A Google Ads audit finds the leaks draining your budget and the wins you're missing. A practical step-by-step checklist you can run yourself.
Why Audit?
Even well-managed accounts develop inefficiencies over time. Keywords that were profitable 12 months ago stop converting. Budget shifts toward campaigns that have strong ROAS but small reach. Negative keyword lists don’t grow. Quality Scores drift.
An audit surfaces these issues systematically rather than waiting for performance to decline enough to become obvious.
Step 1: Conversion Tracking Verification
Before touching anything else, verify that conversion tracking is accurate. Check: is the conversion action firing correctly? Are there duplicate conversions (the same purchase counted twice)? Is the conversion window appropriate for your sales cycle?
Corrupt conversion data corrupts every decision made from it. Optimising a campaign toward inflated conversion numbers is worse than no optimisation at all.
Step 2: Campaign Structure
Review whether campaigns are logically structured. Each campaign should have a clear objective, a controlled budget, and a defined audience or keyword set. Mixing high-intent keywords with broad prospecting terms in the same campaign obscures performance and mixes budget between very different user types.
Check for budget fragmentation: many small-budget campaigns each underfunded relative to what the algorithm needs to learn. Consolidating campaigns often improves performance.
Step 3: Keyword Health
Search terms report: Download the search terms from the past 90 days. Identify queries that are getting spend but have zero or low conversions. Add them as negatives or tighten match types.
Quality Scores: Filter keywords by Quality Score. Any keyword at 3 or below warrants investigation — is the ad copy relevant? Is the landing page matched to the keyword? Is the keyword too broad for the ad group?
Impression share: What percentage of available impressions are you capturing? Low impression share (below 40%) on high-converting keywords means budget or bid constraints are limiting reach on your best traffic.
Step 4: Ad Copy and Extensions
Check that each ad group has at least 2–3 active responsive search ads. Review asset performance ratings in RSAs — remove “Low” rated assets and add new variations.
Verify that all relevant extensions are active: sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call extension if phone calls are valuable, location extension if you have a physical location.
Step 5: Bidding Strategy
Is the current bid strategy appropriate for the account’s data volume? Target ROAS and Target CPA need at least 30–50 conversions per month to function reliably. Accounts below this threshold often perform better on enhanced CPC or manual bidding.
Check the ROAS or CPA target against actual performance. Targets set too aggressively relative to actual historical performance cause the algorithm to become overly restrictive, reducing volume significantly.
Step 6: Audience and Device Performance
Segment performance by device: desktop, mobile, tablet. If mobile traffic converts at half the rate of desktop but you’re not applying negative bid adjustments, you’re overpaying for mobile clicks.
Check audience bid adjustments. In-market audiences and remarketing lists layered onto search campaigns (RLSA) let you bid more aggressively for users with higher purchase intent.
Step 7: Budget Pacing
Is budget being spent evenly across the month, or is it exhausted in the first two weeks? Campaigns hitting budget limits daily are leaving impressions on the table. Either increase budget or tighten targeting to spend more selectively.
In Short
- Start every audit with conversion tracking verification — corrupted data corrupts all decisions
- Search terms report is the fastest way to find budget waste
- Quality Scores below 5 need active investigation and improvement
- Bid strategy must match data volume — automated strategies need 30–50 conversions/month
- Check device and audience segmentation for bid adjustment opportunities
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