Last checked against Google’s documentation on 29 September 2026.
How to audit a Google Ads account: order matters
A useful Google Ads audit checklist is ordered. Start with conversion tracking, because every later judgement depends on it. Then check campaign settings, account structure, search terms, keywords, bidding and budgets, ads and assets, landing pages, targeting, Performance Max and other campaign types, change history, and finally Google’s recommendations. Each step below says what to check, where to find it, and what a problem looks like.
Pick a date range before you start: the last 30 days for current state, compared against the previous 30 days and, for seasonal businesses, the same period last year. Write every finding down with the number that proves it. An audit that only says “CTR looks low” is an opinion; one that says “this ad group spent a fifth of the budget on searches unrelated to the offer” is a fix waiting to happen.
If you would rather have this run for you, the free Google Ads audit runs the same checklist on your account automatically. The rest of this page is the manual version.
1. Conversion tracking
Open Goals and review the conversion actions. Check:
- Which actions are primary. Only primary actions appear in the Conversions column and are used for bidding; secondary actions are for observation in All conversions (Google explains this in About primary and secondary conversion actions). Bad: a page view, a click on an email link, or a micro-step set as primary next to real leads or sales.
- Tracking status. Bad: an action showing Unverified, Tag inactive, or Needs attention. Google’s Tag Assistant troubleshooting guide walks through each status.
- Duplicates. Bad: the same event counted twice, for example by a Google Ads tag and an imported analytics goal, both set as primary.
- Counting and value. Bad: “Every” counting on lead forms, or every conversion carrying the same default value when real values differ.
Compare conversions in Google Ads with your own records for the same week. A large gap means the audit should stop here until tracking is fixed. Our guides on one vs every conversion counting and conversions dropping to zero cover the common failures.
2. Campaign settings
For each campaign, open Settings and check:
- Networks. Bad: a Search campaign that also includes the Display Network without anyone having decided that, or Search partners that spend with no conversions.
- Locations and location options. The default option reaches people in, regularly in, or who have shown interest in your locations. Google describes both options in About advanced location options. Bad: a business that only serves people physically in an area, left on the interest-based default. See ads showing outside your target location.
- Languages, ad schedule, and devices. Bad: a schedule that runs ads when nobody can answer the phone, or languages that don’t match the ads.
- Campaign goals. Bad: a campaign optimising for an account-default goal that includes actions it shouldn’t.
3. Account structure
Look at how campaigns and ad groups are split. The structure should follow real differences: different budgets, different locations, different margins, or clearly different intents. Bad signs: several campaigns targeting the same searches and competing with each other; ad groups with dozens of unrelated keywords; dozens of ad groups each with a handful of impressions, so nothing collects enough data to learn; brand and non-brand searches mixed in one campaign so you can’t see what new customers cost.
4. Search terms
Go to Campaigns → Insights and reports → Search terms, as described in Google’s search terms report guide. Sort by cost and read the top of the list. Turn on the Keyword column to see which keyword matched each search. Bad: searches for things you don’t sell, job seekers, free or DIY intent, or competitor names you didn’t mean to bid on, taking a meaningful share of spend with no conversions. Each of those is a negative keyword candidate. Our guide to finding negative keywords goes step by step.
5. Keywords
- Spend without results. Keywords that spent well above your target cost per conversion with none.
- Match types. Broad match paired with a small budget or with manual bidding tends to spread spend across loosely related searches.
- Quality Score. Add the Quality Score columns. Bad: high-spend keywords with a below-average expected click-through rate, ad relevance, or landing page experience.
- Status. Keywords marked low search volume, or limited by policy, and duplicates of the same keyword across ad groups.
- Negative conflicts. A negative keyword or list blocking a keyword you are actively bidding on.
6. Bidding and budgets
- Strategy fits the data. Bad: Target CPA or Target ROAS on a campaign with very few conversions a month, or a target far from what the campaign actually achieves. See why Target CPA stops spending.
- Budget constraints. Campaigns marked “Limited by budget” while they convert at a good cost are losing sales; campaigns with a large budget and poor results are wasting it.
- Impression share. Compare search lost impression share from budget and from rank. They need different fixes; see lost impression share: budget vs rank.
- Leftover bid adjustments. Google notes that Smart Bidding strategies don’t use manual location, ad schedule, or audience bid adjustments (see About bid adjustments). Old adjustments there are clutter, not control.
7. Ads and assets
Check every enabled ad group has at least one approved, serving responsive search ad. Bad: ads disapproved or limited by policy; ads with Poor ad strength; headlines that repeat the same message; ads that don’t mention what the searcher looked for. Check assets too: sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, calls, and images. Missing or disapproved assets make ads smaller on the page.
8. Landing pages
Open the final URL of every high-spend ad on a phone. Bad: slow loading, a page that doesn’t match the ad’s promise, prices or availability that differ from the ad, a broken form, or several steps before the visitor can act. In Google Ads, Insights and reports → Landing pages breaks performance down by URL (see Google’s landing page report guide); a page that takes a large share of clicks with a much lower conversion rate than the rest is the one to fix first.
9. Targeting
Review performance by location, device, time of day, and audience. In Insights and reports → When and where ads showed, compare targeted locations against matched locations. Bad: spend going to places you don’t serve, a device with a far worse cost per conversion that nobody has looked at, or hours when conversions never happen but spend does. Audiences added in observation mode are useful here: they show which groups convert better without restricting reach.
10. Performance Max and other campaign types
- Channel mix. Open Insights and reports → Channel performance for each Performance Max campaign. Bad: most spend going to a channel that brings few conversions, or a channel status of Not eligible or Missing required assets. See Google’s channel performance report help page and our guide to reading it.
- Brand overlap. Bad: Performance Max taking conversions on your own brand searches that a Search campaign would get more cheaply. See Performance Max cannibalising brand search.
- Asset groups. Bad: asset groups with missing videos or images, low ad strength, or audience signals that don’t describe your customers.
- Demand Gen, Display, and Video. Judge them on the goal they were set up for, and check placements for sites or apps you would not want to appear on.
11. Change history
Go to Change history in the Campaigns menu. Google’s change history guide explains how it maps each change against clicks, cost, and conversions, and shows who made it. Line up the dates of any drop or spike you found earlier with the changes around it. Bad: bid strategy or target changes every few days, large budget swings, or changes made by users or tools nobody recognises.
12. Recommendations and auto-apply
Open Recommendations, then Auto-apply settings. Google’s auto-apply help page shows where to see which recommendation types are switched on and a history of what was applied. Bad: types such as broad match keywords, new keywords, or bid strategy changes applied automatically without anyone reviewing them. Read the current recommendations as suggestions to evaluate, not a to-do list. See auto-apply recommendations for what each type does.
A Google Ads account audit template
Copy this into a spreadsheet, one row per check, and fill in the evidence column before writing any fix:
| Area | Check | Bad looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Tracking | Primary actions, status, duplicates | Micro-steps as primary; Unverified tags |
| Settings | Networks, locations, schedule | Unplanned Display; interest-based locations |
| Search terms | Top terms by cost | Irrelevant terms with spend and no conversions |
| Bidding | Strategy, targets, budget limits | Targets far from actuals; converting campaigns capped |
| Ads and pages | Approval, ad strength, landing pages | Disapproved ads; pages that don’t match |
| History | Changes around each shift | Frequent target or budget changes |
Rank the findings by money at stake, not by how easy they are. One broken conversion action outweighs twenty missing callouts.
Running the checklist every day
A manual audit is a snapshot, and most of these checks drift week to week. Boxoo’s specialist agents run this checklist on your live account every day: tracking, settings, search terms, bidding and budgets, ads, targeting, Performance Max, change history, and Google’s recommendations. Each finding becomes a case with the evidence from your account and a prepared fix. Nothing changes until you press Apply, and most applied changes keep an undo. Things the Google Ads API can’t change, such as landing pages or conversion tags, come to you as exact steps.
Run the free Google Ads audit to see what the checklist finds on your account.
