Google Ads audit checklist: 25 things to check in your account

A Google Ads audit is a check of everything that decides whether your money brings customers: what is counted, who sees the ads, which searches trigger them, what the ads say, where they send people, and how the bidding spends the budget. Done properly it takes an afternoon. Done every week it takes software. Either way, this is the list.

The order matters. Tracking comes first because every other decision in the account rests on what it counts. If the count is wrong, every optimisation since has been optimising the wrong thing.

Tracking and counting

1. Conversion actions exist and mean something. Open Goals, then Conversions. There should be at least one action for a real enquiry: a form send, a booking request, a purchase. If the only actions are page views or "all clicks", nothing is being measured.

2. Each enquiry is counted once. A form send that fires a Google Ads tag and an imported Analytics event is counted twice. Look for pairs of actions with near-identical numbers and make one of them secondary.

3. Primary and secondary are set deliberately. Only primary actions drive bidding. Leave a low-value action as primary and the bidding will chase it.

4. The tag actually fires. Submit your own form and watch the conversion appear within a few hours. If it never does, the tag is broken, however tidy the settings look.

5. Google Analytics is linked, and auto-tagging is on. Without both, you cannot see what visitors from ads do on the site.

6. Conversion values are set where they can be. A sale with its real value, or an enquiry with an agreed estimate. Zero-value conversions make every bidding decision blind.

Campaign settings

7. Search partners and Display Network are switched off on Search campaigns. Both are ticked on by default and both spend money on placements you did not ask for.

8. Location targeting is set to presence, not interest. The default includes people who merely searched about your area from elsewhere. Change it to people who are in it.

9. The locations themselves are right. A radius that covers the river you do not cross, or a city you stopped serving, is paid for every day.

10. Ad schedule matches when you can respond. Ads at 2am for a business that answers at 9am are clicks you cannot act on.

11. Languages match your customers. A campaign set to all languages shows to people who cannot read the ad.

12. Budgets are not limited where it hurts. Google flags campaigns that run out of budget early in the day. If the best campaign is limited and the worst is not, the money is in the wrong place.

Keywords and search terms

13. Match types are intentional. Broad match reaches searches you never typed in. It can work with Smart Bidding and good conversion data; without them it is a leak.

14. The search terms report has been read recently. This is the list of what people actually typed before clicking. Sort by cost, and look for anything that spent money without an enquiry.

15. Negative keywords exist at campaign level and in a shared list. Competitor names, job seekers, free, cheap, DIY, locations you do not serve. If the negative list is empty, the search terms report will show you why it should not be.

16. Keywords are not fighting each other. The same term in two ad groups bids against itself.

17. Quality Score is not stuck at the bottom. A score of 3 or 4 on your main keywords means you are paying more per click than the business next to you with a 7.

Ads

18. Every ad group has at least one responsive search ad rated Good or Excellent. Google rates ad strength in the interface. Poor and Average ads cost more and show less.

19. Ad copy matches the search and the landing page. Someone who searched for emergency plumbing should see an ad about emergency plumbing and land on a page about it, not the home page.

20. Sitelinks, callouts and a phone number asset are filled in. They are free space on the results page, and ads with them earn more clicks.

21. No ads are disapproved or limited. A disapproved ad is a dead ad group. Check Status in the ads table.

Landing pages

22. The page loads fast on a phone and the form works. Test it on your own phone, on mobile data, and submit the form. Most ad clicks are on phones.

23. The page says what the ad promised, above the fold. Price, service, area, how to get in touch. If the visitor has to scroll to find out whether you do what they searched for, many will not.

Bidding and automation

24. The bid strategy fits the data. Maximise clicks is for accounts with no conversion history. Maximise conversions or a target cost per action is for accounts that count enquiries reliably. The wrong one in either direction wastes money.

25. Auto-apply recommendations is off, and recent changes are known. Google can apply its own suggestions automatically if the setting is on. Turn it off, then read change history for anything you did not do.

What to do with the results

Fix the tracking first, then the settings, then search terms and negatives, then ads and pages, then bidding. That order puts the most money back soonest, and it makes every later step more reliable, because each one depends on the ones before it.

If you would rather not do the 25 by hand, the free check below reads your website and shows what would be fixed first, and the full audit of the connected account prices every fault in dollars a month.