How to audit a Google Ads account

A Google Ads audit is a structured review of an account to find where money is being wasted and where it could be working harder. A useful one checks, in order: whether conversions are measured correctly, how the account is structured, which searches trigger your ads, how bids and budgets are set, and whether the ads and landing pages match what people searched for. The order matters, because every later judgment rests on the numbers from the first step.

1. Check conversion tracking first

Everything else in the audit is judged against conversions, so start by confirming they are real.

• List every conversion action and what it counts. A purchase and a page view should not carry the same weight.
• Confirm which actions are set as primary. Only primary actions feed bidding.
• Look for double counting, such as one lead recorded by both an imported Google Analytics event and a Google Ads tag.
• Compare a month of reported conversions with what your CRM or order system shows for the same month.
• If leads close offline, check whether those outcomes are imported back into the account.

If the tracking is wrong, fix it and wait for clean data before you change anything else.

2. Review the account structure

• Does each campaign have one clear goal and its own budget?
• Are brand and non-brand searches in separate campaigns? Mixed together, cheap brand clicks hide how everything else performs.
• Are ad groups tightly themed, so each ad can speak to the searches that trigger it?
• Check the campaign settings that are easy to miss: location targeting (people in your area, or anyone who shows interest in it), the Search Partners and Display Network options on Search campaigns, the ad schedule, and languages.

3. Read the search terms report

The keywords you bid on are not the searches you pay for. The search terms report shows the queries that triggered your ads.

• Sort by cost and read down the list. Queries that will never convert go onto a negative keyword list.
• Look for queries that convert well but have no keyword of their own, and add them.
• Check match types. Broad match reaches furthest and needs the closest watching.
• Note how much spend sits under search terms the report does not show you.

4. Check bidding and budgets

• Does each campaign's bid strategy match its goal? A campaign meant to produce sales at a target return should not be bidding for clicks.
• Does the strategy have enough data? Automated bidding learns from conversions, and a campaign that records only a handful a month gives it little to learn from.
• Are budgets capping the campaigns that perform? A best campaign marked "Limited by budget" while a weak one spends freely is the first thing to fix.
• Look at impression share lost to budget and lost to rank. Together they tell you whether more budget, or better ads and bids, would win more auctions.

5. Review ads and assets

• Every ad group should have at least one responsive search ad with a full set of distinct headlines and descriptions.
• Check that any headline pinned to a position is pinned on purpose. Pinning limits what Google can test.
• Fill in the assets that extend an ad: sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and where they apply, call and location assets.
• Read the ads as a searcher would. Does the ad echo the search and say what happens after the click?

6. Look at Quality Score and landing pages

Quality Score is Google's 1 to 10 estimate of how relevant your keyword, ad, and landing page are to a search. Its three components point to different fixes:

• Expected click-through rate. The ad is not compelling for that search.
• Ad relevance. The ad does not match the intent behind the keyword.
• Landing page experience. The page is slow, off-topic, or hard to use.

Then open the landing pages on a phone. Each one should load quickly, deliver what the ad promised, and make the next step obvious.

7. Check what has been changing

• Open the change history. Long stretches with no changes mean the account has been left to run.
• Open the Recommendations page and see which recommendations are set to apply automatically. Auto-applied changes can add keywords or alter bidding without anyone having decided to.
• If the account runs Performance Max, check which search terms and placements it spends on, and whether it is absorbing brand searches that a Search campaign would win for less.

8. Turn the findings into a short list

An audit that ends as a forty-row spreadsheet rarely gets acted on. Rank what you found by the money involved and the effort to fix it:

1. Tracking errors, because they corrupt every other number.
2. Wasted spend you can stop today: irrelevant search terms, wrong locations, networks you did not mean to buy.
3. Budget moved from weak campaigns to ones that are capped.
4. Structural work: splitting campaigns, rewriting ads, improving landing pages.

How often to audit

A full audit is worth doing when you take over an account, when performance changes and you cannot say why, and on a regular schedule in between. Search terms and budgets need looking at far more often than that.

That routine checking is the part that gets skipped. Goldbeater, the tool we built for our own client accounts, runs an automated Google Ads audit every day: it shows where an account is losing money and drafts the changes for you to approve. Nothing changes without your approval.

If you would rather hand it over, PressRoom is a Google Partner and offers Google Ads management. Our free analysis is the place to start.