How to Audit Your Google Ads Account: A Step-by-Step Checklist

When I audit a Google Ads account I always work through it in the same order. I start with conversion tracking, then move on to structure, search terms, technical settings, ads and landing pages and change history, and finish with a list of fixes in priority order. If you're running your own account, you can do a lighter version of this yourself.

It's well worth putting the time in, as search is still the biggest single slice of UK digital advertising, with UK search ad spend growing 6% to £17.9 billion in 2025, 44% of all digital ad spend.

What a Google Ads Audit Actually Checks

An audit is really just a structured look through your account, and by the end of it you should have a list of fixes in the order you want to tackle them.

Whatever the size of the account, I'm always trying to answer the same few questions:

• Is the account set up correctly? The tracking, campaign settings, targeting and bidding should all reflect how your business actually works.
• Is your budget reaching the right people? Every click you're paying for should come from someone who could plausibly become a customer.
• Are your campaigns actually making you money? A cheap conversion only counts if it turns into a sale or a lead worth having, so I always judge the results against what a customer is worth to you.

One number I wouldn't put much weight on is the optimisation score. Google explains that optimisation score works out a campaign's goal from its bid strategy, and where a campaign isn't on a fully automated Smart Bidding strategy, it uses the one Google recommends. So a score in the high 90s just tells you the account is following Google's suggestions closely. Whether those suggestions suit your margins, your best customers and your capacity is a different question, and that's the one an audit is there to answer.

This is the order I work through things in:

1. Conversion tracking
2. Account and campaign structure
3. Search terms and negative keywords
4. Attribution windows, enhanced conversions and other technical settings
5. Ads, assets and landing pages
6. Change history
7. A priority order action list

I always check tracking first because everything after it relies on the numbers being right. Change history I leave until near the end, as by then you'll have a good idea of which changes in performance you need to explain.

How Often to Audit Your Account

Generally speaking, my rule of thumb is a light-touch audit every six months, which you can do in-house, and then a fresh outside audit every 12 months. That's just my own guidance and it doesn't come from Google. The six-monthly check stops small problems from building up, and the yearly one brings fresh eyes to the things you've stopped noticing.

It matters more as budgets grow, and IAB UK is forecasting UK digital ad spend to reach £45 billion by 2026, growing by around 10% a year. The more you're spending, the more a small leak costs you.

The other time I'd always suggest an audit, whatever the calendar says, is when an account changes hands. If you've just hired someone new, switched agency or brought in a consultant, an audit at the start shows what they're taking on and gives you a baseline to measure their changes against.

Step 1: Check Your Conversion Tracking First

If your tracking is wrong then your cost per conversion is wrong too, your bid strategy ends up optimising towards the wrong thing and every decision you make from the data carries the same mistake. That's why it's the first thing I look at. Head into your conversion actions and go through them one at a time:

• Is it a genuine business outcome? A purchase, a qualified enquiry or a phone call of a sensible length all count, whereas a page view or scroll depth usually doesn't.
• Is it still firing? Look out for anything flagged as needing attention or misconfigured, and check when each action last recorded a conversion. It only takes a website update to break a tag, and the chances are nobody will notice straight away.
• Is it double counting? If the same form is tracked by a Google Ads tag and an imported GA4 event, and both are set as primary, every lead gets counted twice. Check the count setting while you're there too, as "one" per click usually suits leads and "every" suits sales.
• Are micro-conversions mixed in with real results? Newsletter sign-ups and brochure downloads can be useful signals, but I'd set them as secondary. If they sit alongside sales or leads as primary conversions, automated bidding will happily chase them instead.

Then you need to decide which system you're going to believe. Google Ads and GA4 attribute conversions differently so their figures rarely match, and PPC practitioners genuinely disagree on which one should be the source of truth. Whichever you pick, make it a deliberate choice, write it down and make sure that platform is set up properly. If GA4 turns out to be part of the problem, my Google Analytics and GA4 services cover setup, audits and custom reporting.

Step 2: Review Account and Campaign Structure

Next I look at how the account is put together. For each campaign I'd check:

• Does the campaign type (Search, Shopping, Performance Max and so on) suit what it's meant to achieve?
• Is the budget weighted towards the campaigns that make you the most money?
• Does the bid strategy fit? Automated strategies need a steady flow of clean conversion data, so a low-volume campaign may well struggle on one.
• Are location and language set correctly? "Presence or interest" targeting can show your ads to people outside your area who have only shown an interest in it.
• Are the Display Network or search partners switched on in a Search campaign? They can spend on placements you never meant to buy.
• Are your ads running when nobody can answer the phone?

The main thing I'm looking for at this stage is spend without results. I like to sort campaigns and ad groups by cost over the last three to six months and flag anything that has spent steadily without conversions worth the money, as that's usually where your quickest savings are.

Step 3: Work Through Search Terms and Negative Keywords

For me, the search terms report is the most useful part of the whole audit. It shows you what people actually typed before they clicked on your ad, and that can be very different from the keywords you chose.

I'd pull the report over a decent date range and then go through every meaningful term, putting each one into one of three groups:

• Keep and expand. Relevant terms that convert at a sensible cost, and the best of them are worth adding as keywords in their own right.
• Investigate. Relevant terms that are expensive or where it's not clear how they're doing. Before you decide anything, check the ad, the landing page and the match type.
• Exclude. Anything irrelevant, searches from the wrong area and searches with the wrong intent, such as people looking for jobs or for something free. These go in as negative keywords.

Bear in mind that negative broad, phrase and exact match all block different sets of searches, so it's worth thinking about which one you use. A shared negative keyword list also saves you adding the same exclusions to every campaign one at a time.

Step 4: Check Attribution Windows, Enhanced Conversions and Other Technical Settings

These are the settings that tend to look fine at a glance, and not many audit guides cover them. Google doesn't document any of the three problems below either, so I'd treat each one as something to check for yourself.

Conversion windows. Google's default click-through conversion window is 30 days, and you can set it anywhere from 1 to 90 days depending on the conversion source. The window is set on each conversion action, which means campaigns optimising towards different actions can end up being measured over different periods. Say someone cut the window to seven days on the action a Performance Max campaign uses while Search is still counting over 30. Search will then look better on paper and budget can drift towards it for reasons that have nothing to do with how it's really performing. I'd list every primary conversion action and its window and make sure the campaigns you're comparing are being measured on the same terms.

Enhanced conversions. Enhanced conversions send hashed first-party data, such as email addresses, to Google to help it match up conversions it would otherwise miss. Google's own figure is that advertisers using enhanced conversions see an average 11% increase in Search conversions compared with standard conversion imports, and in an older Google case study UK retailer ASOS recorded sales uplifts of 8.6% on Search and 31% on YouTube after setting up enhanced conversions. Both figures come from Google itself, so I'd treat them as the best case for your account.

The catch is that enhanced conversions can look like they're installed while actually doing very little. If the customer data is badly formatted before it's hashed, or the tag is picking up the wrong field, Google may have almost nothing to match against. I'd check the diagnostics on each conversion action that uses them and test a real conversion to make sure the right data is coming through.

Brand keywords under automated bidding. If your brand campaign is running on target CPA or another automated strategy, I'd keep a close eye on your brand cost per click. PPC practitioners report that short bursts of unusual conversion rate data, around seasonal peaks for example, can push brand CPCs well above anything you'd pay with manual bids. A simple way to spot it is to chart brand CPC over the past year and look for spikes that a change in competition doesn't explain.

Step 5: Review Ads, Assets and Landing Pages

Starting with the ads themselves, I'd check for:

• Headlines that reflect the search terms in each ad group
• A clear reason for someone to choose you over the other ads on the page
• A specific call to action
• Sitelinks, callouts and structured snippets that are filled in, relevant and up to date

Then I'd follow the click through to the landing page and check that:

• It delivers what the ad promised and what the person was searching for
• It works well on a phone and loads quickly
• The forms are short, work on mobile and actually submit (it's always worth sending a test one)
• It's obvious what the next step is

You can have an account that's technically well run and still underperforming because the landing page doesn't convert. If the traffic looks right and the ads are strong but the enquiries are thin, it's often the page that's causing the problem.

Step 6: Check Your Account's Change History

If there's one step I'd ask you not to skip it's this one, and hardly any audit guides mention it. Google Ads keeps a log of changes made to your account, campaigns and ad groups over the past two years, and anything older than that can't be retrieved. It records things like budget changes, paused campaigns and keyword edits, along with who or what made each change, whether that's a named user, the Google Ads API or one of Google's automated systems.

What I do is pick out every point where conversions, cost per conversion or spend moved sharply and then look at what changed in the days before. Often the real cause is a budget cut, a paused keyword, an applied recommendation or an edited conversion action. Lining the changes up against performance takes the guesswork out, and it tells you whether the problem is something you can simply undo.

Turn Your Findings Into a Priority Order Action List

A long list of issues in no particular order is hard to act on, so I like to finish with a simple findings table, something like this:

Then I sort it so the biggest savings or gains are at the top, which is also how I hand findings over when I do a PPC audit for a client.

If you'd rather hand the whole thing over, my PPC audit service follows the same priority order approach. It starts with a kickoff call, I run through the findings with you afterwards, and then it's up to you whether I implement them. If you'd like help running the account day to day after that, there's my Google Ads management service, and if you want your organic search checked too, I also offer a full SEO audit.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Do You Audit an Ad Account?

I always start with conversion tracking, since every other number depends on it. From there I review the campaign structure and settings, work through the search terms report, check the bidding and technical settings, look over the ads and landing pages, and turn it all into an action list in priority order.

Is There a Template for a Google Ads Account Audit?

A simple spreadsheet does the job for most accounts. I'd use one row per finding, with columns for the area, what you found, the impact, what you'll do about it and its priority. Then sort it by priority so the fixes with the biggest savings or gains sit at the top.

How Often Should I Audit My Google Ads Account?

My rule of thumb is a light-touch audit every six months, which you can do in-house, and a fresh outside audit every 12 months. That's just my own guidance and it doesn't come from Google. If you've inherited an account from someone else, it's also worth auditing it straight away.

Should I Trust Google Ads or GA4 Conversion Numbers?

There's no settled answer to this one, and PPC practitioners still debate it. The two platforms attribute conversions differently so their figures rarely match, and which one to trust depends on how well each is set up. The "Check Your Conversion Tracking First" section above goes through what to check on both sides.

If you've worked through this checklist and would like a second opinion, or you'd rather I had a look at the account myself, drop me a message. I'm always happy to have a chat and talk it through.