Most things calling themselves a Google Ads audit are a template with the client’s name pasted at the top. Check for negative keywords. Review Quality Score. Try Performance Max. This advice applies to every account on the platform and tells you nothing specific about yours. A proper audit works the other way round – it starts inside the account, pulls the actual data, and tells you exactly what is costing money and why. Here is what that process actually involves.
Account Structure and Campaign Settings
Structure gets dismissed as a formality, but it determines whether the rest of the account can actually be optimised. We look at how campaigns are split – by product line, service area, funnel stage, or just by whoever set the account up years ago and never revisited it. Campaigns that mix branded and non-branded traffic, or lump high-intent and research-stage keywords together, make it impossible to control spend or bidding sensibly at a granular level.
Alongside structure, we go through the settings that get set once and forgotten: network opt-ins (is Search spend leaking into Display via the Search Partners checkbox), location targeting (presence versus interest, which changes who actually sees the ads), ad scheduling, and device adjustments. None of these show up in a performance dashboard. They only show up when someone opens the account and checks each one against what the business is actually trying to achieve.
Conversion Tracking Accuracy
If conversion tracking is wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong too – bid strategies, budget decisions, reporting to the business. So this is where a proper audit spends real time, not a tick-box glance at whether a conversion action exists. We check what is actually being counted as a conversion: is it a genuine lead (a form submission, a qualified phone call) or is it being inflated by page views, button clicks, or newsletter sign-ups tagged as the primary goal.
We also check for duplicate firing, where a single form submission counts twice because of a tag firing on both a confirmation page and an event trigger. We compare Google Ads conversion numbers against GA4 and against the client’s CRM where possible, because a mismatch between what Google Ads reports and what the business actually received tells you the account is being optimised toward the wrong signal. Call tracking gets checked too – whether call conversions are measuring calls of a reasonable duration or counting every dial, including wrong numbers and hang-ups.
Wasted Spend and Search Term Analysis
This is the part a generic audit skips entirely, because it requires actually opening the search terms report and reading it, not just recommending that the client “add negative keywords”. We pull search terms over a meaningful date range and look for patterns – broad match queries drifting into irrelevant territory, job-seeker searches hitting recruitment-adjacent accounts, informational queries consuming budget on campaigns built for transactional intent.
We also check how the account handles this over time. Is there a negative keyword list being actively maintained, or was it built once at launch and never revisited since. Accounts that have been running for years without a fresh search term review almost always have spend leaking into queries that have nothing to do with what the business sells, and it usually accumulates gradually enough that nobody notices until someone goes looking for it specifically.
Bidding Strategy Fit and Match Type Mix
Bidding strategy needs to match the account’s conversion volume and data quality, not just follow whatever Google is currently pushing in the interface. An account with too few monthly conversions to give an automated strategy a stable signal will often perform worse on a “smart” bid strategy than on manual or enhanced CPC, simply because the algorithm doesn’t have enough data to learn from. We check conversion volume against the bid strategy in use and flag where the two don’t line up, along with whether target CPA or target ROAS values were set based on account history or just guessed at.
Match type mix gets checked in the same practical way – not as a rule that broad match is bad or exact match is good, but by looking at how each match type is actually performing in this specific account, alongside how tightly the negative keyword list is controlling broad match reach. An account leaning heavily on broad match with a thin negative list is a very different risk profile to one running broad match with several years of accumulated negatives behind it.
Quality Score, Ad Relevance and Negative Keyword Coverage
Quality Score itself is a diagnostic, not a target, so we look at its three components separately rather than quoting the headline number. Expected click-through rate points to whether the ad copy and keyword intent line up. Ad relevance points to whether ad groups are tightly themed or stuffed with loosely related keywords sharing the same two or three ads. Landing page experience feeds into the next section below. Low scores are useful precisely because they point to which of these three is the actual problem, rather than a vague instruction to “improve Quality Score”.
Negative keyword coverage gets assessed at every level – account, campaign and ad group – checking for cross-contamination where one campaign’s keywords are triggering ads in another, and for shared negative lists that were built for one product line but are now silently suppressing traffic somewhere they shouldn’t.
Landing Page Alignment and Budget Pacing
Landing pages get checked against the keywords and ad copy sending traffic to them, not against generic conversion rate optimisation advice. If an ad promises a specific service and the landing page is the homepage, or the page loads slowly on mobile, or the form asks for more information than the intent level justifies, that is where clicks are being paid for and then lost. This is checked page by page against the campaigns actually pointing to it, rather than as a one-off site-wide comment.
Finally, we check budget pacing – whether campaigns are consistently limited by budget and losing impression share as a result, whether spend is front-loading early in the day and starving performance later, and whether budget allocation across campaigns still reflects which ones actually convert, rather than however it was originally split when the account launched.
This is what our free audit actually looks at, account by account, rather than handing back a checklist that would apply to anyone. We go through your structure, tracking, search terms, bidding, Quality Score, landing pages and budget pacing, whether or not you work with us. No commitment, response within one business day.