Google Ads Audit: Ten Checks You Can Run in an Hour
A Google Ads audit does not need a week, a spreadsheet template or an agency. Most accounts that waste money waste it in the same ten places, and you can check all of them in an hour with nothing but access to the account. Here is the order we work through them in, and what to do when a check fails.
1. Check that conversions mean something
Start here, because every other check depends on it. Open your conversion actions and ask what each one actually counts. If page views, button clicks or "contact page visited" sit alongside real form submissions and calls, Smart Bidding is optimising towards noise. Set the genuine enquiries as primary actions and demote the rest to secondary. If you track calls, make sure the calls are real ones, which we cover in our guide to Google Ads call tracking.
2. Read the change history
Go to Tools, then Change history. It covers the past two years and shows who changed what and when, alongside performance data, according to Google's change history documentation. Look for a budget cut, a bidding strategy switch or a paused campaign that lines up with a drop in enquiries. Accounts managed by several people, or by a former agency, nearly always contain a change nobody remembers making.
3. Read the search terms, not the keywords
The keyword list tells you what you hoped to buy. The search terms report tells you what you bought. Sort by cost, look at the top 50 queries and mark every one you would not want a click from: jobs, free, DIY, competitors, the wrong location. Add them as negatives. Google also groups queries into intent categories in search terms insights, which is useful for spotting a theme you had not noticed. Our piece on negative keywords covers how to build the list properly.
4. Check match types against bidding
Broad match without Smart Bidding and sound conversion data is a quick way to lose money. Broad match with both can work well. Exact match everywhere can starve a campaign of volume. Whichever you are running, check it was a decision rather than a default. The detail is in Google Ads match types.
5. Look at where the ads are showing
Check the network settings, the location settings and the device split. Search Partners is on by default for many campaigns and often returns weaker traffic, and location targeting set to "presence or interest" can show your ads to people who merely searched about your area. A Manchester plumber does not need clicks from someone researching a holiday in Manchester.
6. Compare impression share with budget
If a campaign that converts well is losing impression share to budget, you are turning away customers you have already proved are profitable. If a campaign that converts badly is spending its full budget, the money is better elsewhere. Move budget from the second to the first before you ask for more. The same logic applies when reading auction insights, which show how often competitors appear alongside you and how often you outrank them. Note that Google does not show insights where your impression share is below 10%, so a blank report is itself a finding.
7. Audit the ads, not just the numbers
Open each ad group and read the ads as a stranger would. Are there at least two or three distinct messages? Does the headline mention what the person searched for? Do the final URLs go to a page that matches the ad, or to your homepage? Sending paid traffic to a generic page is one of the most common leaks we find, and it is the subject of our post on PPC landing pages.
8. Treat the recommendations tab with suspicion
Google gives each account an optimization score, which it describes as a rough gauge of how well a campaign is likely to perform, built from suggestions drawn from past data and Google's own best practices, as set out in its optimization score guidance. Read the recommendations, and apply the ones that match your goals, such as fixing a disapproved ad or a broken sitelink. Ignore the ones that simply ask you to spend more or loosen targeting. Chasing 100% is not the aim. A high score on an account that is losing money is worth nothing.
9. Check the basics nobody revisits
Look at ad extensions, now called assets: are the sitelinks current, are the phone numbers correct, is the location asset linked to your real Business Profile? Check the ad schedule, and read our view on whether to switch ads off outside office hours before you cut anything. Confirm the account is linked to GA4 and that the two systems agree on what a lead is.
10. Ask what the account is for
The last check is not in the interface. Write down the one number the business needs, whether that is leads, booked jobs or sales at a given margin, and check the account is built to produce it. If you cannot connect the campaign structure to that number in a sentence, the account has drifted. That is when a restructure beats another round of tweaks.
What to do with the results
Fix the first three checks before anything else. Conversion tracking, change history and search terms account for most of the waste we find, and none of them need a new campaign. Then work down the list, making one change at a time so you can tell what helped.
If you would rather have someone else run the audit, our Google Ads service starts with exactly this process, and you can see the kind of work we do on the case studies page. To book a free account review, get in touch.
