How to audit a Google Ads account, step by step

An audit answers one question: is this account spending money on the right things, and can its numbers be trusted? You cannot answer it without knowing what the business sells and what a result is worth.

• What counts as a result. A sale, a lead, a call, a booking. Write down which one the account is run for.
• What a result is worth. The margin on a sale, or the share of leads that become customers and their value.
• The period. The last 30 days for spend, 90 days on a small account, and 12 months for anything seasonal.
• Access. Standard access to the Google Ads account is enough to read it. Add Google Analytics 4 and Merchant Center if the account uses them.

Keep a list as you go. For every finding, note the rows that prove it. A finding without evidence becomes an argument, and an argument rarely becomes a change.

Smart Bidding spends toward whatever is marked as a primary conversion. If that is wrong, every cost per conversion is wrong, and every later step of the audit inherits the error. So tracking comes first, always.

Open Goals, then Conversions, then Summary. For each action, read whether it is primary, how it counts, what value it sends and how many conversions it recorded in the period.

Several Google Ads settings are on unless someone turned them off. Each one widens where the money goes. None of them is always wrong, but each should be a decision.

• Search Partners and the Display network on Search campaigns. Segment the campaign by network to compare their cost per conversion with Google Search.
• Location option. 'Presence or interest' shows ads to people interested in your area, wherever they are. A local business usually wants 'Presence'.
• Languages. A campaign with no language set serves in every language Google has an audience for.
• Ad schedule. A business that answers the phone in office hours should not pay for calls at night.
• Auto-applied recommendations. Check which ones are switched on, and what the change history shows they changed.
• AI Max and optimized targeting. Both widen what a campaign reaches beyond what you chose.

The search terms report shows what people actually typed. It is the first place money leaks and the first place new demand shows up. Download 30 days, or 90 on a small account.

Before you call a search wasted, decide how many clicks it takes for zero conversions to mean something. It depends on the account's conversion rate: the lower the rate, the more clicks. The free wasted spend threshold calculator gives the number for yours.

Add a money bar too, because a €4 click and a €0.40 click cannot share one count. A search should also have spent well past what a conversion should cost you.

1. 1

   Block the clear waste

   Searches past both bars with no conversion, for things you do not sell, become negatives. Add them at the campaign level where possible.

2. 2

   Add the plurals

   Negative keywords do not match close variants. A negative for 'job' does not block 'jobs'.

3. 3

   Protect what sold

   Never block a search that converted anywhere in the account, even if it looks odd.

4. 4

   Harvest the winners

   Searches that convert through a keyword aimed at something else deserve an exact keyword and an ad group of their own.

5. 5

   Check for blocked keywords

   A negative can switch off a keyword you added. The keyword still says enabled, and its searches never reach it.

Structure decides what every number means. Look for the same keyword in two campaigns, which makes the account compete with itself and splits one search's numbers across two places.

Look for budgets split too thin. Thirty conversions a month across ten campaigns is three each, and no campaign can bid well on three. Fewer, larger campaigns often learn faster.

Check that brand searches are separated from the rest. Brand converts several times better, and a blended cost per lead hides what non-brand search really costs. If Performance Max runs beside Search, check whether it buys queries the Search campaigns were built for.

Read impression share lost to budget for each campaign. A campaign that runs out of money every day while converting well is a candidate for more budget. First, look for budget sitting unused in a campaign that converts worse.

Then read each bid strategy against the account's goal. Maximize clicks on an account that counts calls buys the cheapest clicks, which are the least likely to call.

• A target set too early. Without steady conversions month after month, a target CPA asks the bidding to learn a cost it cannot learn yet.
• A target far from reality. A target well below what the campaign achieves throttles it. Start near the actual, then tighten in steps.
• A ROAS target without a margin. Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by the margin. At 25% margin, a 400% target only breaks even.
• Brand on Smart Bidding. People searching your name already chose you. Automated bids overpay for them.

Responsive search ads hold up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions. Ads with half of that give Google fewer combinations to test. Pinning one asset to a position removes every combination in that slot.

Check the free space around the ad: sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and a call asset where calls matter. Look for ad groups with one ad, and groups where every ad but one has stopped getting impressions.

Then open the pages. A page that answers 404, a form the account counts that is not on the page, or a phone number nobody can tap on a phone makes good ads look broken. Time the pages on mobile, where most paid clicks land.

In Shopping and Performance Max, the feed is the ad. Open Merchant Center and count products that are not eligible and products limited by warnings. Both are easier to read in Merchant Center than in Google Ads.

• Listing groups that exclude most of the catalogue.
• One bid for the whole catalogue, which pushes spend toward the cheapest products.
• No brand exclusion in Performance Max, so it wins your own name cheaply and claims those sales.
• Asset groups thin on images, videos or headlines, or with no search theme.
• Promotions still showing after the offer ended.

A list of problems is not a plan. Each finding needs four things before it becomes a change: the evidence, what it is worth with its arithmetic, whether it can be undone, and who owns it.

Be honest about money. If the account already runs out of budget, money freed by blocking waste is spent again on better searches the same day. That is a redirection, not a saving, and the two should never be added into one total.

Order the plan: tracking fixes first, then reversible changes like negatives and sitelinks, then structural changes that need a decision. Then audit again. Accounts drift every week.

A careful manual audit takes hours on a small account and days on a large one, which is why most accounts get one a year. Optizads runs the same order as 107 checks, in minutes, every week.

Checks that weigh money or clicks take their bars from your account. Each check prints its evidence and turns what it finds into a task you approve. You can see every check, by area, on the audit checks page.