40% on winning ads past their peak
Waste or below break-even, with overlaps removedAbout half
A real audit of one Shopify brand, Aug 19 – Sep 17, 2026. Shares rounded; break-even ROAS 1.67 at a 60% margin. Leaks overlap, so the rows don’t add up, and the outlined bar is an upper bound. Yours will look different. Read the full audit
What the audit checks

Seven leaks, and the check that comes before them

Every check matches your ad data to your Shopify data. The order matters: if the platforms’ numbers can’t be trusted, nothing after them can, and brand search and dead search terms change what the break-even list says.

00Runs first

Do the platforms’ numbers match your orders?

Are Meta and Google claiming more sales than your store made?

Drew adds up the purchases Meta and Google claim and compares the total with your Shopify orders for the same dates. If together they claim more orders than the store recorded, every ROAS figure after this point is inflated, so Drew still runs the checks but marks the findings that rely on those numbers.

The fix

Fix tracking before you cut anything. Duplicate pixel events, a Conversions API deduplication problem, view-through attribution and both platforms claiming the same orders are the usual causes. Cutting campaigns on inflated numbers makes the account worse.

01

Ads on products you can’t ship

Is spend going to products with zero or negative stock?

Product-level spend from Google Shopping and Performance Max, matched to Shopify stock for each variant.

The fix

Set the rule once: pause ads below a set number of days of stock, or let a hero product sell into backorder with capped spend. Then check it weekly.

Out-of-stock ad spend, in depth

02

Spend below break-even ROAS

Which campaigns lose money once margin is counted?

Break-even ROAS is 1 ÷ contribution margin: 1.67 at a 60% margin, 2.5 at 40%. Drew takes your margin from Shopify product costs, or from the number you give it, and lists every campaign and ad set below the line by spend.

The fix

Below the line is a decision, not an automatic pause. Check that the conversion action isn’t undercounting first — Performance Max is the usual suspect.

The margin check before any budget increase

03

Tired creatives still taking budget

Are fatigued ads carrying the account?

Graded per ad, not per campaign: link CTR down 30% or more from the ad’s own 7-day peak with frequency above 2.5, or last-7-day cost per purchase at 1.5× its 30-day baseline. In the sample audit, dead ads were 3% of spend — and tiring winners carried about 40%.

The fix

Kill what’s dead. For a winner that is tiring but still profitable, brief the next version now, before ROAS breaks.

Creative fatigue signals and thresholds

04

Brand search counted as acquisition

Is your own brand name flattering “new customer” ROAS?

Drew splits Google search spend into brand and non-brand terms for every campaign, with ROAS for each half. Campaign names don’t settle it: in the sample, the shopping campaign was half brand traffic.

The fix

Brand spend isn’t waste; counting it as acquisition is. Split brand from non-brand at the campaign level and report ROAS with and without it.

05

Boosted posts with no purchase goal

How much spend has no purchase objective at all?

Meta campaigns optimising for engagement, profile visits or an automatic objective, with their spend and purchases. Boosts are cheap one at a time, and nobody owns the total.

The fix

Boost from your ads account with a purchase objective, or don’t boost. Turn posts that earn attention into conversion ads.

06

Search terms that never convert

Which searches cost money and never sell?

Search terms that spent more than 3× your cost per purchase with zero conversions, each checked against the terms converting in your other campaigns.

The fix

Add negative keywords weekly, not monthly — and never one that blocks a search converting somewhere else.

07

Cold ads reaching people who already buy

Are you paying to “acquire” your own customers?

Cold-audience Meta ad sets with no recent-purchaser exclusion, set against your returning-customer share of Shopify orders. That share caps how much of the spend could be reaching people who already buy.

The fix

Exclude purchasers from the last 60 to 90 days in every cold ad set, and retarget existing customers on purpose, in an ad set of their own.

And where it finds nothing

Not everything is a leak

The audit says where it found nothing, too. In the sample, hour of day and the long tail of Meta placements both came back clean: two places you can skip on a first pass.

Knowing what to leave alone is part of the job, which is why the audit asks Drew for it.

Why it finds more

Your margins, stock and repeat customers live in Shopify, not in your ad account

Meta and Google grade their own campaigns, against the conversion you gave them. They don’t weigh what each product earns you, how many units you actually have, or which “new” customers already buy from you. The two biggest leaks in the sample audit sat exactly there.

What the ad account shows

  • ROAS, CPA and CTR for each campaign
  • Spend, frequency and reach
  • The conversions each platform claims for itself

What the audit adds from Shopify

  • Stock for every variant
  • Contribution margin, from your product costs
  • The orders your store actually recorded
  • Your share of returning customers
  • SKU A62%contribution margin
  • SKU B21%contribution margin
  • SKU C3×more repeat purchases
  • SKU D8 daysof stock left

The same ROAS should not lead to the same budget decision for all four. Drew weighs that before it recommends where the next dollar should go.

Run it on your account

Three steps, one click in Drew

Installing and connecting takes about 10 minutes. Drew reads Meta, Google and Shopify live as soon as they’re connected, so you can run the audit the same day; the rest of your history loads in the background, which can take up to 24 hours.

  1. 1

    Install Datadrew free

    From the Shopify App Store, on the free plan. Orders, products, stock and customers sync on their own. No credit card.

  2. 2

    Connect Meta and Google Ads

    A few clicks per platform, from the Integrations page. If your product costs aren’t in Shopify, have your contribution margin ready.

  3. 3

    Open the audit in Drew

    Use the button below. Drew works through the checks in order and comes back with the leaks, the share of spend in each and the fixes ranked by dollars at stake.

Run the audit in Drew

One click opens Drew with the audit already in the message box. Nothing runs until you press send. If Shopify has no product costs, Drew asks for your margin partway through, then writes the report. Expect several minutes, not seconds.

Open the audit in Drew New to Datadrew? Install free first
Safe to run

The audit reads your accounts. It doesn’t touch them.

Run it on a live account without a second thought. Nothing changes in Meta, Google or Shopify unless you make the change yourself.

What Drew reads

Shopify orders, products, stock and customers. Meta and Google campaigns, spend, creatives and search terms.

What it won’t do

Change a budget, pause an ad or edit a campaign. The audit recommends and you decide. On the free plan, Drew can’t apply changes at all.

How your data is kept

Encrypted in transit and at rest, on SOC 2-compliant, GDPR-aligned infrastructure. See our sub-processors and privacy policy.

When you want Drew to make approved changes for you, that is AI Ads CoPilot: in early access and rolling out now, with approval workflows, budget guardrails and margin floors.

Common questions

The free ad spend audit, answered

What operators ask before they connect an account.

See where your ad spend is leaking

Install Datadrew free, connect Meta and Google, and open the audit in Drew. Every leak is checked against your own orders, stock and margin. No credit card required.

Install on Shopify Book a demo
Or read the sample audit first