Google Ads Audit: A Step by Step Checklist to Find Wasted Spend

A Google Ads audit is a structured review of your account to find what is wasting money, what is holding performance back and what should be scaled. A good audit checks, in order: conversion tracking, account and campaign structure, campaign settings, keywords and search terms, ads and assets, landing pages, bidding and budgets, and reporting. Tracking comes first because every other conclusion depends on accurate data. The output should be a prioritized action list, ranked by likely impact and effort, not just a list of observations.

This guide is for business owners, marketers and in-house teams who want to review a Google Ads account themselves or understand what a proper audit should cover. I will walk through each area of the audit, what to look for, how to prioritize findings, common problems, a practical example and a complete checklist. If you need a grounding in how the platform works, start with my Google Ads guide.

When Should You Audit a Google Ads Account?

Audits are useful at several moments:

• When costs are rising and results are flat or falling.
• When you take over an account from another person or agency.
• Before increasing budget significantly.
• After major website changes, such as a redesign or new forms.
• When sales teams say lead quality has changed.
• As a routine check, often once or twice a year, even when things seem fine.

An audit is different from weekly optimization. Weekly work keeps the account tidy. An audit steps back and asks whether the account is built and measured correctly in the first place.

Before You Start: Gather Context

An account cannot be judged without knowing the business behind it. Before opening the interface, write down:

• The business goals: sales, leads, calls, bookings or sign ups.
• What a customer or lead is worth, even roughly.
• Target cost per acquisition or return on ad spend, if one exists.
• Locations served and any seasonal patterns.
• Which products or services matter most, and which have the best margins.
• What the sales team thinks about lead quality.

Choose a date range long enough to be meaningful, usually the last 90 days compared with the previous period, and look at the last year for seasonality. Keep a change history view open, because recent changes often explain sudden shifts.

Area 1: Conversion Tracking

Start here, always. If tracking is wrong, every metric built on it is wrong: cost per conversion, return on ad spend, bidding performance and campaign comparisons.

Check:

• Which conversion actions exist, and which are primary. Primary actions should represent real business value.
• Whether any action is counted twice, such as a Google Ads tag and a GA4 import of the same form both set as primary.
• Whether conversions fire on completion rather than on button clicks or page views.
• Count settings: “One” for leads, “Every” for purchases.
• Whether purchase conversions pass values and transaction IDs.
• Whether enhanced conversions, consent mode and auto-tagging are in place.
• Whether recorded conversions roughly match real leads or orders in your own systems.

For a complete walkthrough of these points, see my guide to Google Ads conversion tracking with GA4. If tracking is broken, fixing it is the first priority on the action list, and some later findings should be revisited once reliable data is available.

Area 2: Account and Campaign Structure

Structure determines how well you can control budget, match ads to intent and read performance. Look at how campaigns are divided and why.

• Are campaigns separated by meaningful differences, such as service lines, product categories, locations with different budgets, or brand and non brand?
• Is brand search in its own campaign, so that cheap brand conversions do not hide the true cost of new customers?
• Are there too many campaigns with too little data each? Fragmented accounts starve automated bidding.
• Are there campaigns that overlap and compete for the same searches?
• Are the campaign types right for the goals? My overview of Google Ads campaign types explains what each type is best for.

Inside Search campaigns, look at ad groups. Each should have a clear theme and a small set of related keywords. Ad groups that mix unrelated services make relevant ads impossible.

Area 3: Campaign Settings

Settings mistakes are common because they are set once and rarely revisited. Check each active campaign for:

• Networks: Search campaigns with the Display Network enabled can spend on lower intent placements. Decide deliberately whether search partners and display expansion should be on.
• Locations: confirm the targeted areas and the location option. Targeting people “in or regularly in” your locations is usually safer than including people who have only shown interest in them.
• Languages: make sure they reflect your audience.
• Ad schedule: check whether ads run when you can answer calls or respond to leads, and whether data supports any adjustments.
• Devices: review performance by device. Poor mobile results often point to landing page problems rather than a need to exclude mobile.
• Automatically created assets and URL expansion: know which automated features are on, and check that they send people to suitable pages.

Area 4: Keywords and Search Terms

This area usually reveals the most wasted spend in Search campaigns.

• Review the search terms report for the audit period, sorted by cost. Identify irrelevant searches that spent money without converting.
• Check negative keyword lists. Are there campaign level negatives for obvious waste, such as jobs, free, DIY or unrelated products? Are any negatives blocking valuable searches?
• Look at match type use. Is broad match running without Smart Bidding or without reliable conversion data?
• Find keywords with high spend and no conversions over a long period.
• Find duplicate keywords across ad groups or campaigns.
• Look for converting search terms that are not yet keywords.

My guide to match types and negative keywords covers how to fix what this part of the audit uncovers.

Area 5: Quality Score and Relevance

Add the Quality Score and component columns to the keywords view. Focus on high spend keywords with below average expected click through rate, ad relevance or landing page experience. These point to weak themes, generic ads or poorly matched landing pages. My guide to Google Ads Quality Score explains how to diagnose and improve each component. Remember that the score is a diagnostic, so always weigh it against conversion performance.

Area 6: Ads and Assets

Review the ads in each ad group:

• Does each ad group have at least one responsive search ad with a healthy variety of headlines and descriptions?
• Do headlines reflect the ad group’s theme and the searcher’s intent, or are they generic slogans?
• Are there disapproved or limited ads?
• Are pinned headlines restricting combinations unnecessarily?
• Are sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call, location, image and price assets used where relevant?
• Do sitelinks point to specific, working pages?
• Are offers, prices and dates still accurate?

Area 7: Landing Pages

Many accounts have reasonable campaigns but poor conversion rates because of the pages they send traffic to. For each major ad group or campaign, open the landing page on a phone and check:

• Does the main heading match the promise of the ad?
• Is the offer clear within a few seconds?
• Is the page fast and stable on mobile?
• Are forms short and working? Do phone numbers work as tap to call?
• Are there genuine trust signals, such as reviews, accreditations, examples of work or clear guarantees?
• Are there distractions, such as full navigation menus or pop ups, that pull people away from the goal?

Speed and responsiveness deserve their own check; my Core Web Vitals guide explains what to measure and how to improve it.

Area 8: Bidding and Budgets

Bidding strategy should match the account’s data and goals:

• Is the bidding strategy aligned with the goal? Lead generation usually suits Maximize Conversions or Target CPA; ecommerce with values suits Maximize Conversion Value or Target ROAS.
• Does each campaign have enough conversions for its strategy to learn? Very low volume campaigns may need consolidation or a simpler strategy.
• Are targets realistic compared with actual performance? Targets far from reality either choke volume or overspend.
• Are campaigns limited by budget while others underspend? Budget should follow performance.
• Were bidding strategies changed frequently? Constant changes keep campaigns in a learning state.

Area 9: Performance Max and Automated Campaigns

If the account uses Performance Max, check what it is really doing. Review asset groups, audience signals, the quality of creative assets, any brand exclusions, and the available channel and search term insights. Make sure conversion goals for the campaign are correct and that it is not simply capturing brand searches that would have converted anyway. My Performance Max guide goes deeper into how to evaluate this campaign type.

Area 10: Reporting and Business Fit

Finally, step back. Does reporting answer the questions the business cares about? Are results compared with real revenue or qualified leads, not just platform conversions? Is paid search judged alongside organic search and other channels? My comparison of SEO vs Google Ads can help frame how the two should work together, and for businesses selling to other businesses, the issues I describe from managing B2B websites often show up in paid campaigns too, especially around lead quality and long sales cycles.

Useful Reports and Tools for an Audit

You do not need specialist software to audit an account well. Most of what you need is already inside Google Ads and Google Analytics.

• Change history: shows who changed what and when. It often explains sudden drops or spikes, such as a budget cut, a bidding strategy change or a paused campaign.
• Recommendations and optimization score: worth reading, but treat them as suggestions rather than instructions. Some recommendations, such as adding broad match keywords or raising budgets, benefit spend more than results in certain accounts.
• Search terms and search term insights: the main source for finding waste and new keyword ideas.
• Auction insights: shows which competitors appear alongside you and how often, which helps explain changes in impression share and cost.
• Segments: segmenting by device, day, hour, network and conversion action often reveals patterns hidden in totals.
• Diagnostics for conversion actions: the status and diagnostics of each conversion action highlight tags that stopped recording.
• Google Analytics 4: landing page engagement, paths after landing and comparisons with other channels.
• Tag Assistant: confirms which tags fire on which actions.

Export key reports to a spreadsheet so you can sort and filter freely. A simple sheet with one tab per audit area, listing each finding, its evidence, its priority and the proposed fix, turns the audit into a working document you can track over the following weeks.

Reading Impression Share and Lost Opportunity

Impression share tells you how often your ads appeared out of the times they were eligible. Lost impression share is split into two causes: budget and rank. Lost share due to budget means campaigns stopped showing because the daily budget ran out. Lost share due to rank means ads did not show because Ad Rank was too low, which points to bids, relevance or landing page quality.

These metrics are most useful for campaigns that are already profitable. If a campaign converts at an acceptable cost and loses a large share to budget, it may deserve more budget. If it loses share to rank, improving relevance and landing pages may be a better first step than simply raising bids. For campaigns that are not profitable, impression share is less important than fixing the fundamentals.

How to Prioritize Audit Findings

An audit that produces fifty equal findings is hard to act on. Rank each finding by impact and effort:

1. Fix first: anything that makes data wrong or wastes significant money quickly, such as broken tracking, duplicate conversions, Search campaigns spending on the Display Network unintentionally, or major irrelevant search terms.
2. Fix next: high impact improvements with moderate effort, such as restructuring overloaded ad groups, rewriting ads for top spending themes, and sending traffic to better landing pages.
3. Plan: larger projects such as new landing pages, offline conversion imports or campaign type changes.
4. Monitor: smaller issues that can be handled during routine optimization.

For each action, note what you will change, why, what result you expect, and when you will review it. Make changes in stages where possible so you can see what helped.

Common Problems Found in Google Ads Audits

• Conversion actions that include page views or clicks as primary goals.
• The same lead counted twice through two tracking methods.
• Search campaigns with display expansion enabled without a clear reason.
• Location targeting that includes people outside the service area.
• Broad match keywords with manual bidding and weak negatives.
• Ad groups mixing unrelated services.
• All ads sending people to the homepage.
• Outdated offers or broken sitelinks.
• Brand and non brand traffic combined, hiding the real cost of new customers.
• Budgets spread evenly regardless of performance.

Practical Example: A Physiotherapy Clinic

This is an illustrative example to show the process, not a real client case.

Imagine a physiotherapy clinic with two locations spending a steady monthly budget on Google Ads. The owner says bookings from ads feel lower than a year ago, although the account reports plenty of conversions.

The audit starts with tracking and finds that a “click to call” button and an “appointment page view” are both primary conversions, while completed online bookings are not tracked at all. This explains why reported conversions look healthy while real bookings are not. Fixing tracking becomes priority one: the booking confirmation is tracked as the main conversion, calls are tracked with a minimum duration, and page views are moved to secondary.

The structure review finds a single Search campaign covering both locations and every treatment, with brand searches mixed in. The plan separates brand from non brand, and splits non brand ad groups by treatment theme. Settings show the location option includes people interested in the area rather than people in it, which is changed. The search terms report reveals spend on searches about physiotherapy courses and jobs, so negatives are added. Landing pages are the homepage; the plan adds treatment pages with booking links.

Bidding is left on a simpler strategy until the new booking conversion has gathered enough data. The clinic then reviews results monthly using real bookings from its practice system. The value of the audit is the order of operations: fix measurement, remove waste, improve relevance, then let bidding work.

Google Ads Audit Checklist

• Business goals, customer value and targets are documented.
• Primary conversions represent real business value, with no duplicates.
• Conversions fire on completion and match real leads or sales.
• Enhanced conversions, consent mode and auto-tagging are in place where appropriate.
• Campaigns are structured by meaningful differences, with brand separated.
• Network, location, language, schedule and device settings are deliberate.
• Search terms are reviewed and negative lists are maintained.
• Match types fit the bidding strategy and data volume.
• High spend keywords with weak Quality Score components are identified.
• Every ad group has relevant responsive search ads and useful assets.
• Landing pages match ad intent and work well on mobile.
• Bidding strategies and targets match goals and data volume.
• Budgets follow performance.
• Performance Max campaigns are reviewed for goals, assets and brand capture.
• Findings are prioritized into an action plan with review dates.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does a Google Ads audit take?

It depends on account size. A small account can be reviewed in a few hours, while larger accounts with many campaigns and tracking complexity take longer. The action plan matters more than the time spent.

What should I check first in a Google Ads audit?

Conversion tracking. If conversions are missing, duplicated or measuring the wrong action, every other metric and conclusion is unreliable.

How often should I audit my Google Ads account?

A full audit once or twice a year is sensible for most accounts, plus an audit whenever results change sharply, the website changes significantly, or management changes hands.

Can I audit my own Google Ads account?

Yes. The checklist in this guide covers the main areas. An outside review can still help because it brings fresh eyes and experience of common patterns across many accounts.

What is the most common source of wasted spend?

Irrelevant search terms, often caused by broad matching without enough negatives, and settings such as unintended display placements or loose location targeting.

Should I make all audit changes at once?

Fix tracking and obvious waste quickly. Make larger structural and bidding changes in stages so you can see the effect of each and avoid resetting automated bidding repeatedly.

Should I follow every Google Ads recommendation?

No. Recommendations can be useful, but each should be judged against your goals and data. Apply the ones that fit and dismiss the ones that would increase spend without a clear benefit.

Conclusion

A Google Ads audit is most valuable when it follows the right order: verify tracking, review structure and settings, clean up keywords and search terms, improve ads and landing pages, then align bidding and budgets with reliable data. Each step builds on the one before. The result should be a short, prioritized plan that fixes waste first and then builds lasting improvements.

Regular audits keep an account honest. They catch settings that drift, tracking that breaks and structures that no longer fit the business. For how paid search fits into your wider marketing, see my guide to digital marketing strategy for small businesses.

Want an Expert Review of Your Google Ads?

If you are unsure whether your Google Ads account is set up correctly, I can audit your tracking, structure, keywords, ads, landing pages and bidding, and give you a clear, prioritized plan to reduce waste and improve results. Contact me through DigitalKetan.com to request a Google Ads audit.