What is a Google Ads audit? What we check and why

What is a Google Ads audit?

A Google Ads audit is a structured review of an account against the things that actually decide performance: account settings, conversion tracking health, search-term waste, match types and budget allocation. Done properly, it produces a written list of findings and fixes, ranked by impact, not a pitch deck built to sell a retainer.

Most business owners have never had one done outside a sales call, which is why accounts run for years with the same waste sitting untouched, quietly costing money every day nobody looks.

Account settings first, because they quietly decide everything else

Location targeting, ad scheduling, device bid adjustments, network settings. These sound boring, and that is exactly why they get skipped. We have opened accounts advertising nationally for a business that only serves one city, and accounts running on the Display Network at full budget alongside Search because nobody unchecked a default box during setup.

None of this shows up as an obvious red flag in a performance report. It just quietly burns a percentage of the budget every single day, forever, until someone checks it.

Conversion tracking health

If tracking is wrong, nothing else in the account can be judged fairly, because every bidding decision Google's system makes is built on what it thinks converts. We check whether calls, form fills and bookings are all firing correctly, whether the same conversion is being counted twice (common, and it makes an account look better than it actually is), and whether recorded conversions match what genuinely happened on the website.

This is the check most audits skip, because it takes longer than screenshotting a metrics dashboard. It is also the one that matters most. An account with perfect settings and broken tracking is still a bad account, and every optimisation built on top of bad data makes the account worse, not better.

Search-term waste

The keywords you bid on and the actual searches that trigger your ads are two different lists, and the gap between them is where money leaks fastest. We pull the search-terms report and look for irrelevant queries eating spend: job seekers, DIY searchers, competitor brand names, suburbs you do not service. On accounts that have never had a proper negative-keyword pass, this is often the single fastest win in the whole review, and one of the easiest to fix once it is found.

Match types

Broad match without tight controls hands Google's algorithm a lot of latitude to decide what counts as relevant, and for a considered-purchase service business that latitude usually costs more than it earns. We check whether match type strategy actually fits the account's buying intent, and whether the tightly targeted terms that convert best are getting starved of budget by broader terms that simply spend faster.

Budgets

Not just the total spend, the allocation across it. We look at whether budget is spread evenly across campaigns regardless of which ones convert, whether the highest-intent campaigns are capped and losing impression share to competitors as a result, and whether spend is following performance or just following how the account happened to be set up two years ago.

What a real audit hands you

Every finding gets a plain-English explanation and a fix, ranked by what will move the result fastest. No jargon, no vanity metrics, and no recommendation that conveniently requires hiring the agency that ran the audit to act on it. If the fix is a five-minute setting change you can make yourself, we say so. This is the same checklist that sits underneath our Google Ads management, run in full before we touch a single ad or dollar of spend.

An audit that only ever concludes "you need us" was not a real audit. It was a sales call wearing a report as a costume.

Get the audit, not the sales pitch

Our free Growth Audit runs this exact checklist against your account, plus your landing pages and tracking, and hands you a written report of what to fix first, whoever you hire. Get the free Growth Audit.