How to Audit Your Own Google Ads Account: 12 Things to Check

Look at how your campaigns and ad groups are organised. Each campaign should have a clear purpose and each ad group should be tightly themed around a specific set of closely related keywords.

What to look for: Ad groups with more than 20 keywords are usually too broad. If an ad group contains keywords that span very different topics, the ads inside it can't be relevant to all of them. That hurts quality scores and click-through rates.

Ask yourself whether the structure reflects how your customers think about your products or services, or whether it reflects how someone set up the account quickly without thinking it through.

Look at the keywords you are bidding on. Are they relevant to what you actually sell? Are the match types appropriate for your goals and budget?

What to look for: Too many broad match keywords on a limited budget is a common problem. Broad match gives Google a lot of latitude to show your ads for searches you didn't intend to target. That can be powerful in large accounts with lots of data, but in smaller accounts it usually burns through budget fast.

Check which keywords are spending the most and whether they are generating conversions or just clicks.

This is one of the most important things to check. Go to Keywords and then Search Terms. This shows you the actual searches that triggered your ads and resulted in clicks.

What to look for: Look for search terms that are irrelevant to your business. If you are a B2B software company and your ads are showing for "free software download" or "student discount," that is wasted budget. Make a note of anything irrelevant as these need to become negative keywords.

Also look for high-performing search terms that you are not directly targeting as keywords. These are opportunities to be more specific and improve relevance.

Check what negative keywords are already in place at both campaign and ad group level. A new account often has very few negatives, which means budget is being spent on irrelevant searches from day one.

What to look for: The absence of negative keywords is itself the finding. Most accounts should have a substantial negative keyword list built from regular search term reviews. If yours doesn't, start one based on your search terms report findings from step three.

Common negatives for B2B accounts include "free," "jobs," "courses," "how to" and "DIY." For local service businesses, searches from outside your service area should be excluded.

Look at your responsive search ads. Are the headlines and descriptions relevant to the keywords in each ad group? Do they give a clear reason to click and a clear call to action?

What to look for: Check your ad strength rating in Google Ads. Poor or average ratings suggest headlines and descriptions are too similar to each other or aren't using enough unique content. Also check whether you have enabled all available asset types including sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets and call extensions if phone calls matter to your business.

Look at the performance labels on individual headlines and descriptions. "Low" performing assets should be replaced with something different.

Click through your ads and look at the pages people are landing on. Does the landing page deliver what the ad promised? Is the call to action obvious? Does it load quickly on mobile?

What to look for: A mismatch between the ad and the landing page is a major conversion killer. If your ad says "get a free quote" and the landing page talks about your company history with no obvious quote form, people will leave.

Check Google's landing page experience rating in the Keywords section. Below average ratings indicate that Google considers your landing page a poor match for the keywords being targeted.

Add the Quality Score column to your keywords view. This shows Google's rating of how relevant your keywords, ads and landing pages are to each other, scored from 1 to 10.

What to look for: Keywords with quality scores of 1 to 4 are costing you significantly more per click than they need to. A quality score of 7 or above is a reasonable target. Scores below 5 indicate a meaningful disconnect somewhere between the keyword, the ad or the landing page.

Also look at the three component scores: expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience. These tell you exactly where the problem is.

Check what bidding strategy each campaign is using and whether it is appropriate for where the account is in its lifecycle.

What to look for: Smart bidding strategies like Target CPA and Maximise Conversions need conversion data to work well. If a campaign has fewer than 30 conversions in the last 30 days, automated bidding is likely to underperform. Manual CPC or Maximise Clicks with a bid cap is often more appropriate until enough data has been collected.

Also check whether any campaigns have Target CPA targets set that are unrealistically low. If the target is £20 but the average order value is £50 and competitors are paying £30, the campaign will struggle to spend budget and win auctions.

Go to Tools and then Conversions. Check what conversion actions are being tracked and whether they are actually meaningful to your business.

What to look for: Tracking page views or session starts as conversions is a common mistake that makes the account look like it is performing better than it is. Only track things that represent genuine business outcomes: form submissions, phone calls, purchases, bookings.

Check that the conversion status shows "Recording" rather than "No recent conversions." If you haven't recorded a conversion in weeks on an active campaign, either the tracking is broken or the campaign genuinely isn't converting. This matters even more for B2B accounts, where a form fill often isn't the real conversion event, pipeline and revenue are.

Go to Audiences and then Demographics. Look at performance broken down by age, gender and household income if available.

What to look for: You may find that one age group converts at twice the rate of another. Or that mobile users have a conversion rate of 0.5% while desktop users convert at 4%. These are not things to ignore. Applying bid adjustments to amplify what is working and reduce spend on what isn't is one of the clearest efficiency gains available in most accounts.

Add the Impression Share and Impression Share Lost to Budget columns to your campaign view.

What to look for: If your impression share lost to budget is high, it means your ads are not showing for every eligible search because you are running out of budget. That might mean the budget needs increasing, or it might mean you are targeting too broadly and wasting budget on irrelevant searches that could be cut to make the most of what you have.

Also look at when in the day your budget runs out. If campaigns are depleted by 2pm, you are missing the afternoon and evening traffic entirely.

Go to Auction Insights in your campaign view. This shows you which competitors are appearing in the same auctions as you and how your impression share compares to theirs.

What to look for: Competitors with significantly higher impression share are likely winning more of the available traffic. That could be because of higher bids, better quality scores, broader targeting or simply larger budgets. Understanding who you are competing against and where you are losing out is an important part of knowing where to focus improvement efforts.