If your Google Ads results have gone flat, or you’ve taken over someone else’s account and have no idea what’s going on inside, an audit is the first thing to do. It sounds like a big technical job, but it isn’t. You’re just going through the account, one section at a time, and asking: “Is this actually helping me get customers, or is it burning money?”

Below is the process I follow. You can do this in an afternoon, even on a big account.

Before you start: set your goal and pull the numbers

Don’t open the account and start clicking around. First, decide what “good” looks like for this business.

Write down three things:

• What counts as a win. A sale, a phone call, a form fill, a booking?
• What you can afford to pay for one. If a customer is worth $200 to you and you keep 30% as profit, you can’t pay $80 to get one.
• The time period you’re checking. Use the last 90 days if you can. If the business is seasonal, also compare with the same period last year.

Then download or note down the basics: total spend, conversions, cost per conversion, and conversion value if you’re running an online store. This is your starting point. After you make changes, you’ll come back to these numbers.

Step 1: Check your conversion tracking first

This is the most important step, and most people skip it. If tracking is broken, every other number in the account is misleading, and Google’s automated bidding will make bad decisions based on bad data.

Go to Goals → Conversions → Summary and check:

• Is anything actually being recorded? Look at the status column. “Recording conversions” is good. “No recent conversions” or “Inactive” means something is wrong.
• Are you counting the right things? I’ve seen accounts where “page view” or “clicked on phone number” was counted as a conversion. That makes a campaign look great when it’s producing nothing of value.
• Primary vs. secondary. Only the actions that truly matter should be set as primary, because those are what bidding optimizes for. Everything else should be secondary.
• Duplicates. If a purchase is being counted twice (say, once by Google Ads tag and once through Google Analytics import), your results look twice as good as they are.
• Count setting. For sales, “Every” makes sense. For leads, “One” is usually better, because one person filling out the form three times is still one lead.
• Enhanced conversions and consent settings. If you have visitors from regions with privacy rules, make sure your consent setup is working properly. Otherwise you’ll lose a chunk of your data.

The simplest test is to make a test purchase or submit your own form, then check whether it shows up in the account. It takes five minutes and can save you months of wasted spend.

Step 2: Look at the account structure

Now zoom out. Open the campaigns list and ask:

• Are campaigns organized in a way that makes sense? Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Display, and YouTube should be separated. Different products or services with different profit margins should have their own campaigns so you can control budget for each.
• Is one campaign eating everything? Sort by spend. If one campaign takes 80% of the budget, check whether it deserves that.
• Are there old, paused, or forgotten campaigns? Clean up what you don’t need. It’s easier to manage a small, clear account.
• Is the budget in the right place? Look at the “Impression share lost (budget)” column. If your best campaign is losing a lot of impressions because of budget, while a weak campaign has money left over, move the money.

Also check that the campaign names are understandable. If you can’t tell what a campaign does from its name, the next person (or you, six months from now) will struggle.

Step 3: Review campaign settings

This is where many “silent” money leaks hide. Open each campaign’s settings and look at:

• Locations. Check the location targeting option. “Presence or interest” can show your ads to people who are just interested in your area but aren’t there. For a local business, “Presence” is usually the safer choice.
• Languages. Make sure they match the language of your ads and website.
• Networks. For Search campaigns, see whether Search Partners and Display Network expansion are on. Check their performance in the segments report. If they cost a lot and convert badly, turn them off.
• Ad schedule. If your business can only answer calls from 9 to 6, don’t pay for clicks at 2 a.m. (unless you have data showing night-time leads are fine).
• Devices. Segment by device. If mobile clicks are expensive and never convert, that’s worth knowing, even if you decide to keep them.
• Bid strategy. Is it a good fit for the amount of data you have? Something like Target CPA or Target ROAS needs a steady flow of conversions to work well. A campaign with 5 conversions a month usually doesn’t have enough for that.
• Budget. Check whether daily budgets match what you can realistically spend and what the campaign can actually use.

Step 4: Audit keywords and search terms

For Search campaigns, this is where you’ll usually find the biggest savings.

Search terms report. Go to Insights & reports → Search terms and read what people actually typed before clicking your ads. Sort by cost. You’ll often find things like “free”, “jobs”, “how to”, “DIY”, or another brand’s name eating up your budget. Add those as negative keywords. Do this regularly, not once.

Keyword match types. Look at how your keywords are set up. Broad match isn’t bad, but it needs good conversion data and solid negatives behind it. If you’re using broad match with a manual bidding strategy and no negatives, expect a lot of junk traffic.

Quality Score. It’s not a KPI on its own, but it’s a helpful clue. Add the Quality Score column and look at keywords scoring 4 or below that also have lots of spend. Then check the three parts: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Whichever one says “below average” tells you where to fix things.

Keywords with no results. Find keywords that have spent a fair amount with zero conversions. Give them a reasonable amount of data before judging, but don’t let them run forever just because they’ve always been there.

Missed opportunities. Check the search terms that converted but aren’t added as keywords. Add the good ones so you have more control.

Step 5: Review ads and assets

Now look at what people see.

• Ad count. Each ad group should have at least one strong responsive search ad, and preferably two to test against each other.
• Ad strength. Don’t chase “Excellent” just for the label, but if it says “Poor,” you probably need more varied headlines and descriptions.
• Message match. Do the headlines include what people searched for? Do they include something that makes you different: price, speed, guarantee, reviews, location?
• Pinning. Overusing pins limits Google’s ability to test combinations. Use them only when you need to (legal text, for example).
• Assets (formerly extensions). Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call, location, and image assets all take up more space on the results page and usually help click-through rate. Check they’re up to date, with no broken links or expired offers.
• Old promotions. It sounds silly, but ads still running “Summer Sale” in September happen a lot.

Step 6: Check your landing pages

You can have perfect ads and still lose money if the page they lead to is bad. Click your own ads and check:

• Does the page load fast on mobile? Test it with PageSpeed Insights.
• Does it match what the ad promised?
• Is it obvious what to do next? Is the button or phone number easy to find?
• Does the form work? Is it too long?
• Is the page the homepage when it should be a specific product or service page?

If a lot of your traffic goes to one weak page, fixing that page can improve results more than any change inside Google Ads.

Step 7: Look at Performance Max and Shopping (if you use them)

These campaign types give you less visibility, so you need to check them more carefully.

• Asset groups. Are the images, videos, headlines, and text good and relevant? Or did someone upload the bare minimum?
• Brand traffic. Performance Max can take credit for people who were already searching for your brand name. Check the search themes and insights to see how much of the results are really new customers. If you’re seeing mostly brand searches, use brand exclusions.
• Product feed (for Shopping). Look in Merchant Center for disapproved products, missing data, and poor titles. Product titles matter a lot for matching search queries.
• Product-level performance. Some products get all the spend and never sell. Others sell well but get little budget. Split them up if needed.

Step 8: Check the account’s health and access

A quick round of housekeeping:

• Billing. Is payment working? Any warnings?
• Policy status. Any disapproved ads or limited campaigns?
• User access. Who has access to the account? Remove old agencies and ex-employees.
• Auto-applied recommendations. Look at what’s turned on under Recommendations. Some are fine, but some auto-applied changes (like broader targeting or higher budgets) can quietly change your account. Turn off what you didn’t choose.
• Change history. Review the last month or two. It shows who changed what, and it often explains a sudden drop in results.

Step 9: Turn what you found into a plan

An audit is only useful if it leads to action. Don’t try to fix everything at once. Make a simple list and sort it into three groups:

1. Fix now. Broken tracking, wasted spend on obviously irrelevant search terms, wrong location settings, broken landing pages.
2. Fix this month. New negative keyword lists, ad rewrites, restructuring, budget moves.
3. Test later. New bid strategies, new campaign types, landing page variations.

Make changes in small batches and give them time. Changing ten things on the same day makes it impossible to know what worked. And don’t judge a change after two days, especially with automated bidding, which needs a bit of time to settle.

How often should you audit?

A full audit like this makes sense once every quarter, or right away when you take over an account. In between, spend 15 to 20 minutes a week checking search terms, spend, and any unusual changes in cost per conversion. Small, regular checks stop problems from getting big.

Final thoughts

Most Google Ads accounts don’t fail because of one huge mistake. They lose money through small leaks: a wrong setting here, some irrelevant search terms there, a tracking issue nobody noticed. An audit finds those leaks. Start with tracking, work your way down, and fix the things that cost the most money first.

If you’re not sure where to begin, start with Step 1 and Step 4. Those two alone usually show you where the biggest problems are.