Google Ads Audit Checklist

How do you audit a Google Ads account?

In the order the money moves. Start with whether the data is true, then whether the budget is in the right place, then whether the targeting and creative deserve that budget. Most audits go wrong by starting at ad copy, which is the most visible part of an account and one of the least expensive things wrong with it.

1. Check the conversion actions list first. Names, sources, counts, and which are Primary. Then fire a test conversion and watch it land.
2. Look at six months of performance before you touch a setting. You are looking for the shape of the trend, not this week’s noise.
3. Separate brand, non brand and competitor traffic so you can see what is really performing.
4. Find the wasted spend: search terms with clicks and no conversions, campaigns with spend and no conversions, placements nobody would choose.
5. Check where the budget is constrained and where it is not. A winner sitting Limited by budget next to a loser running free is the most common expensive mistake in an account.
6. Then, and only then, look at bidding targets, ad copy, assets and landing pages.

What should you audit or fix first?

Tracking, then negatives and budget reallocation, then bidding, then structure. That order is not arbitrary. Broken tracking makes every other number on this list a guess, and it makes Smart Bidding optimise towards something that is not real. Negatives and budget moves are the fastest money because they take a day and cost nothing. Bidding changes need a learning period. Restructures are weeks of work and should be last, however tempting the account map looks.

How long does a Google Ads audit take?

Thirty minutes for the triage that finds most of the money, and half a day to a full day for a proper account level audit with a written deliverable. That is why this tool has a quick triage mode: 18 checks that surface the expensive problems before you commit to the full 64. If someone offers you a five minute automated audit, what they are offering is a lead magnet with a sales call attached.

Can I audit my own Google Ads account?

Yes, and you should, regularly. What a second pair of eyes buys you is not secret knowledge, it is the absence of the assumptions you built the account on. The checklist is written so the item and the standard sit together, so you are not being asked to judge whether something is fine without being told what fine looks like.

What is the most common problem a Google Ads audit finds?

Conversion tracking. It is not close. Duplicate counting between the Google Ads tag and the GA4 import, soft actions sitting in Primary where Smart Bidding will chase them, values missing so Target ROAS cannot work, and conversions that stopped firing after a site change nobody told the PPC team about.

The reason it matters more than everything else is that it corrupts the decisions rather than just the reporting. A duplicated tag does not simply make the dashboard look nicer. It teaches the bidding algorithm that the wrong clicks are valuable, and then it spends your budget acting on that. One audited account was reporting 4.1x ROAS on a real 3.2x, which is the difference between scaling and quietly losing money.

How do I know if my conversion tracking is broken?

Four checks, in about fifteen minutes.

How do I find wasted spend in Google Ads?

Four places, in the order they usually pay.

1. The search terms report. Filter to more than 5 clicks and zero conversions and negate. One audit found nine months of neglect here costing about 2,500 a month on job seekers, support queries and competitor research.
2. Brand cannibalisation. Performance Max and broad match both happily buy clicks you would have had for free. In one 50,000 a month account this was around 19,000 a month.
3. Placements on Display and YouTube. Mobile gaming apps and content farms, about 2,400 a month in the same audit, with no exclusion list in place at all.
4. Campaign sprawl. In that account, 5 of 19 campaigns produced 92 percent of the revenue while the other 14 took 31 percent of the spend for 8 percent of the results.

Those are figures from one published audit of one account, not an industry average. Treat them as an illustration of where to look, not as a promise about your own account.

How often should I audit my Google Ads account?

A monthly quick check and a quarterly deep audit is the cadence most practitioners settle on, with an immediate audit after any of the following: a website migration or redesign, a tracking or tag manager change, taking over an account from someone else, a sudden performance drop, or a significant budget increase.

The monthly check is the quick triage in this tool. The quarterly one is the full 64 items with a written output. Anything more frequent than monthly tends to produce changes for the sake of changes, and Smart Bidding needs stretches of stability to learn in.

Should I aim for a 100 percent optimisation score?

No. Optimisation score measures how closely you follow Google’s recommendations, not how well your account performs. The clearest evidence of that is how the score works: dismissing a recommendation gives you exactly the same score uplift as applying it. A metric you can max out by clicking dismiss on everything is not measuring performance.

Some recommendations are genuinely good. Fixing a disapproved asset, adding a missing sitelink, correcting a broken final URL. Others will raise your spend and call it an improvement. One documented test had an automated bidding recommendation push spend up 47 percent. Read them one at a time and apply the ones that make sense for your goals.

Should I turn on auto apply recommendations?

No, and it is worth checking whether they are already on, because several are enabled by default. Auto apply changes your live account without asking, which means a client can ring you about a change you did not make and cannot explain. Untick all of them and review recommendations manually. It is the single quickest thing on this checklist and it takes about a minute.

How do you audit a Performance Max campaign?

You audit the inputs, because you cannot see most of the outputs. Performance Max hides placements, most search terms and the internal budget split, so the audit is about whether you have given it the right constraints and the right signals, and whether you have waited long enough to judge it.

How do I stop Performance Max cannibalising brand search?

Brand exclusions at campaign level, plus brand terms negated from every non brand Search campaign so the comparison is clean. The exclusion list has to be maintained: misspellings, the product names people use instead of yours, and anything a former employee added to the list six months ago and never reviewed. Our Performance Max brand exclusions guide covers the setup, and the Performance Max negative keywords strategy covers what you can and cannot exclude at account level.

How do you audit a Google Shopping feed and Merchant Center?

Start in Merchant Center, not in Google Ads. Almost every Shopping performance problem that looks like a bidding problem is a feed problem wearing a disguise: a disapproved bestseller, a title nobody searches for, a category that puts you in the wrong auction, or an out of stock product still taking impressions.

1. Clear disapprovals and item issues on the products that actually matter, and check identifiers, GTIN and product category are complete and specific.
2. Structure titles as brand, then type, then size and colour, leading with the terms people search rather than your internal product names. Our GTIN check digit calculator will tell you whether the identifiers themselves are valid before you chase anything else.
3. Refresh the feed at least daily, hourly if inventory moves fast, and make sure out of stock handling is automatic rather than manual.
4. Use custom labels 0 to 4 for margin, seasonality, stock level and bestsellers so you can bid differently on a high margin product and a loss leader.
5. Set campaign priorities and negatives so Shopping campaigns do not compete with each other for the same query.
6. Find zombie products with no impressions in about 30 days and segment them out before they drag a campaign average around.
7. Check shipping and returns in Merchant Center match the website, and read the price competitiveness report.
8. Configure cost of goods and cart data so you can report on profit rather than revenue.

What is a good click through rate, conversion rate and cost per click in Google Ads?

The 2026 WordStream and LocaliQ benchmarks, from 13,474 US Search campaigns run between April 2025 and March 2026, give these averages: click through rate 6.64 percent, cost per click 5.42, conversion rate 8.18 percent, cost per lead 66.69. The range behind each of those averages is far more useful than the average itself.

WordStream themselves put it plainly: these are not scorecards. A cost per lead above the average is only a problem if the lead is not worth it, and a click through rate above the average means nothing if the clicks do not convert. Tab three compares your numbers against your own industry row rather than the headline figure. If you want to work backwards from what a customer is worth instead, the CPA calculator and the CAC calculator will give you the ceiling your margin can actually carry.

What red flags mean an agency is not managing the account well?

None of these are proof on their own. Together they are a pattern worth asking about.

1. Change history shows nothing meaningful in the last 30 days, or shows only automated changes.
2. Target CPA or target ROAS has not been revisited in a year. One audited account had a target untouched for 14 months buying orders below break even.
3. Search terms report has not been worked in months and there are obvious junk queries with clicks.
4. Reporting shows platform conversions with no reconciliation against the CRM or the order table.
5. Auto apply recommendations are switched on.
6. Reports lead with click through rate, impressions and optimisation score rather than cost per acquisition and revenue.
7. Brand and non brand are reported as one blended number, which flatters everything.
8. Nobody can tell you what a customer is worth, so nobody can tell you whether the current cost per acquisition is good.

How much does a Google Ads audit cost, and is a free one worth it?

A free audit is a sales process with a spreadsheet attached, and that is not automatically a bad thing. The question is what you are paying with. Most free audits want your account access and your email, and the report you get back is generated in minutes and designed to produce a call. Some of them are genuinely useful; the findings are usually real, even when the framing is aimed at winning the work.

What a paid audit buys is time and a written deliverable: someone who spends half a day in the account, reconciles the numbers against your back end, and gives you a prioritised list you could hand to another agency. Pricing varies too much by market to quote a range honestly.

Does a Google Ads grader need access to my account?

Some do and some do not, and it is worth knowing which you are using. Tools that connect to your account can read real data, which makes their findings more specific, and they almost always require a Google login and an email address first. Self assessment tools like this one ask you what you see in your own account, which means the output is only as honest as your answers but nothing leaves your browser and nobody gets your contact details.

This checklist is the second kind. No login, no email, no connection to your account, nothing stored anywhere except your own browser.

Google Ads audit checklist FAQs

Related free tools and guides

Sources

Where a figure on this page comes from a single published audit of one account rather than from a dataset, it is described that way. Thresholds that come from practitioner experience rather than from measurement are labelled as rules of thumb. Competitor checklists that assert things like “40 percent of accounts have this problem” without naming a source are not repeated here.

Last verified 15 September 2026 by the Hustle Marketers PPC team.