Before you spend a dollar on paid media, run this check. It takes sixty seconds. Most of the businesses I audit fail at least two items. Failing even one means the ad spend you are about to launch is funding a leaky bucket.
What is the 60-second plumbing check?
It is a diagnostic I run at the start of every marketing engagement, before touching ad accounts, media plans, or creative. The goal is to verify that the digital front office - the website, the tracking stack, the conversion paths - is set up to capture what the ads are about to drive. If it is not, no amount of targeting or creative will fix the underlying problem.
The check has ten items. Each one is a yes or a no. A passing grade is ten out of ten. Anything less and there is a gap between what the ads will cost and what they will return.
The 10-point checklist
1. Does the site load in under three seconds on mobile?
Run the homepage URL through Google PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting. A score below 75 is a problem. Time to First Contentful Paint above 3.5 seconds is a problem. If either is true, the ads you are about to run are sending people to a page that will lose 40 percent of them before it finishes loading. The ad spend is funding a friction experience, not a customer journey.
2. Is the primary conversion action above the fold on mobile?
Scroll to the top of the homepage on a phone and stop. Is the thing you want a visitor to do - book, buy, call, fill out a form - visible without scrolling? If the call to action is buried below a 1200-pixel hero image, a navigation bar, and three lines of tagline copy, the conversion rate will reflect that. The fold is not a design preference. It is a revenue constraint.
3. Does the contact form submit without errors?
Fill out every form on the site and submit it. Not a test submission - a real one. Check what happens after. Does it go to a confirmation page? Does it fire a GA4 conversion event? Does someone actually receive the submission? I find broken forms in roughly one in four audits. The business has been running ads to a form that silently drops submissions. This is a complete loss of budget.
4. Is there a GA4 property installed and receiving data?
Open the GA4 real-time report. Visit the website from a browser the GA4 property is not currently tracking. Does the session appear? If not, the property either is not installed or is installed incorrectly. Running paid media without analytics is flying blind - you have no signal for what converts, what does not, and where the budget should shift.
5. Are conversion events firing on the primary actions?
Open GA4 DebugView and complete the primary conversion action on the site - book a table, submit a form, click the phone number, complete a purchase. Does a conversion event appear in DebugView? If not, the conversion tracking is broken. Your ad platform is optimizing toward something it cannot measure, which means it is not optimizing toward what you want.
6. Is the phone number clickable on mobile?
On a phone, tap the phone number on the contact page and on the homepage. Does it open the dialer? If the number is in a graphic or formatted in a way that prevents mobile tap-to-call, you are losing a percentage of mobile visitors who intend to call but will not type the number manually. This is a five-minute fix and it is broken more often than it should be.
7. Does the site have an SSL certificate?
Check the browser address bar. Is there a padlock? Is the URL https and not http? A site without SSL is flagged by Chrome and Firefox before the user sees the first pixel of content. Beyond the trust issue, Google's crawlers deprioritize non-secure sites in local rankings. This is a hosting configuration fix that takes under an hour.
8. Is the Google Business Profile claimed and verified?
For local businesses, the GBP is as important as the website. Search for the business on Google Maps. Is there a claimed profile with accurate hours, a phone number, a website link, and photos? If the profile is unclaimed or has stale information, every dollar you spend on local search ads is fighting a credibility deficit the organic presence is creating.
9. Does the site have a privacy policy and cookie consent?
This is not a box-ticking exercise. Meta and Google both require a privacy policy to run ads. Pixel-based remarketing requires cookie consent in most jurisdictions. An ad account without a compliant privacy policy is one complaint away from a suspension. The policy does not need to be long - a generator like Termly or Privacy Policy Generator produces a compliant document in ten minutes.
10. Is the site indexed by Google?
Open Google and type site:[yourdomain.com] in the search bar. Do pages appear? If the site returns zero results, it is either blocking Google's crawlers via a robots.txt directive, it is too new to be indexed, or there is a structural issue preventing indexing. Running paid media to an unindexed site is not a catastrophe - paid ads bypass organic ranking - but it signals a technical debt that will affect organic performance long-term.
What to do with the results
If you pass all ten, you can run ads with confidence that the front office will capture what the campaign drives. If you fail any item, fix it before you turn on the spend. The only exception is item 10 (indexing), which does not block paid media but should be on the technical backlog.
The order of priority if you have limited time:
- Fix any broken forms first. A broken form is a complete conversion loss.
- Fix conversion tracking second. Without it, the ad platform is flying blind.
- Fix mobile load speed third. Above-the-fold CTA and SSL are in the same tier.
- GBP, privacy policy, and indexing are important but not immediate blockers for launching ads.
This check is the prerequisite, not the strategy. A business that passes all ten items has a front office that can convert what the ads drive. What the ads drive, and whether the targeting and creative are right, is a separate conversation. But it is a conversation worth having only after the plumbing is confirmed working.
If you run through this and find gaps you are not sure how to close, that is the first thing I look at in any marketing engagement. A fifteen-minute call is enough to figure out which items need a developer, which need a configuration change, and which you can close yourself this afternoon.
