How to audit a Google Ads account in one afternoon

By Joseph Tobin. 17 September 2026. 9 min read.

Most Google Ads accounts waste between fifteen and thirty per cent of their budget on things that cannot convert. You do not need a tool to find it. You need four hours, the account, and the order below.

Work through the sections in order. Each one builds on the last. Write every finding in a spreadsheet with three columns: what you found, what it costs, what to do.

Before you start: check the tracking

Nothing else in the audit means anything if the conversions are wrong.

1. Open Goals, then Conversions. List every conversion action. Note which are set to Primary and which to Secondary.
2. For each Primary action, ask: is this a sale, a lead, or a step on the way? If page views, button clicks or “engaged sessions” are set to Primary, the account is bidding to the wrong thing.
3. Compare last month’s conversions in Google Ads with the same period in your CRM, your ecommerce platform or your finance figures. A gap of more than fifteen per cent either way is a finding.
4. Check the attribution model and the conversion window on the main action. Note them. You will need them when you read the reports.

If the tracking is broken, stop. Fix it, wait two weeks, then audit. Everything below depends on it.

Hour one: where the money went

Set the date range to the last ninety days.

1. Campaigns report. Sort by cost. Note the top five. In most accounts they are more than seventy per cent of spend. The audit is mostly about those five.
2. Search terms report. Filter to terms with no conversions and more than £50 of spend. Add them up. That number is the first line of your wasted spend estimate.
3. Search terms again, sorted by cost. Read the top hundred. Mark every one that is not a plausible customer. Job seekers, students, competitors’ brand names you do not want, free and DIY intent, and the wrong product entirely.
4. Performance Max. Open the Insights and the search categories. Performance Max hides its search terms, but the categories show whether it is buying brand traffic. If your brand appears at the top, Performance Max is claiming sales that brand search would have made anyway.

Hour two: structure and match types

1. Keywords report, filtered to Broad match. Note what share of spend is broad. Broad match is fine with good conversion data and a smart bidding target. It is expensive without them. If the tracking check above found problems, broad match is spending on guesswork.
2. Look for the ad group that does everything. An ad group with more than twenty keywords covering different intents usually has one ad trying to say everything and a landing page that says nothing.
3. Brand versus generic. Check that brand terms are in their own campaign with their own budget and target. If brand and generic share a campaign, the generic spend hides behind the brand results.
4. Negatives. Open the negative keyword lists. If there are none, or the only one is from 2021, that is a finding on its own.

Hour three: bidding and budgets

1. For each of the top five campaigns, note the bid strategy and the target. Ask where the target came from. “Target ROAS 400 per cent” is only a good target if the margin says so. Most targets are a round number someone picked.
2. Open Budgets and look for “Limited by budget”. A capped campaign with a good cost per conversion is lost sales. A capped campaign with a bad one is the cap doing its job.
3. Check the bid strategy report for each campaign. Smart bidding needs around thirty conversions a month per campaign to work. Below that, it is guessing.
4. Look at the Devices and Locations reports for the top campaigns. A location with spend and no conversions over ninety days is a finding. So is mobile at twice the cost per conversion of desktop with the same bids.

Hour four: ads, assets and settings

1. Open the ads in the top five campaigns. Do they say what the landing page says? Does the landing page load in under three seconds on a phone? Open it on your phone and time it.
2. Check the assets: sitelinks, callouts, images, prices. Missing assets are cheap to fix and usually lift click-through rate.
3. Settings. For each top campaign: networks (is Display switched on in a Search campaign?), location options (is “presence or interest” letting people in other countries in?), ad schedule, and ad rotation.
4. Change history. Filter to the last ninety days. If nothing has changed, nobody is running the account. If a hundred things changed in one day, someone is running it badly.

Writing it up

Add up the wasted spend from the search terms, the locations, the Display network and the Performance Max brand overlap. That is the number for the top of the report.

Then rank the findings by impact and effort. The fixes that go first are the ones that stop waste today: negatives, locations, networks, Primary conversion actions. Structure and bidding come next. Ads and assets last.

When to get help

If the tracking check fails, or the account spends more than £50k a month, or you found more than you can fix, Joseph can run the audit for you and give you the ranked list with the evidence behind each line.