How to Run a PPC Audit
A 7-part Google Ads audit checklist — account structure, keywords, search terms, budget, ad copy, conversion tracking and landing pages. What to check, in order, and what each finding usually means.
Nobody audits a Google Ads account until something feels wrong — cost per lead creeping up, or a client asking why spend went up and leads didn't.
By then it's usually not one problem. It's four or five small ones that compounded quietly for months. This is the checklist we run before touching a single bid.
What you need before you start
- Admin or edit access to the Google Ads account itself — read-only access isn't enough to check everything below.
- At least 30 days of recent data. A newer account or a recently changed campaign won't have enough volume for some of these checks to mean anything.
- Access to the linked Google Analytics / GA4 property, if conversion tracking runs through it. See GA4 setup if that link doesn't exist yet.
- A spreadsheet or note to log findings as you go — an audit you don't write down doesn't turn into a fixed account.
1. Account structure and settings
Start here because a structural problem undermines everything you check afterward — no amount of bid tuning fixes a campaign targeting the wrong country.
Check: campaign naming is consistent and tells you what's inside without opening it, campaign type matches the actual goal (Search vs. Performance Max vs. Display doing what you think it's doing), geographic and language targeting matches who you actually sell to, ad schedule matches when your team can respond to leads, and device bid adjustments reflect where conversions actually happen rather than a guess made at setup.
Where to look: Campaigns tab > Settings, for each active campaign.
2. Keyword analysis
Not every keyword deserves to keep running just because it was added once.
Check: keywords with enough impressions to judge fairly (very low-impression keywords aren't telling you anything yet), keywords with a high cost per acquisition relative to the account average, whether match types are still appropriate (broad match keywords added years ago often need tightening), Quality Score below 5 on any keyword spending real budget, and whether current bids match what each keyword is actually worth in conversions.
Where to look: Campaigns > [campaign] > Ad groups > Keywords, sorted by cost, descending.
3. The search term report
This is usually where the biggest single finding lives, and it's the most skipped step in a rushed audit.
Published industry data puts the typical share of irrelevant search terms at 30–50% of an unaudited account's search volume — meaning a third to half of what triggered your ads may never have been a real match for what you sell.
Check: read the actual queries that triggered your ads (not just the keywords you added), flag irrelevant ones for the negative keyword list, and look for high-performing queries that aren't yet added as their own keyword — those deserve a dedicated ad group, not just a broad match catch. Aim for a relevance rate above roughly 50% of search term spend going to genuinely on-target queries; below that, the negative list needs real work.
Where to look: Campaigns > [campaign] > Insights and reports > Search terms.
See negative keywords for the full process of building and maintaining this list properly.
4. Budget and bidding
Check: whether budget is distributed toward what's actually performing rather than split evenly out of habit, whether any high-performing campaign is budget-constrained (check the "Limited by budget" status), and whether the bidding strategy matches a real business goal rather than defaulting to Maximize Clicks because nobody changed it.
Where to look: Campaigns tab, "Status" column for budget-limited flags; Settings > Bidding for the strategy in use.
See Google Ads bidding strategy for how to pick the right one, and impression share for the metric that tells you what a budget cap is actually costing you in lost visibility.
5. Ad copy and extensions
Check: each ad group has at least three responsive search ads running (not one ad carrying the whole group), headlines include the actual keyword being targeted rather than generic brand language, and sitelink, callout and structured snippet extensions are active and current — an extension pointing to a page that no longer exists is a small, easy-to-miss leak.
Where to look: Ads & extensions tab, filtered by ad group.
See responsive search ads and CTR for what a healthy click-through rate looks like once ad copy is fixed.
6. Conversion tracking
An audit that skips this step can hand back confident recommendations built on broken data — worth checking early, not last, in practice, even though it's listed here as step six for narrative order.
Check: conversion actions are actually firing (test one yourself and confirm it registers), the attribution model matches how your sales process actually works, and there's no duplicate counting — the most common cause of a conversion number that looks suspiciously good.
Where to look: Goals > Conversions, and Google Tag Manager's Preview mode if tags are managed there. Full setup process in GA4 setup and conversion tracking.
7. Landing pages
Check: the final URL on each ad actually matches what the ad promised (a surprising number don't, after a site redesign), the page is genuinely usable on mobile, the message matches the ad's headline, and load speed is under about three seconds — slower than that and you're paying for clicks that bounce before the page even renders.
Where to look: click through your own ads on a phone, on mobile data, not office wifi.
How long this actually takes
For a single, moderately complex account, budget three to five hours for a first full pass through all seven areas — longer if the account has years of history and multiple campaigns, shorter on repeat audits once you know where the account's usual problem spots are. Resist the urge to rush the search term report specifically; it's the section most likely to be skimmed under time pressure, and it's also the one most likely to be hiding real budget waste.
Tools that speed this up
You don't need a paid tool to run this checklist — every check above can be done directly inside Google Ads. That said, two things are worth knowing.
Google Ads' own Recommendations tab surfaces some of this automatically, but treat its suggestions with healthy scepticism — it's optimised to help you spend more, not necessarily to help you spend better, and several of its default suggestions (broader match types, automatically applying every recommendation) work against the tightening this audit is trying to achieve. Use it as a prompt to investigate, not as an instruction to accept.
If you're running this audit regularly across several accounts, a dedicated PPC audit tool can save time on the mechanical parts — pulling the search term report, flagging Quality Score outliers — but it won't replace the judgment calls in steps 1, 4 and 7, which depend on knowing the actual business, not just reading a dashboard.
A simple audit scorecard
Use this to keep the seven checks honest rather than a vague "looks fine" pass.
| Area | Pass looks like | Fail looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | Targeting matches who you actually sell to | Country/state-wide targeting for a single-city business |
| Keywords | Quality Score mostly 6+ on spend-heavy terms | Multiple high-spend keywords under 5 |
| Search terms | 50%+ of spend on genuinely relevant queries | Under 50%, or a negative list that hasn't been touched in months |
| Budget | Spend follows performance | A top performer flagged "Limited by budget" |
| Ad copy | 3+ live responsive search ads per ad group | One ad carrying an entire ad group |
| Conversion tracking | You tested it yourself and it fired correctly | Nobody has manually tested it in over a year |
| Landing pages | Loads under ~3 seconds on mobile data | Noticeably slow or message-mismatched on a phone |
How often should you audit a PPC account?
Quarterly is a reasonable default for an active account with real budget behind it. A newly launched campaign is worth a lighter first check at 30 days — mainly to catch structural and tracking problems early — with the full seven-part audit once it has enough data volume, typically after 60–90 days.
An account that hasn't been touched in six months or more should assume it needs this audit regardless of how the numbers currently look on the surface — the search term report in particular tends to drift quietly for months without anyone noticing.
Can you audit your own account, or do you need an outside pair of eyes?
You can absolutely run this checklist on your own account — nothing above requires outside access you don't already have. What an outside audit adds isn't a different checklist, it's the willingness to flag a decision you made yourself and have gotten used to seeing. A campaign you set up eighteen months ago stops looking like a decision and starts looking like "how it's always been" — a second set of eyes tends to catch exactly the things that have become invisible through familiarity.
What to do with the findings
Fix in this order: conversion tracking first (nothing else means anything until this is accurate), then the search term report (usually the fastest budget recovery), then structure and bidding, then ad copy last. Re-check in 30 days — some of these changes need real data volume before you can tell if they worked.
We audit before we touch a single bid
Every new Google Ads account we take on gets this exact checklist first — reported honestly, findings and all.