Most Google Ads audits are surface-level nonsense. A few screenshots, some vague recommendations about “optimising your campaigns,” and a sales pitch dressed up as insight. I know this because I see the reports prospects bring to us from other agencies. They’re thin. They miss the stuff that actually costs you money.
A proper audit isn’t a tick-box exercise. It’s a diagnostic. And when you know what to look for, the findings are often brutal.
Here’s what a thorough Google Ads audit should actually cover and where most fall short.
Your tracking is probably lying to you
The first thing we check in any audit is conversion tracking. Not because it’s the most exciting part, but because everything else is meaningless if the data feeding your decisions is wrong.
We see this regularly: accounts where “conversions” include page views, button clicks, or duplicate purchase events. The numbers in the dashboard look healthy. The actual revenue tells a different story.
In maybe 5-15% of accounts we audit, the conversion tracking setup is fundamentally broken. Not slightly off. Broken. That means every optimisation decision the previous agency made was based on bad data. Every “performance report” they sent was fiction.
Before you look at anything else in a Google Ads account, you need to know whether the numbers you’re reading are real. If they’re not, nothing else matters.
Where your money is actually going
Once tracking is verified, we look at waste. This is where most business owners get uncomfortable, because the numbers are hard to ignore.
Wasted spend shows up in a few consistent places:
Search terms you’d never pay for. Open up the search terms report on most accounts and you’ll find irrelevant queries eating budget daily. Branded terms you’re already ranking for organically. Competitor names. Completely unrelated searches that slipped through because nobody built a proper negative keyword list. It’s death by a thousand cuts — no single query bankrupts you, but hundreds of small ones add up fast.
Audience targeting that’s too broad. Campaigns serving ads to people who were never going to buy. Geographic targeting that covers areas you don’t serve. Demographics left wide open because the default settings were never reviewed.
Campaigns running on autopilot. This is the big one. We regularly audit accounts where there’s barely any change history. The campaigns were set up, switched on, and left. No search term reviews, no bid adjustments, no testing. Just money going out the door with nobody watching where it lands.
The common thread? Lack of ongoing management. Setting up a campaign is maybe 20% of the work. The other 80% is the week-in, week-out optimisation that stops waste from compounding.
Campaign structure tells you everything
After tracking and waste, we look at how the account is actually built. This is where you can tell whether someone had a strategy or just followed Google’s default recommendations.
The pattern we see most often: accounts that lean heavily on Performance Max for everything, regardless of whether the business has enough conversion data to make it work. PMax needs volume. It needs data. For a small ecommerce business spending a few thousand a month, it’s often the wrong tool entirely. But it’s what Google recommends, and it’s easy to set up, so that’s what gets used.
A good audit will question the campaign structure against the business reality. What’s the monthly spend? How many conversions are you actually getting? Is there enough data for automated bidding to learn properly, or is the algorithm basically guessing?
We also look at how products and services are segmented. Lumping everything into one campaign means you can’t control budget allocation between your best sellers and your low-margin products. You end up throwing good money after bad — spending the same on products that return 10x as you do on products that barely break even.
What a good audit gives you
A proper audit should leave you with three things:
First, a clear picture of what’s working and what isn’t, based on verified data. Not vanity metrics like impressions and click-through rate. Actual performance tied to revenue.
Second, specific quick wins. These are the changes that would make an immediate difference — fixing tracking, adding negative keywords, pausing wasteful campaigns, restructuring budget allocation. In most accounts, there’s enough low-hanging fruit to cover the cost of bringing in professional management within the first month.
Third, a strategic direction. Not a vague promise about “growing your account,” but a concrete plan based on your products, your margins, your competition, and your budget. What campaign types make sense for your spend level. Where the opportunity is. What realistic targets look like.
That last point is where most audit reports fall down. They identify problems but don’t connect them to a plan. Or worse, they skip the problems entirely and jump straight to “here’s what we’d do” without showing you why the current setup isn’t working.
The uncomfortable question
If your current agency hasn’t walked you through your search terms report, hasn’t shown you exactly where your budget is going, and can’t explain why your account is structured the way it is — that should concern you.
It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re doing a bad job. But it does mean you don’t know whether they are or not. And when you’re spending thousands a month on advertising, “I think it’s probably fine” isn’t good enough.
A Google Ads audit gives you the information to make that call yourself. Not promises, not projections. Data.
We run free Google Ads audits for ecommerce businesses. No contract, no obligation. If you want to know what’s actually happening inside your account, get in touch.