How to audit a Google Ads account, properly

A Google Ads account audit is supposed to answer one question: where is this account leaking money, and what's the cheapest thing to fix first? Yet most audits bury that answer under a hundred green ticks. So here's the version that leads with impact — the checks that actually recover spend, in the order a senior buyer runs them.

Start with the number you can't trust

Before you judge a single campaign, judge the measurement. An account optimizing toward a mis-configured or value-less conversion will make every downstream number lie — and no amount of bid tuning fixes a broken signal. So the first check isn't performance, it's whether performance is even measurable.

An audit that trusts a broken number just optimizes the account deeper into the wrong thing.

This is the same discipline behind leading with the verdict: say what you can stand behind, flag what you can't, and never manufacture confidence.

The 12-point audit, ranked by recoverable spend

1. Conversion tracking integrity. Are conversions firing once, with the right value, on the right action? Duplicate or value-less conversions corrupt every optimization downstream. Verify against Google's conversion tracking setup.
2. Wasted search terms. Pull the search terms report and find spend on queries that will never convert. This is usually the single largest pool of instantly recoverable budget.
3. Placement leakage. On Display, Video and Performance Max, spend drifts to low-quality placements at a fraction of core performance — the Google-side twin of the placement drift that hides inside a blended average.
4. Bid strategy fit. Is the strategy matched to the data volume? Target CPA/ROAS need enough conversions to learn; below that threshold they thrash.
5. Budget pacing. Which campaigns are capped while winners starve? Reallocation is free performance.
6. Search vs Performance Max overlap. PMax can cannibalize your branded and high-intent search. Check where they compete for the same query.
7. Negative keyword hygiene. Missing negatives let broad match bleed into irrelevant queries — this compounds with check 2.
8. Audience and geo signal. Are you feeding the algorithm useful audience signals, or letting it guess?
9. Ad strength and asset coverage. Thin responsive assets cap reach and quality — but chase this after the money checks, not before.
10. Landing page and tracking parity. Do the pages match the promise, and does analytics agree with Ads on conversions?
11. Attribution maturity. Recent numbers are still settling. A campaign judged inside its window reads pessimistic — the Google cousin of Meta's 7-day window problem.
12. Cross-platform comparability. If you also run Meta, remember the two can't be compared directly before you shift budget between them.

Rank, don't just list

The difference between a useful audit and a report nobody acts on is ordering. Every finding should carry an estimate of recoverable spend so the account owner knows what to do Monday morning — not a flat list where a $12,000/month leak sits next to a cosmetic asset warning.

• Attach a number to each finding. "Wasted search terms: ~$9,000/mo" beats "improve keyword targeting."
• Sequence the fixes. Some changes reset learning; order them so you don't undo one fix with the next.
• Make every figure verifiable. Each number should link back to where to confirm it in the account. Trust is the whole point.

Why this doesn't stay done

The catch with a one-off audit is that accounts drift. Search terms shift weekly, placements re-leak, pacing changes with seasonality. A PDF from last quarter describes an account that no longer exists. The real fix isn't a better audit template — it's a standing analyst that re-audits continuously and flags what changed.

That's what Adgent does for Google, Meta and TikTok as one account: it runs these checks every morning, ranks findings by recoverable spend, and prepares the fix for your approval. If you want to see it against a real account, request a demo — fifteen minutes, connected read-only.

Red flags: what a broken account looks like

Some findings you have to calculate. Others you can spot in thirty seconds — the tells that an account has been left on autopilot. If you see any of these, you've found recoverable spend before you've done a single sum.

• Conversion action set to "Every" instead of "One." A lead form counting every submission inflates your conversion count and teaches Smart Bidding to chase repeat form-fillers. For lead gen, this single toggle can overstate conversions by 20–40%.
• No audience exclusions on retargeting or PMax. You're paying full CPA to re-serve ads to people who already converted. On accounts with a healthy return rate, that's often 5–15% of spend re-buying customers you already own.
• Performance Max with zero audience signals. An empty signal means the algorithm cold-starts on your money. PMax will find the cheapest conversions it can — usually your existing branded traffic — and take credit for demand you'd have captured for free.
• A search terms report nobody has opened in 90 days. Broad match without weekly negative-keyword pruning bleeds into junk queries continuously. If the last negative was added six months ago, assume 10–30% of search spend is landing on queries that will never convert.
• Target CPA/ROAS running on under 15 conversions in 30 days. Below roughly 30 conversions a month per campaign, Smart Bidding doesn't have enough signal to learn — it thrashes, and CPA swings wildly week to week.
• One "catch-all" ad group with 50+ keywords. Structure this loose means no query gets a relevant ad or landing page. Quality Score suffers, CPCs climb, and you can't diagnose anything because everything is averaged together.
• Auto-applied recommendations turned on. Google's auto-apply will quietly expand match types and raise budgets on its own schedule. An account where Google is making the changes isn't an account you're auditing — it's one you're discovering.
• Display and Search fused in one campaign. "Search with Display Select" pools two totally different funnels under one budget and one CPA target. The Display half almost always drags, hidden inside the blended number — the same trap as placement drift inside an average.
• Ads-reported conversions that don't match analytics. When Google Ads claims 400 conversions and GA4 sees 250, someone is optimizing on a number that isn't real. A gap wider than about 15–20% means your measurement is the first thing to fix, not your bids.

Manual audit vs. continuous audit

The format of the audit decides what it can actually catch. A human running a checklist once a quarter and software reading the account through the API every morning are looking for the same leaks — but they see very different amounts of them.

Neither wins outright. A manual audit brings judgement a script can't; a continuous one catches the leaks that reopen the week after a manual audit ships. The strongest setup is a standing analyst for the high-drift checks and a human for the strategy calls — which is exactly what an AI media buyer is built to be.

How often should you audit?

Audit cadence should match how fast each check goes stale. Some things barely move; others rot within a week. A single quarterly review treats them all the same, which is why so many audits feel out of date the moment they land.

• Full audit — quarterly. The complete 12-point pass: structure, bid strategy, attribution, account hygiene. These are slow-moving and worth a deep, unhurried look four times a year.
• Light review — monthly. A focused pass on budget pacing, ad strength and the accounts that shifted most. Thirty minutes to catch anything the quarter would let drift too far.
• Continuous — for the high-drift checks. Wasted search terms, placement leakage and budget pacing move week to week. These want monitoring, not scheduling — the moment they slip, spend leaks, and a quarterly cadence means you find out 89 days late.

The blunt version: audit the slow things on a calendar and watch the fast things continuously. Anything you only check quarterly, you're effectively not checking.

Common Google Ads audit mistakes

A bad audit isn't just an incomplete one — it's one that draws confident conclusions from bad inputs. These are the mistakes that turn a review into a list of wrong decisions.

• Auditing before you've checked conversion tracking. Every performance judgement rests on the conversion signal. If you rank campaigns before verifying it fires once, with the right value, you're ranking noise. Measurement is step one for a reason.
• Treating small-sample placements as decisions. A placement with 40 impressions and one conversion isn't a winner, and one with 200 clicks and no sale isn't dead — it's just noise. Cutting or scaling on samples this thin creates the very volatility you were trying to fix.
• Ignoring the attribution window. Recent conversions are still landing. Judge a campaign from inside its window and it always reads pessimistic — the Google cousin of Meta's day-one data problem. Let the window close before you call a verdict.
• Comparing across platforms as if they measure the same thing. Google and Meta count conversions differently, so a raw ROAS comparison is apples to oranges. Reconcile the models before you move budget between them.
• Producing a to-do list instead of a ranking. A flat 40-point list where a $12,000/mo leak sits beside a cosmetic asset warning gets skimmed, not acted on. Rank by recoverable spend, or the audit changes nothing.