Google Ads account audits

Wasted ad spend rarely looks like a mistake. It looks like a campaign quietly running on broad match, bidding against your own brand terms, or targeting a location you stopped serving two years ago. Nobody notices because the account is still “working” — leads are still coming in, just at a worse price than they should be.

What I look for

Broad match creep, junk placements, overlapping campaigns bidding against each other, conversion tracking that’s counting the wrong thing. I’ve seen accounts losing a third of their budget to problems that take an afternoon to fix once someone actually looks.

Structure and setup

I start at account level and work in: campaign types that actually suit what you’re trying to do, ad groups that aren’t a dumping ground for forty unrelated keywords, shared budgets quietly starving one campaign to feed another. I check whether auto-apply recommendations is switched on (that’s Google’s way of spending your money the way Google prefers, not necessarily the way that helps you), whether old paused campaigns are cluttering the account, and whether the whole thing is structured in a way a human could actually manage, not just one someone set up once and never touched again.

Keywords and search terms

Every match type gets a look, because broad match with weak negatives is still the easiest way to light money on fire. I pull the full search terms report, not just skim the top ten, and check for keyword overlap between campaigns bidding against each other, negative keyword lists that are missing or years out of date, and Quality Score drag coming from ad relevance or landing page experience rather than the keyword itself. If your own brand terms are getting eaten by your own campaigns, or by a competitor, I’ll flag that too.

The ads and assets

I read the actual ad copy, not just the ad strength label, because “Excellent” from Google’s own scoring tool isn’t the same thing as good. Responsive search ads, image assets, sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, lead forms, whatever’s live, I check whether they’re genuinely being used or just technically present to tick a box. Same goes for Performance Max if you’re running it: asset group quality, what the search term insights are actually showing, and whether brand exclusions and channel settings are doing what you think they’re doing, because PMax will happily spend into your own brand searches if nobody’s told it not to.

Tracking, call tracking and whether the numbers can be trusted

None of the above matters if the numbers feeding your decisions are wrong, so this is where I spend real time. Conversion actions get checked one by one: are you counting the same conversion twice, is it value-based when it should be, are enhanced conversions actually configured, does what Google Ads reports match what GA4 and Search Console are telling you. I check the GTM container and UTM tagging for gaps, cross-domain tracking if your checkout or booking flow lives on a different domain, and whether phone calls are tracked through dedicated call tracking numbers or just Google’s own call extensions, which under-report more often than people realise. If leads are coming in but the account can’t see them, everything built on top of that data is guesswork.

The stuff that’s easy to miss

Auction insights against whoever’s actually beating you, not just who you assume it is. Audience targeting and exclusion lists, including whether old remarketing audiences are stale or still worth keeping. Device bid adjustments and ad scheduling that made sense two years ago and haven’t been touched since. Location and language targeting that’s broader or narrower than it should be. Placement exclusions on Display and YouTube, because junk placements are a classic silent budget leak. And the change history, because sometimes the fastest way to understand why performance dropped on a specific date is to see exactly what changed that day.

Why a second set of eyes helps

Whoever built your account isn’t going to flag their own mistakes for you, and an in-house team is usually too close to the day-to-day to spot the drift. I come in with no stake in defending past decisions — just what the data says now.

What happens after

You get the findings and a straight answer on what’s worth fixing first. What you do with it is up to you — hand it to your existing team, take it to a new agency, or ask me anything that’s unclear.

Questions people ask