What a real Google Ads audit looks for
A checklist you can run yourself, in the order that usually matters most. If you would rather we did it, the written audit is free.
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No sales call, ever. Tell us about your business and we’ll reply in writing, usually within one business day.
On this page
1. Start with conversion tracking
Everything downstream depends on this, so it is the wrong thing to check last. Open your conversion actions and ask three questions of each one. What exactly triggers it? Is it set to “primary” and therefore used for bidding? And would you genuinely describe that event as a sales lead?
The classic failures are all variations of counting something too generous: page views on a thank-you page that can be reloaded, every phone call regardless of length, both a form submission and its confirmation page as separate conversions, or a click on an email address counted the same as a completed enquiry. Any of these will inflate your conversion numbers and, much worse, teach Google’s bidding to chase the wrong thing with real money.
If you find the tracking is wrong, fix it before you change anything else. Judging campaign performance on bad data is worse than having no data.
2. Read the search terms report
Set the date range to the last ninety days, sort by cost, and read the top hundred rows. This single report usually explains most of an underperforming account. You are looking for anything that could never become a customer: job and salary searches, training and certification, DIY and how-to, free and cheap, parts and wholesale, competitor names you do not want, and locations outside your service area.
Add up the cost of those rows. In an account with no negative keyword maintenance, twenty to forty per cent of spend sitting in that bucket is entirely normal, and it is the fastest money you will ever recover.
3. Check the structure and the budgets
List your campaigns and, next to each, write down the average value of a job from that campaign. If a campaign selling $250 repairs and a campaign selling $9,000 installations share one budget, the repair campaign is winning and the installation campaign is starving — because cheap conversions are easier to produce, and automated bidding optimises for what you told it to count.
Then check whether any campaign is limited by budget while a less valuable one is underspending. That is the most common misallocation in small accounts and it is usually a five-minute fix.
4. Look at the map
Open the locations report and sort by spend. Two questions: are you paying for clicks in places you cannot profitably serve, and is your location setting on “presence or interest” rather than “presence”? The second one catches a surprising number of accounts — it means you can be paying to show ads to people who are not in your area but once searched about it.
5. Read the ads as a customer would
Take your three best-spending ads and ask whether a competitor could run the identical ad without changing a word. “Quality service, free estimates, family owned, call today” describes every company in your category. An ad that says your actual response time, your actual price range or your actual guarantee will get fewer clicks and more customers.
Also check that something is being tested. If the same ad has been running untouched for a year, you have no idea whether it is good — only that it is familiar.
6. Follow the click to the page
Click your own ad on a phone, on mobile data rather than wi-fi. Time how long it takes to load. Ask whether the page answers the exact thing you just searched for, or whether it is a general homepage. Count how many taps it takes to contact the business. Check whether the price, the service area and the availability are visible without scrolling three screens.
Most of the conversion problems blamed on campaigns live here.
7. The settings that quietly cost money
- Search partners and Display expansion on Search campaigns, which frequently add cheap, poor-quality traffic that flatters your click volume.
- Automatically applied recommendations, which can change your keywords and match types without asking.
- Ad scheduling running at hours nobody answers.
- Device bids that have never been reviewed, in categories where mobile and desktop convert very differently.
- Bid strategy targets set once and never revisited, so the account is optimising toward a cost per acquisition that is no longer realistic.
If you would rather not do all of that: send us read-only access and we will run through every point above and send the findings back in writing, ranked by cost. It is free, it takes two to three business days, and there is no call involved. Request the audit.
Questions about audits
How often should a Google Ads account be audited?
A full audit once or twice a year is reasonable for a healthy account. But the weekly habits matter more: if nobody is reading the search terms report every week, an annual audit will simply document twelve months of the same waste.
Can I audit my own account?
Yes, and the checklist on this page is genuinely enough to find most of the common problems. The parts that are hard to self-assess are competitive context — whether your cost per click is normal for your market — and whether your conversion tracking is measuring something real.
Is a free audit just a sales pitch?
Frequently, in this industry. The test is whether the document contains specific findings from your account — actual search terms, actual campaign names, actual numbers — or whether it is a generic list that could have been sent to anyone.