The Pre-Account Audit

When it started and what the founder was actually thinking when it did. A brand started to solve a problem the founder had personally behaves differently in market than one started because a category looked profitable, and the ads have to be written differently.

Whether they came from inside this category or arrived at it from outside. Someone who spent years in the trade knows things about the product, the supply and the customer that no audit surfaces, and someone who did not will have gaps in exactly those places.

Whether selling online was the plan or the fallback after another channel stalled. It sets how much of the current setup is deliberate and how much is inherited.

Some products move offline and stall online for reasons no creative fixes. Naming the people already selling this category well online tells you whether the ceiling is the product, the price or the marketing.

Not the category worldwide — the addressable buyers for this product at this price in this country. It is the number that decides whether the plan is to take share or to grow demand, and those are two different media plans.

Whether there is a source behind the product or it is bought in from whoever is available this month. It sets whether the margin is defensible and whether scaling is even physically possible.

Asked plainly, and the answer is usually no or a number that turns out to be gross margin. Everything downstream — the CPA target, the offer, what counts as a winning creative — is derived from this one figure, so it gets established before anything else is agreed.

When sales started, what the fixed costs are, how much has been spent on marketing to date and where it went. This is the baseline every later claim of improvement is measured against, and it has to be written down before I touch anything.

Every step from the ad click to the confirmed order: page speed, message match, product page, pricing display, shipping clarity, checkout friction and the mobile experience specifically, because most of the traffic is mobile on Egyptian data.

Every SKU with its true landed cost, plus the fixed costs the business carries monthly. The output is a break-even CPA per product and a confirmation of whether the current price can carry paid traffic at all. Some products cannot, and finding that out before spending is the whole point.

Who they actually are, what they sell, what they offer, their prices and the quality of what arrives. Priced 13% above a market that has settled at one number is a zero-orders problem no creative solves, and the only way to know is to build the sheet.

What the business currently measures, whether the numbers reconcile with the store back end, and where reported figures diverge from collected cash. If the owner and I are not looking at the same number, no decision after this is worth making.

Delivery rate and return rate per courier and per governorate, with the stated reasons attached. On cash on delivery this is not logistics housekeeping — it is a direct input to what a purchase is worth and therefore to every bid.

Before any spend. Traffic sent to a page that converts at half what it should is a permanent tax on every campaign that follows, and it is the one fix that improves every future creative at once.

Getting to the optimum price given COGS, competitors and what the market has settled on. Pricing sits above everything paid: it sets break-even, it sets what offers are affordable, and it is the lever that decides whether the account can work before a single ad runs.

Knowing which offer formats work in which category, when each one is used, and building the scenarios in advance so there is a ready move rather than an improvised discount. An offer is priced against the product's real economics — a gift retailing at 250 that costs 70 is far more efficient than a 250 discount, and both look identical on a creative.

Only now does the account get built: a readable naming convention, a clear split between testing, scaling and retargeting, one budget logic, and events verified server-side before anything scales. The structure exists so that in three months it is still possible to tell what happened.

A full read of every creative the brand has ever run, sorted by date and by month, to establish which tests were valid and how, what was spent, what was killed before it had a fair test, and which creatives were beaten by the setup rather than by the market. Every creative in the log is matched against what the dashboard says it actually delivered.

Which creative genuinely won, and which buyer persona it won with. Personas are defined and segmented first, and creative is then built against them — so a winner can be attributed to an audience and an angle rather than to luck.

The account is read against what the business needs to earn, not against what the ads manager considers a good result.

Where this brand sits on price, offer and creative relative to the sheet built in Phase 1.

Carried forward from the diagnostic and now used as the actual target, so every campaign has a number it has to clear.

Four resolutions, because a dip that looks like a creative problem at day level is often a month-level pattern that repeats every year.

Price changes mid-period, offers that ran, stock that went out — each annotated onto the curve. An unexplained spike gets copied as if it were a strategy; an annotated one gets used.

Worked out from the brand's own history rather than assumed from the category. Most seasonality that gets blamed for a bad month turns out to be an offer that ran the year before.

On a wide catalogue, the products already appearing in the same orders unprompted. That is where the bundle comes from and where the AOV headroom is — bundles invented off a spreadsheet do not sell.

Split by governorate, by product and by return reason rather than reported as one store-level number. A single blended cancellation rate hides the one product and the two governorates that are producing most of it.

The whole diagnostic re-read as one set, and what comes out is a ranked list of opportunities with a number attached to each.

What has to be true — spend, CPA, delivery rate, AOV — to reach the target the owner actually wants, stated before the money starts moving.