The Google Ads Audit Checklist We Use Before Taking On An Account

Before we quote on an account, I spend an hour inside it. Not a forensic teardown, an hour. That is almost always enough to find where the money is going and whether the problem is the account or the offer sitting behind it. A Google Ads audit works in one order: verify the tracking first, because every other number in the account is downstream of it, then follow the spend into the search terms, then judge structure and bidding against what you found.

Most audits I read run backwards. They open with campaign structure, list twelve things that could be tidier, and never establish whether the conversion numbers holding the whole account up are real. Below is the checklist we actually use, in the order we use it, with the red flag at each step that tells me to stop and dig.

Run the checks in this order

Step	What you are checking	Red flag
1. Tracking	Conversions are real, counted once, and used for bidding	Duplicate conversion actions, or a soft action set as primary
2. Spend	Where the budget actually lands	Top spenders with zero conversions in 90 days
3. Structure	Campaigns fed enough data to learn	Fifteen campaigns splitting one small budget
4. Bidding	Targets that match the maths and the volume	A tCPA set well below the account’s best ever CPA
5. Performance Max	Visibility and exclusions	No brand exclusions, no negatives, no channel report ever opened
6. Ads and landing pages	Relevance from query to page	One ad per group, traffic dumped on the homepage
7. Settings	The quiet leaks	Auto-apply recommendations left on

Work top to bottom. A broken step 1 makes steps 2 to 7 a waste of an afternoon.

1. Tracking, before you form any opinion

If the conversion data is wrong, the account is not underperforming or overperforming. It is unmeasured. Four checks.

Duplicates. Look for the same action counted twice: a Google Ads tag firing on the thank-you page while a GA4 conversion for the same event is also imported. Sort conversion actions by volume and check anything suspiciously round or suspiciously high.

Counting. Open each conversion action and check “Count”. Every conversion is the default for website conversion actions, which is right for ecommerce where each sale adds value. For lead generation it inflates everything, because one person filling the same form three times becomes three leads. Set lead actions to count one conversion per click.

Primary versus secondary. Primary actions report in the “Conversions” column and get used for bidding. Secondary actions are observation only and land in “All conversions”. I find newsletter signups, PDF downloads and phone page views marked primary more often than I would like. Smart Bidding then spends the month buying the cheapest of those. Demote anything that is not a genuine business outcome.

Attribution. Data-driven attribution is the default now. First click, linear, time decay and position-based are no longer supported and conversion actions that used them were moved to data-driven. Last click is still available. If an account is deliberately on last click, I want to hear the reason.

Then check enhanced conversions are on and a consent management platform is actually passing signals. Our step-by-step Google Ads account audit goes deeper on the Consent Mode side.

2. Follow the money

Set the date range to the last 90 days and sort every table by cost, descending. Not by conversions. By cost.

• Brand versus non-brand split. Pull brand terms out and look at the account again. Plenty of “profitable” accounts are buying back demand they already had.
• Top 20 keywords by spend with zero conversions. This is the fastest money you will ever find. Write down the total.
• Campaigns with spend and no conversions in 90 days. Ask what they are for before you pause them, but ask.
• Search terms. Download 90 days of search terms, sort by cost, and read the top 100 by hand. Nothing else tells you as much about an account this quickly. We wrote up the weekly routine in mining the search terms report.

By the end of this step you should be able to say, in pounds, roughly how much of last quarter’s budget bought nothing.

3. Structure

I am looking for one thing: is each campaign getting enough conversion data to learn? Smart Bidding needs volume, and splintering a modest budget across a dozen campaigns starves all of them.

Check for duplicate keywords competing across ad groups, ad groups holding forty loosely related keywords, and campaigns that exist because someone wanted a separate line in a report rather than a separate budget or a separate target. Consolidate until each campaign has a real job. Our take on Google Ads account structure sets out the shape we use now.

4. Bidding and budget

Three questions per campaign.

1. Does the strategy match the data volume? A tROAS campaign on four conversions a month is an algorithm optimising on noise.
2. Is the target realistic? Compare the tCPA or tROAS target to the campaign’s actual trailing performance. A target set 60% tighter than anything the account has ever achieved will simply throttle delivery, and the client will report that “Google stopped spending”.
3. When did the target last change? Weekly target changes keep campaigns in permanent learning. I want to see change history that is calm.

Then check pacing. Campaigns flagged limited by budget while a poor performer runs uncapped is a reallocation waiting to happen.

5. Performance Max

PMax is where most audits go quiet, because people assume there is nothing to see. There is.

• Open Insights and reports, then Channel performance. If nobody has ever looked at how spend splits across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube and Discover, look now.
• Read the search terms report in the campaign, which now gives Search-style granularity inside PMax.
• Check brand exclusions are applied, so PMax is not quietly absorbing brand traffic a cheap Search campaign should be winning.
• Check negative keywords. You can add them at campaign level in PMax, and account-level negatives apply across Search and Shopping inventory including PMax, capped at 1,000 per account. In both cases they only affect Search and Shopping inventory, not Display or video.

No brand exclusions plus no negatives plus a flattering ROAS usually means the campaign is being paid for work the brand campaign already did.

6. Ads, assets and landing pages

Add the Quality Score columns and its three components: expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Quality Score is a keyword-level diagnostic on a 1 to 10 scale rather than an input to the auction itself, though the auction does assess quality at the time it runs. Use it to find the weak link, not as a score to chase.

Read the components as a map. Low ad relevance means the ad copy and the keyword have drifted apart. Low landing page experience means the page is slow, thin, or answering a different question to the query. Then check the obvious: at least two responsive search ads per ad group, sitelinks and callouts present, and traffic landing on a page that repeats the search term back to the user instead of a homepage.

7. The settings that leak

The last fifteen minutes, and often the most profitable.

• Auto-apply recommendations. Check Admin, then Account settings, then Auto-apply. Google applying keyword and budget changes on its own schedule explains a surprising number of mystery weeks.
• Location targeting. The default is people in, regularly in, or who have shown interest in your locations. For a local trade business, switch to presence only. For travel and education, the broader default usually earns its keep.
• Search partners and display expansion on Search campaigns. Segment by network and judge them on their own numbers.
• Ad schedule and device bid adjustments set years ago and never revisited.
• Change history. Filter the last 90 days. Who has been in here, and what did they change the week performance moved?

How often to run it

Full audit twice a year. A 30-minute version monthly covering tracking, search terms, budget pacing and change history. Run the full checklist immediately after any of these: a new agency or freelancer takes over, tracking or the website changes, conversion volume shifts by more than a quarter, or someone turns on a new campaign type.

Want us to run it on your account?

I have never audited an account and found nothing. The question is only whether what we find is worth more than the fee to fix it, which is why our free Google Ads audit runs this exact checklist and comes back with the wasted spend in pounds, not a list of observations. If the maths stacks up afterwards, that is what our Google Ads management is for.

FAQ

How long does a Google Ads audit take? An experienced auditor gets the high-value findings in about an hour: tracking, wasted spend, bidding sanity and account settings. A full written audit covering structure, assets, landing pages and Performance Max takes half a day for most accounts.

What is the first thing to check in a Google Ads audit? Conversion tracking. Check for duplicate conversion actions, confirm the counting setting suits the business, and make sure only genuine business outcomes are set as primary. Every other metric in the account depends on those being right.

How often should you audit a Google Ads account? A full audit twice a year, plus a short monthly check on search terms, budget pacing and change history. Run one straight away whenever the account changes hands or the website changes.

Can I audit a Google Ads account myself? Yes. Work in order: tracking, spend, structure, bidding, Performance Max, ads and landing pages, settings. The part most people skip is reading 90 days of search terms by hand, and that is usually where the wasted spend is hiding.

What are the biggest red flags in a Google Ads audit? Soft actions marked as primary conversions, no negative keyword work, auto-apply recommendations left switched on, and Performance Max running without brand exclusions. Any one of those means the reported performance is flattering the account.