How to audit a Google Ads account: the twelve checks I run first

Most Google Ads audits start in the wrong place. They open with campaigns, ad groups and keywords, because that is where the settings live, and they produce twenty pages of observations about match types while missing the thing that is actually costing money. After auditing accounts from four figures a month to six, I run the same twelve checks in the same order, and the order matters: measurement first, money second, mechanics third. Here is the list, and what each check usually finds.

1. The conversion action inventory

Before anything else: what is this account calling a conversion? List every conversion action with its counting type, its primary or secondary status, and its volume and value. The single most common serious fault I find is soft page events, button clicks, form views, page loads, sitting as primary conversions. The account's headline figures look wonderful, the bidding algorithm chases page events, and real sales quietly starve.

2. Duplicate and overlapping purchase tags

Accounts accumulate purchase tags the way lofts accumulate boxes. A platform tag here, an imported analytics goal there, a test somebody forgot. If two or more of them count the same sale, your reported conversions and revenue are inflated and your true cost per sale is hidden. On one account I audited, a reported six thousand weekly conversions decomposed to roughly 120 real sales once the overlaps and soft events were stripped out.

3. The zero-sale waste ledger

Pull every search term and keyword over a sensible spend threshold and ask one question: has this ever produced a sale? Not a click, not a page view, a sale. The output is a ledger of spend with nothing to show for it, and it is usually the fastest money an audit finds. One recent 30-day pass found 16% of total spend, over £35,000, on keywords that had never sold anything.

If this sounds like your account, the audit is the fastest way to know for sure.

4. Bid strategy and target history

What is each campaign's bid strategy, what are the targets, and crucially, when did they change? A target moved at the wrong moment explains more performance cliffs than any algorithm update. The change history tells you what the account was asked to do, and when.

5. Quality score at landing page level

Keyword-level quality score is noise until you pivot it. Aggregate it to the landing page, weighted by impressions, and suddenly you can see which pages are taxing every click that lands on them. One weak page under a hundred keywords costs more than a hundred weak keywords on one page.

6. Final URL health

Every final URL across ads, keywords, sitelinks and asset groups, checked for redirects, soft 404s and dead ends. Paused legacy assets pointing at retired domains are common and harmless. Live spend flowing to a broken page is common and expensive. Both turn up more often than anyone expects.

7. Disapprovals and policy topics

A clean sweep of disapproved and limited ads with their policy topics. In regulated sectors this check is half the audit on its own, because a limited ad serving at reduced volume can look like a demand problem when it is a policy one.

8. Invalid click rates

Google credits invalid clicks automatically, but the rate by campaign is still worth reading. A campaign running multiples of the account average deserves a closer look, especially on competitor and brand terms where motivated clicking is a real phenomenon.

9. Budget, pacing and impression share

Where does the money actually go, and what share of the available auctions does it buy? Impression share lost to budget on your best converters while money burns on the waste ledger is the classic misallocation, and it hides in plain sight because every campaign looks individually reasonable.

10. Attribution integrity

Does a click survive the journey to purchase with its attribution intact? Cross-domain moves, subdomain checkouts, consent configuration and redirect chains all break this, and the symptom is always the same: paid shrinks, direct grows, and paid media takes the blame for a measurement fault.

11. The daily heartbeat

A simple check with an outsized payoff: for every recent day, was there spend, and were there sales? Days of spend with zero recorded sales either mean a tracking failure or a genuine trading failure, and both need to surface the next morning, not at month end.

12. Change history against the performance timeline

Finally, lay the account's change history against the performance curve. Who changed what, when, and does the damage line up? This check turns arguments about what went wrong into a dated timeline with named events, which is the difference between a theory and a finding.

What good findings look like

An audit is not a list of observations, it is a prioritised case for action: what is broken, what it costs, what to do about it, in what order, with the evidence attached. If an audit you have paid for does not read like that, you have bought a settings review. The twelve checks above are the audit I run, scripted so they are consistent and repeatable. If you want them run on your account, that is exactly what my fixed-fee audit is.