Google Ads audit checklist: eight steps to find the waste in an account

A Google Ads audit is a structured review of an account to find wasted spend, broken tracking and missed opportunities, and to rank them by how much each one costs. A good audit checks conversion tracking first, then account settings, structure, search terms, bidding, Performance Max, ads and landing pages, in that order, because problems higher up distort everything below them.

This checklist is the order we work through on every Google Ads audit. You can run it yourself with admin or standard access to the account and a few hours. For a broader self-audit that also covers Meta, see how to audit your own ad account.

When to run a Google Ads audit

• Before hiring or changing an agency. You need a baseline to judge the new team against.
• When results drop and nobody can explain why. Cost per conversion up, conversion volume down, or the numbers in Google Ads no longer match the CRM.
• After a big change. A new website, a new tracking setup, a switch to Performance Max or to a new bid strategy.
• Once a quarter in any case. Settings drift, auto-applied recommendations pile up and negative lists go stale.

Use the last 90 days as the main window, with the previous 90 days for comparison. For seasonal businesses, compare with the same period last year as well.

Before you start: access, data and a baseline

An audit goes faster and finds more when the inputs are ready before you open the account.

• Access. Read-only access is enough to review everything. If someone outside the business is auditing, grant access through your own manager account or by email, and check who already has access while you are there; the ad account access checklist explains what each level allows. Confirm the account is owned by the business, not by a current or past agency.
• The business numbers. Leads or sales by month from your CRM or store, average order or deal value, gross margin, and the cost per lead or acquisition the business can afford. Without these, the audit can find waste but cannot say what good looks like.
• Linked accounts. Google Analytics 4, Merchant Center for retailers, Search Console and any call tracking platform. Many tracking problems only show when two systems are compared.
• Change history. Export the last 90 days. A sudden drop often lines up with a change someone made, or a recommendation Google applied.
• A baseline. Write down spend, conversions, cost per conversion and conversion value for the window before you change anything. Every fix will be judged against it.

The PPC forecast calculator is a quick way to set the target numbers next to the baseline, so findings can be read against what the account should be producing.

Google Ads audit checklist step 1: conversion tracking

Every other finding depends on this one. If conversions are wrong, Smart Bidding is optimising toward the wrong thing and every cost per conversion in the account is fiction.

• List every conversion action under Goals. Note which are primary (used for bidding) and which are secondary.
• Check that only real business outcomes are primary. Purchases, qualified leads, booked calls. Page views, scroll depth, "clicked email" and button clicks belong in secondary or nowhere.
• Look for duplicates. A purchase tracked by both the Google tag and an imported GA4 event counts twice. Compare Google Ads conversions with orders or leads in your own system for the same week.
• Check counting. Leads should usually count "one" per click; purchases "every".
• Check enhanced conversions and consent mode are set up where they apply, especially for UK and EU traffic.
• Check offline imports if you sell by phone or through a sales team. If qualified leads never come back to Google, bidding sees only form fills.

Our guide to checking Google Ads conversion tracking has the full test sequence.

Settings that leak budget

These take five minutes to check and are wrong in a surprising number of accounts.

• Location options. "Presence or interest" (the default) shows ads to people outside your area who show interest in it. Most local and national businesses want "Presence". Check the locations report for spend outside your targets.
• Search partners and Display Network. Search campaigns are created with both switched on. Check the network segment: if Display spend inside a Search campaign has no conversions, switch it off.
• Ad schedule. If sales only answer calls 9 to 5, are call-heavy campaigns running at night?
• Auto-applied recommendations. Check which are switched on. Some add broad match keywords, change bid strategies or create assets without anyone reviewing them. The change history shows what Google applied.
• Languages, devices and audience settings. Check for exclusions that no longer make sense, or observation audiences added by mistake as targeting.

Structure, keywords and search terms

Structure. Look at how campaigns split the budget. Each campaign should have a clear job (brand, generic, competitor, a product line, a region) and enough conversions to learn from. Too many tiny campaigns starve Smart Bidding; one giant campaign lets cheap, low-value clicks swallow the budget. Brand should sit in its own campaign so it does not flatter the rest. The model we use is in Google Search ads structure.

Keywords. Sort keywords by spend. For the top 20, check match type, Quality Score components (expected click-through rate, ad relevance, landing page experience) and conversion rate. Look for keywords with heavy spend and no conversions over 90 days, and for duplicates competing across ad groups. Google Ads Quality Score explains what each component means.

Search terms. This is where most waste hides. Download 90 days of search terms, sort by cost, and mark every irrelevant one: jobs, free, DIY, competitors you do not want, wrong locations, wrong products. Add the patterns as negative keywords at the right level, and build shared negative lists so new campaigns inherit them. The process is set out in our negative keywords audit and search terms report guide.

Bidding, budgets and Performance Max

Bid strategies. For each campaign, note the strategy and whether it has enough conversions to support it. Target CPA or target ROAS on a campaign with a handful of conversions a month will be erratic. Check that targets are realistic: a target CPA far below the actual cost per conversion throttles delivery.

Budgets. Check "lost impression share (budget)" and "lost impression share (rank)". A profitable campaign losing a large share to budget is a missed opportunity; an unprofitable one with plenty of budget is a leak. Remember Google can spend up to twice the average daily budget on a given day, so daily figures alone mislead. The budget pacing calculator helps here.

Performance Max. Check whether brand exclusions are applied, so PMax is not taking credit for people already searching your name; see Performance Max brand exclusions. Review the channel and placement reports Google now provides, the search term insights, and the asset group structure. Check final URL expansion: if it is on, PMax can send traffic to pages you never meant to advertise. Check that PMax and Search are not both bidding for the same high-value terms without a plan.

Ads, assets and landing pages

• Responsive search ads. Each ad group should have at least one with a range of headlines that include the keyword theme and a clear offer. Check ad strength, but judge by conversion rate, not the label.
• Pinning. Heavy pinning limits combinations. Pin only what must appear, such as a compliance line.
• Assets. Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call and location assets, image assets where eligible. Missing assets mean smaller ads and lower click-through rates.
• Disapprovals and limited ads. Filter the ads view by status.
• Landing pages. Open the top five landing pages by spend on a phone. Check load speed, that the headline matches the ad, that the form or phone number is visible without scrolling, and that the page works. Broken forms are more common than anyone admits. Our landing page checklist covers the rest.

How to prioritise what the Google Ads audit finds

An audit usually turns up 20 to 40 findings. Ranking them matters more than listing them. Score each by money at stake and effort to fix.

Fix tracking before you change bids, and change one major thing at a time on Smart Bidding campaigns so you can see the effect.

Write the result as a short report the account owner can act on: a one-paragraph summary of the account's health, the ranked findings with the evidence for each (a screenshot or the report it came from), the recommended fix, who does it, and the date it will be checked. A finding without an owner and a check date tends to come back in the next audit.

A worked example: sizing the waste

These figures are hypothetical, to show the method. Say an account spends $30,000 a month on Search and Performance Max.

• The search terms review shows 14% of Search spend over 90 days went on irrelevant terms such as jobs and DIY queries: about $4,200 a month.
• The locations report shows 6% of spend reached people outside the service area: about $1,800 a month.
• Display Network placements inside two Search campaigns took 5% of spend with no conversions: about $1,500 a month.

That is roughly $7,500 a month, a quarter of the budget, going to clicks with little chance of converting. Not all of it is recoverable, because some irrelevant terms will always slip through, but most of it can be moved to campaigns that were losing impression share to budget. On top of that, the audit found that a "page view" action was set as primary, so reported conversions were inflated and target CPA bidding was learning from the wrong signal. That cost does not appear as a line item, yet it often matters more than all three leaks together.

Common Google Ads audit mistakes

• Starting with ad copy. Ad tests are the least important thing if tracking or search terms are broken.
• Trusting optimisation score. It measures how many of Google's recommendations you have adopted, not how profitable the account is.
• Too short a window. Seven days of data hides waste and exaggerates noise. Use 90 days.
• Changing everything at once. Ten changes in a day make it impossible to know what worked, and can send Smart Bidding campaigns back into learning.
• Ignoring the CRM. If Google Ads conversions do not match leads or sales in your own system, the audit is about the wrong numbers.
• No written output. An audit that ends as a call with no ranked list rarely gets acted on.

Doing the Google Ads audit yourself or getting a second opinion

Steps one to four of this checklist need patience more than expertise, and many owners can do them. Bidding, Performance Max and structure decisions take more experience, because the right answer depends on conversion volume, margins and seasonality. A second opinion is also useful when the person running the account is the person reviewing it.

We run a free ad account audit for businesses and agencies in the US, UK, Canada and Australia: read-only access, a written list of findings ranked by cost, and no obligation to hire us. If you want the account managed afterwards, our Google Ads agency team takes it from there, and we say the fee on the first call.

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