Audit
Google Ads audit
Eighteen areas of the account, read by hand by the person who would run it.
A Google Ads audit is a full read of an account against the things that decide whether it makes money: what it counts as a conversion, where the money actually goes, whether the structure allows good bidding, and how much of the spend reached queries you would never have chosen. Ours covers eighteen areas and is written by a senior specialist rather than generated by a scanner, so the output is a ranked set of findings with the evidence attached rather than a list of everything a rule set could flag.
Coverage
What does a Google Ads audit cover?
Eighteen named areas, from what the account counts as a conversion through to feed quality, competitive position and the settings that cost money quietly.
The audit covers eighteen areas of the account. Here they are, all of them, so you can count them rather than take our word for the depth.
Account structure and campaign architecture
Whether campaigns are split along lines that let you control budget and read results, or along lines that made sense to whoever built them three years ago. Structure decides what you are able to steer later, so a structural fault caps every other improvement.
Campaign type mix
Where the money actually sits across Search, Performance Max, Shopping, Demand Gen, Display and Video. Most accounts have drifted into a mix nobody deliberately chose, usually one campaign at a time and often after a platform representative recommended it.
Budget allocation and pacing
Whether budget follows marginal return or last year's habit, and whether campaigns are capped, underspending, or spending the day's budget before the hours that actually convert.
Bidding strategy and the signals feeding it
Which strategy each campaign runs, whether it has the conversion volume that strategy needs to work, and what signal it is optimising toward. A bidding strategy is only ever as good as the data feeding it.
Conversion actions
What the account counts as a conversion, which actions are set to Primary, and whether each one is worth steering spend toward. This is where most accounts turn out to be quietly broken.
Conversion tracking integrity and import paths
Whether conversions are counted once, counted at all, and imported from the systems that hold the truth. We verify this rather than assume it, because every other number in the account is derived from it.
Keyword coverage and match type strategy
What the account is eligible to show on, where the coverage is thin, and whether the match type mix is doing what its owner believes it is doing.
Search terms and negative keyword hygiene
What the account is really buying, read at the query level rather than the keyword level, and how much of it a working negative list would have stopped. Negative lists rot faster than anything else in an account.
Audience and targeting settings
Location, language, device and schedule, plus the audience layers and how they are applied. This includes the location setting that quietly serves your ads to people merely showing interest in the area rather than sitting in it.
Ad copy, assets and asset group quality
Whether the messaging matches the query it was bought against, how many assets each ad group and asset group carries, and what the platform actually has to work with when it assembles a combination.
Extensions and asset coverage
Which asset types are present, which are missing entirely, and which are inherited from account level and still saying something that stopped being true two years ago.
Landing page relevance and message match
Where each ad sends people and whether the page answers the query it was bought against. A well-built account pointed at the wrong page still fails, and the account report will not tell you that.
Ad relevance and quality signals
The platform's own quality reporting, read as a symptom rather than as a score to chase. Low ad relevance usually names a structure problem rather than a copywriting one.
Wasted spend
Spend that reached queries you would never have chosen, placements you did not intend to buy, or people who were going to convert anyway. Quantified in money, because a percentage is easy to argue with and a figure is not.
Competitive position
Impression share, where it is being lost, and to whom. Losing share to budget and losing it to rank are different problems with opposite fixes, and treating one as the other wastes a quarter.
Product feed quality
Where Shopping or Performance Max is running, the feed is the campaign. Titles, attributes, disapprovals and coverage decide what the campaign is able to bid on at all, so a feed fault outranks any bid adjustment.
Account settings and defaults
The defaults that cost money quietly: auto-applied recommendations, partner networks, expansion settings, and the options the platform switches on for you between one login and the next.
Reporting setup
Whether the account can be read by the person paying for it, and whether the numbers in the report reconcile with the numbers in the platform. They frequently do not.
Method
How is the audit actually run?
By hand, in dependency order. Conversion data is verified first, because every later finding is meaningless if the numbers underneath it are wrong.
This is the same audit we run on an account before we agree to take it on. We use it to decide whether we can help, which is a stronger reason to make it accurate than any promise about it would be.
Read-only access, agreed first
You grant read-only access to the Google Ads account and to whatever else the account depends on, usually the analytics property and the tag manager. We make no changes to any account during an audit, and access can be revoked as soon as the walkthrough is done.
Conversion data first
The audit runs in dependency order and conversion tracking is verified before anything else is read. If the conversion data is wrong then the cost per acquisition is wrong, the campaign comparison is wrong, and bidding has been optimising toward the wrong thing for as long as the fault has existed.
The account read, by hand
Most free and cheap audits in this market are tool-generated scans: a crawler or a script runs a fixed rule set and formats the output. Ours is run by hand by the senior specialist who would do the work, which is why it reads like a person wrote it and why it can tell you which three findings matter out of forty.
Findings ranked by impact and effort
Every finding is placed on two axes: what it is worth and what it costs to fix. A document that lists forty observations in the order the auditor noticed them is a document nobody acts on.
The walkthrough
We take you through the findings on a call, in priority order, and answer the awkward questions about them. The document is yours afterwards whatever you decide to do next.
Deliverables
What do you receive at the end?
A written findings document ranked by impact and effort, the evidence behind each one, an implementation order, and a call to walk through it.
- A written findings document covering all eighteen areas, ranked by impact and effort
- The evidence behind each finding, so you can check it rather than take our word for it
- The wasted spend we found, quantified in money rather than described
- An implementation order, including what to leave alone and why
- A call to walk through it with the person who wrote it
- The document itself, which is yours to act on with us, with your own team, or with someone else
Where this leads
- Google Ads management
What the ongoing work covers, if the audit concludes it is worth doing.
- PPC management services
What the ongoing work covers, if the audit concludes it is worth doing.
- Google Ads management cost
Third-party market data, named and dated, with what each figure does not tell you.
- How pricing works
Why an audit is quoted against scope rather than listed, and what drives the figure for a given account.
The do-it-yourself version
The method is published rather than held back. If you would rather run it yourself, these are written so you can.
Fit
Who is a Google Ads audit for?
Accounts spending enough that a structural mistake is expensive, and anyone who has inherited one and needs to know what they are holding.
- Accounts spending enough that a structural mistake is expensive rather than annoying
- Anyone who has inherited an account and needs to know what they are holding before they touch it
- Businesses whose reported cost per acquisition and actual sales have stopped agreeing with each other
- Teams about to increase budget, who would rather find the leaks before they scale them
- In-house marketers who need an outside read to support a decision internally
When it is not the right thing to buy
If the account has been live for under a month, or has almost no conversion volume yet, an audit will mostly tell you that there is not enough data to read. Wait, or start with the free audit instead. If you already know exactly what is wrong and simply need it built, the audit is a step you can skip and we will say so rather than sell it to you.
If that is where you are, the free audit is the better place to start. It costs nothing and it will tell you whether there is enough here to be worth a paid one.
Questions
What do buyers ask about a Google Ads audit?
How it differs from the free version, what access is needed, how long it takes, whether we implement the findings, and who owns the document.
How is this different from the free audit?
The free audit is a review that surfaces the biggest issues we can see in your accounts and tells you which are worth fixing first, delivered on a call. The paid Google Ads audit is the full eighteen-area read, written up with the evidence attached, ranked by impact and effort, and delivered as a document you keep. If you are not sure which you need, start with the free one.
What access do you need?
Read-only access to the Google Ads account, and usually to the analytics property and tag manager as well, because conversion tracking cannot be verified from inside Google Ads alone. We make no changes to any account during an audit, and you can revoke access as soon as the walkthrough is finished.
How long does it take?
It depends on account size, measured in campaigns and conversion actions rather than in spend, and on whether the measurement layer needs untangling before anything else can be read. We give you a date when we agree the scope, and if the measurement turns out to be the problem we tell you early rather than at the end.
Do you implement the findings?
Only if you want us to, and it is quoted separately. The document is written so that your own team or another agency can act on it, because an audit that only works if you hire the auditor is a sales document wearing a spreadsheet.
Is it run by a tool?
No. Automated scanners are useful for gathering data and we use them for that, but the reading, the ranking and the judgement are done by the senior specialist who would run the account. A rule set cannot tell you which three of its forty flags actually matter for your business.
Who owns the findings document?
You do. It is yours whatever you decide afterwards, including deciding not to work with us. We have never seen the point of an audit the client cannot keep.
The other audits
SEO audit services
Sixteen areas, read by a person, with the findings ranked rather than dumped.
Conversion rate optimization audit
Thirteen areas of the conversion path, ending in a test backlog you can actually run.
Conversion tracking audit
Fourteen areas across GA4, Google Ads, the tag manager and the CRM, verified rather than assumed.
All four, and how they fit together, are on the audit services page.
Request the Google Ads audit
Tell us what you are running and we will scope it, then quote against that scope in writing before anything starts. You keep the findings whatever you decide afterwards.