How do I audit my Google Ads account?

Why the order matters more than the checklist

Most audit checklists treat the account like a list of independent settings. It is not. Every number you will look at, from cost per conversion to which campaigns deserve budget, is computed from the conversion signal. If that signal is wrong, every downstream conclusion is wrong with it.

That is not a rare edge case. In the twelve home-services accounts I benchmarked in June 2026, a third had conversion tracking that was inflated or missing entirely. One logged more conversions than it had clicks. The owners of those accounts had been making budget decisions on fiction. The full data is in my home services benchmarks.

So the audit runs in a fixed order, and tracking goes first. Budget an afternoon for the whole pass.

Step one: verify the conversion signal (45 minutes)

Open Goals, then Conversions, and answer four questions:

• Which actions are set as primary? Primary conversions are what Smart Bidding optimizes toward. If a page view or a newsletter signup sits next to a purchase as primary, the machine is buying the cheap one.
• Is every call counted as a win? A conversion rate above 30 to 40 percent on a lead account usually means misdials and spam calls are being counted. I have seen 82 percent. That account was not brilliant. It was counting phone rings.
• Are values real? Revenue-based bidding needs revenue numbers that reconcile with your store or CRM, within roughly fifteen percent.
• Do browser and server events deduplicate? If you run a pixel and a server-side feed without a shared event ID, you are double counting.

If this step fails, stop. Fix the signal before judging anything else, because the rest of the audit reads through this lens.

Step two: the 90-day search terms pass (30 minutes)

Pull the search terms report for the last 90 days, sort by cost, and read every term that spent more than one day’s budget. You are looking for two patterns: terms with real spend and zero conversions, and terms that have nothing to do with what you sell. The first list becomes bid and match-type decisions. The second becomes negative keywords.

While you are there, note how far the matched terms drift from the keywords you bought. Broad match with a weak conversion signal drifts furthest, which is why this step comes after step one.

Step three: budget split and structure (20 minutes)

Compare each campaign’s share of spend with its share of conversions or revenue. The mismatches are the story. Brand terms harvesting demand at high return often subsidize prospecting campaigns nobody has judged on their own numbers. If you run Performance Max next to Shopping, split them and judge each on its own job before moving money.

Step four: ads, assets, and landing pages (30 minutes)

Check that every ad group has a responsive search ad with distinct headlines rather than one headline rephrased twelve ways. Then follow the top three ads by spend to their landing pages and ask one question per page: does the page say the thing the ad promised? Message match is the cheapest conversion-rate lever in the account. Load the page on your phone while you are at it.

Step five: the settings that quietly leak (15 minutes)

Five checks: Search partners and Display expansion turned on without a decision. Location settings on presence-or-interest instead of presence. Auto-applied recommendations enabled. Bid strategy targets that contradict the goal you set in step one. And the change history, which tells you whether the account is being managed or just billed.

Score it, then fix in the same order

Write every finding down with a dollar estimate next to it: what the term wasted, what the double counting inflated, what the mismatched page costs. Rank by recoverable dollars and fix from the top. My free Google Ads Setup Audit is a 25-page workbook version of this exact pass, with scoring sheets, and it does not ask for your email. If you want to know what paying someone to run it should cost, I published an honest breakdown of audit pricing from free graders to senior-operator memos.