The new-client tracking audit: a one-hour template for week one

Week one of a new client is when discovery either gets done or gets deferred. Deferred discovery is how agencies end up six weeks in, optimizing against a Google Ads conversion action that's been double-counting since 2024.

This is the one-hour template that closes the four questions you actually need to answer before you can write strategy. It's not exhaustive. It's the minimum that pays for itself the first time it catches a broken pixel.

The four questions, in order

1. What exists? — every property, container, pixel, account, audience, and feed currently configured.
2. Who owns each thing? — login, billing relationship, who can grant access tomorrow if it breaks.
3. What's its current state? — firing, broken, dormant, deprecated.
4. What does the client think exists that doesn't? — the gap between the slide deck and reality.

You can't do strategy until you can answer all four. Most agencies attempt strategy without answering any. That's how you end up writing a Q1 plan around a Meta Pixel that's been inactive since the iOS 14.5 rollout.

The 60-minute walkthrough

Block one calendar hour with the client's most-technical stakeholder. Have them share their screen. You drive the questions.

Minutes 0–10: account inventory (the easy one)

Read out the list, get yes/no per item:

• Google Analytics 4 — property ID(s), measurement IDs
• Google Tag Manager — container IDs (web + server, if any)
• Google Ads — account ID, MCC parent if applicable
• Meta Business Manager — business ID, ad account IDs, dataset (pixel) IDs
• TikTok Ads — account ID, pixel IDs
• Microsoft Ads — UET tags
• LinkedIn — Insight tag, ad account
• Email platform — Klaviyo / Mailchimp / Customer.io list IDs
• CRM — HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive
• Ecommerce platform — Shopify store URL, plan
• Server-side — own backend, headless CMS, anything custom

You're not auditing each one yet. You're getting the list.

Minutes 10–25: access and ownership

For each item from minutes 0–10, ask three things:

1. Who owns the billing? — agency, client, third-party (an old contractor still paying for the GTM container).
2. Who has admin? — name, email, last login if known.
3. What's our access? — invited as admin, viewer, "you can ask Sarah, she has it."

Document each row. The pattern that emerges is always the same: 60% the client has admin, 30% an old contractor has admin, 10% nobody can get in. The 10% is the urgent work. Get those access requests started during this call so they're in motion before the call ends.

Minutes 25–45: live state per system

Now go open the live UI for each item. Don't take the client's word that it's working. Don't trust the slide deck.

• GA4: Realtime tab, then DebugView. Trigger a checkout (or any conversion) on the live site. Does it fire in DebugView? Does it appear in the conversion event report? Are the right events marked as key events?
• GTM: Preview mode the live container. Walk through the funnel. Note which tags fire, which trigger, which are paused, which are deprecated and should be removed.
• Google Ads: Conversion actions list. Status column. "Recording conversions"? "No recent conversions"? Click each one — when did it last receive a conversion? Match the count against GA4 (see GA4 vs Google Ads conversions for why they'll differ).
• Meta: Events Manager → Diagnostics. Match quality scores. Dedup rates if Pixel + CAPI. (The one-hour-per-pixel deep-dive is in Meta Pixel + CAPI without double-counting.)
• Other ad pixels: same drill — does a recent test event show in the platform's UI?

This is where most of the audit's value lands. The slide deck always overstates what works. The realtime UI doesn't.

Minutes 45–55: client-side reality check

Two open questions:

1. What conversion volume do you think you're getting? Compare to the actual numbers in front of you. If they don't match, that's the conversation to have first — before strategy, before optimization, before anything else.
2. What did the previous agency / in-house team configure that you haven't looked at since? Almost always there's an audience, a CAPI integration, or a custom event that nobody owns and that's silently wrong.

Minutes 55–60: write the punchlist

Five rows, in priority order:

1. Access we still need — who owns it, what we asked for
2. Things confirmed broken — what, where, the impact estimate
3. Things confirmed deprecated — to remove on day-30 sweep
4. Open questions — needs follow-up to answer
5. Things we'll verify weekly — pixels with low match quality, conversions with low volume

Email the punchlist to the client within 24 hours of the call. Schedule a 30-minute follow-up two weeks out to close out items 1–4 and put item 5 on the recurring monthly retainer.

What "good" looks like by end of week one

You should be able to answer, for the new client, in front of any other client meeting:

• "Show me, right now, every pixel firing on the checkout page." — answerable in 30 seconds
• "Which conversion actions in Google Ads are sourced from GA4 vs direct?" — table exists
• "What's our access state across every system?" — row per system, status per row
• "What did the previous setup get wrong?" — listed and prioritized

If you can answer those, you're in week two and ready for strategy. If you can't, the audit isn't done — and starting strategy on top of an unfinished audit is how the engagement begins quietly leaking ROAS.

Why we made this the first thing the product does

The whole Phloz tracking map is built around this exact week-one audit. The typed nodes match the account-inventory step. The health states (working / broken / missing / unverified) match the live-state step. The "last verified" timestamp turns the recurring weekly check into one filter.

Without the structure, the audit is a Google Doc that decays. With it, the same audit template works across every client and the per-client diff stays maintainable for the life of the engagement.

But the structure isn't the point. The audit is. Even if you do it in a Google Sheet, do it in week one — every time, the same way, before strategy. The first time it catches a broken Meta pixel before you spend a quarter optimizing against it, the hour pays back permanently.

The takeaway

Week-one discovery is not a vibes-based exercise you do "as you go." It's a 60-minute structured audit that closes four questions:

1. What exists?
2. Who owns each thing?
3. What's the current state?
4. What does the client think exists that doesn't?

Run the template every time. Email the punchlist within 24 hours. Schedule the follow-up. Set up the weekly verification.

Strategy is only as good as the data underneath it. Audit first.