Why we audit before we quote
We run a Google Ads audit on every account before sending a proposal. Not as a sales gimmick. It is the only honest way to price the work, and roughly seven times in ten it finds enough waste in the first hour to cover our first month.
Here is the checklist, in the order we work through it. You can run most of it yourself in an afternoon.
Checks 1 to 4: measurement, before anything else
If conversion tracking is wrong, every optimisation decision after it is also wrong. Fix this first or the rest is theatre.
- ✓Is there more than one conversion action counting the same thing? Duplicate tags are the single most common cause of ROAS that looks too good.
- ✓Are micro-conversions set as primary? Page views and button clicks marked "primary" teach Smart Bidding to chase the wrong outcome.
- ✓Is the conversion window sane? A 90-day window on a product with a three-day cycle inflates everything.
- ✓Does Google Ads roughly agree with your CRM? Not exactly, they never will. But a 3x gap means something is broken.
Checks 5 to 8: account structure
- ✓Search terms report, last 90 days. Sort by cost, descending. Read the top 100. You will find spend on queries you would never have bid on.
- ✓Negative keyword lists. Most accounts we open have none, or one built in 2021 and never touched.
- ✓Are brand and non-brand separated? If they share a campaign, brand traffic is flattering your numbers and hiding non-brand failure.
- ✓How many ad groups have fewer than three ads? No testing is happening in those.
That brand and non-brand split matters more than people expect. Brand search converts at several times the rate of everything else because those people already decided. Blending them gives you a comfortable blended number that tells you nothing about whether you can acquire a customer who has never heard of you.
Checks 9 to 11: bidding and budget
- ✓Is Smart Bidding running on enough data? Target CPA needs a meaningful volume of conversions per month to learn. Below that it is guessing expensively.
- ✓Are budgets capped on campaigns that are working? Look for campaigns limited by budget with a return above your target. That is free money left on the table.
- ✓Performance Max: is there a brand exclusion list? Without one, PMax will happily absorb your brand traffic and take credit for it.
Checks 12 to 14: what happens after the click
Most accounts we audit do not have an ads problem. They have a landing page problem that the ads are paying for.
- ✓Mobile load time on the actual landing page. Not the homepage. Test the page the ad points to, on a throttled connection.
- ✓Does the page repeat the promise in the ad? Message mismatch quietly kills conversion rate and Quality Score together.
- ✓How many form fields? Every field past the fourth costs you completions. Ask for what sales genuinely needs to make the first call.
What to fix first
Work in this order. It is deliberately not the order that feels most satisfying.
- 1Tracking. Everything downstream depends on it.
- 2Negatives and search terms. Fastest waste reduction available.
- 3Landing page speed and message match. Usually the biggest lift.
- 4Structure and bidding. Important, but pointless before the first three.
If you would rather have someone else do this, that is what our performance marketing team does, and the audit is free before you commit to anything.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I audit a Google Ads account?
A full audit twice a year, plus a search terms review every fortnight. Accounts drift. Match types loosen, Google adds campaign types by default, and what was clean in January is leaking by June.
Can I audit my own account without an agency?
Yes. The checklist above is deliberately runnable by a competent marketer. The parts that genuinely need experience are bidding strategy selection and judging whether a campaign has hit its ceiling.
What is a reasonable amount of wasted spend to find?
In accounts that have never been audited, finding meaningful waste in the search terms report alone is common. Most of it is broad match picking up loosely related queries.
