I audit Google Ads accounts every week. Some are new prospects. Some are existing clients we inherited from other agencies. And the pattern is always the same: money leaking out of places nobody thought to check.
Across our client base at Run The Numbers®, we recover an average of £1,300 per month in wasted spend per account. That’s not a rounding error. That’s profit being torched because somebody set up a campaign two years ago and never looked under the bonnet again.
This is the checklist I use. It’s built from 15+ years of managing eCommerce Google Ads accounts and the audits we run as part of every Free Ads Analysis we do for prospective clients. If you run an online store, work through this list. You’ll almost certainly find money you’re wasting right now.
Check Your Conversion Tracking First
Everything else in your account is built on conversion data. If that data is wrong, every optimisation decision you make is wrong too.
Here’s what I check:
Pull up your Google Ads conversion actions. Count them. I regularly see accounts with 15+ conversion actions, half of which are duplicated, outdated, or tracking the wrong thing entirely. One eCommerce account I audited last year was counting “page views” as conversions. Their reported ROAS looked incredible. Their actual ROAS was dire.
Compare your Google Ads conversion count against your Shopify or WooCommerce order data for the same period. If the gap is bigger than 15%, something is broken. Browser restrictions and ad blockers mean some gap is inevitable in 2026, but a 30-40% discrepancy means your tracking setup needs rebuilding.
Check whether you’re using Enhanced Conversions. If you’re still relying purely on the standard Google tag without Enhanced Conversions or server-side tracking, you’re losing data on every transaction where the customer uses Safari, blocks cookies, or switches devices. That’s a significant chunk of your customers.
At RTN, tracking validation is the first phase of our RTN System — what we call the Audit phase. We don’t touch bids, budgets, or campaign structure until we’re confident the data we’re optimising against is accurate. Anything else is guesswork dressed up as strategy.
Search Term Reports: Where the Quiet Waste Lives
Open your search term report for the last 30 days. Filter by cost, highest first. Now read through the actual queries people searched before clicking your ad.
What you’re looking for: queries that have nothing to do with what you sell. “Free” versions of your products. DIY alternatives. Competitor brand names you’re paying for but can’t convert on. Informational queries from people who are researching, not buying.
Broad match has become the default in Google Ads, and Google actively pushes advertisers towards it. Broad match works well when it’s paired with a rigorous negative keyword strategy and strong conversion data. Without those guardrails, it’s a firehose of irrelevant traffic.
I worked with a framing eCommerce brand where the previous agency had broad match keywords running with almost no negatives. We restructured the account, tightened match types, built out a proper negative keyword list, and improved their ROAS from around 4x to 6.39x. The product range didn’t change. The website didn’t change. We just stopped paying for clicks that were never going to buy a picture frame.
Add negative keywords weekly. Not monthly. Not quarterly. Weekly. This is one of the highest-ROI activities in paid search management, and it takes 20 minutes.
Performance Max: Check What It’s Actually Spending On
If you’re running Performance Max campaigns (and most eCommerce advertisers are), you need to understand where that budget is going. PMax bundles Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover into a single campaign. The convenience is appealing. The lack of visibility is the problem.
Two things to check immediately:
First, are you running brand exclusions? If PMax is bidding on your brand name, it’s probably claiming conversions that would have happened anyway through organic search. That inflates your PMax ROAS and masks the true performance of your prospecting spend. Google added brand exclusion controls for PMax — use them.
Second, check your placement reports. PMax will spend on Display and YouTube placements, and some of those placements will be junk. Mobile game apps, obscure websites, auto-play video slots. If you’re seeing spend on placements that clearly aren’t driving real purchase intent, add placement exclusions.
Google expanded negative keyword capacity to 10,000 per campaign in early 2026 and introduced channel-level performance reporting for PMax. These are welcome improvements, but they only help if you actually use them. The tool is there. You have to pick it up.
Campaign Structure: Simplicity Beats Complexity
I see over-segmented accounts constantly. Twelve campaigns for a product range that needs three. Separate campaigns for every product category, every match type, every audience segment. The result is thin data spread across too many campaigns, none of which have enough conversion volume for Smart Bidding to work properly.
Google’s algorithms need data density. A campaign with 5 conversions per week is guessing. A campaign with 50 conversions per week is learning. If you’ve got 15 campaigns each getting a handful of conversions, consolidate.
For most eCommerce brands turning over between £500k and £5m, I’d recommend a structure along these lines: one branded Search campaign, one non-brand Search campaign, one Shopping or PMax campaign (with brand exclusions), and potentially a remarketing campaign. That’s it. Four campaigns. Maybe five if you’ve got a seasonal product line that justifies its own budget.
One of our bushcraft and outdoor clients saw a 10/1+ ROAS after we restructured their Shopping campaigns using exactly this approach. Fewer campaigns, better data density, smarter bidding decisions. The account wasn’t underfunded before the restructure. It was just over-complicated. You can see how your metrics compare in our eCommerce PPC benchmarks.
Landing Pages: The Bit Everyone Forgets
Your Google Ads audit shouldn’t stop at the ad account. Where are those clicks going?
Check your top-spending keywords and look at the landing pages they point to. Is there a match between what the person searched, what the ad promised, and what the page delivers? Mismatched landing pages kill conversion rates, and no amount of bid optimisation will fix a page that doesn’t answer the searcher’s question.
For eCommerce, this usually means making sure Shopping ads land on the correct product page (not a category page or homepage), and making sure Search ads for category-level terms land on a well-structured collection page with filters, not a generic landing page.
Page speed matters too. Run your top landing pages through PageSpeed Insights. If your mobile speed score is below 50, you’re losing sales to impatience. eCommerce shoppers won’t wait 6 seconds for a page to load when your competitor’s loads in 2.
What to Do With What You Find
Work through this list. Write down every issue. Then prioritise ruthlessly.
Fix tracking first. Fix search term waste second. Fix campaign structure third. Fix landing pages fourth. That’s the order because each fix compounds the effectiveness of the one after it. Accurate data makes your negative keywords more impactful. Clean targeting makes your campaign structure more efficient. Good structure makes your landing page optimisation more measurable.
If you want a professional pair of eyes on your account, we offer a Free Ads Analysis that covers all of this and more. No obligation, no hard sell. Just a clear breakdown of where your money is going and what we’d do differently. Or if you’d prefer to hand the whole thing over, take a look at our Google Ads management service.