How to Audit a Google Ads Account: A Checklist That Ends in Action

Every Google Ads audit template on the internet shares the same flaw: it produces a document. Forty pages of screenshots, a traffic-light scorecard, a "strategic recommendations" section — and three months later the account looks exactly the same. The audit was never the deliverable. The applied changes were.

Here is the audit we actually run: five checks, in the order that matters, each one ending in a change you can review and apply the same week.

Start With the Conversion Count — Is It Double?

Everything downstream — search term analysis, budget decisions, bidding — is computed from conversion data. If the count is wrong, every conclusion built on it is wrong too. So before judging a single campaign:

• Look for duplicate conversion actions. The classic failure: a Google Ads tag and an imported GA4 event, both marked as primary, both counting the same purchase. The account looks twice as profitable as it is, and Smart Bidding happily optimizes toward the inflated signal.
• Check the counting setting. Purchases should count every conversion; lead forms should almost always count one per click. A lead action set to "every" lets one enthusiastic visitor file five conversions from one click.
• Reconcile against reality. Take last month. Compare conversions reported in Google Ads against orders or leads in your backend or CRM. They will never match exactly — attribution windows differ — but if Google claims roughly 2x what your own system recorded, stop the audit and fix conversion tracking first.

A mis-measured account cannot be optimized. Plenty of "underperforming" accounts turn out to be perfectly fine accounts wearing broken instrumentation.

Search Terms: Where the Money Leaks

Pull the search terms report for the last 90 days and sort by spend. Then ask one question per row: would I pay for this click again?

You are looking for three patterns:

• Zero-conversion spenders. Terms that accumulated real money and never converted. As illustrative math: a campaign spending $3,000/month where 20% of clicks land on terms that have never converted is leaking $600/month — over $7,000 a year — into queries that were never going to buy.
• Wrong-intent matches. Broad match pulling "free", "jobs", "DIY", competitor names you can't convert, or an entirely different product. These become negative keywords today, not "themes to monitor".
• Cross-campaign cannibalization. The same query triggering two campaigns, with the worse one winning the auction internally. Fix it with negatives that route traffic, not by hoping.

The output of this section is a concrete negative keyword list per campaign — not an observation that "match types could be tightened."

Budget Split vs. Performance

Now compare where the money goes against where the results come from. Build a simple table: each campaign's share of total spend next to its share of total conversions (or conversion value). An illustrative example of what this usually exposes:

The numbers above are made up; the shape is not. Almost every account has at least one campaign whose budget reflects a decision made a year ago rather than current performance, and one "limited by budget" campaign that is quietly the best thing in the account. The fix is a set of specific budget moves with amounts attached — shift this much from campaign B to campaign A — not a slide that says "rebalance investment".

Ad Strength and Asset Coverage

Responsive search ads live or die on the raw material you give them. Check three things per ad group:

• Headline and description count. An RSA with three headlines gives Google three things to test. Fill the slots with genuinely different angles — price, proof, speed, objection-handling — not the same sentence rephrased five times.
• Pinning discipline. Pinning every headline to a fixed position turns a responsive ad back into a static one. Pin only what compliance genuinely requires.
• Asset coverage. Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, images. Missing assets shrink your real estate in the auction you are already paying to enter.

Ad Strength is a guide, not a grade you optimize for its own sake — but an ad group stuck at "Poor" because it has three headlines and no assets is competing with one hand tied.

Does the Bidding Strategy Fit the Data?

Smart Bidding learns from conversion history. The audit question is whether each campaign's strategy matches the volume and quality of signal it actually receives:

• Value-based bidding (tROAS) on a campaign with a handful of conversions a month gives the algorithm almost nothing to learn from. Step down to a simpler strategy until volume supports it (about Smart Bidding).
• Maximize Conversions with no target will spend the whole budget by design. That is the correct behavior of the strategy, and a surprise only to whoever forgot to set a target.
• Targets set from inflated counts — remember the double-counted conversions from step one — produce a tROAS that looks achieved and a P&L that disagrees. If you fixed tracking, recalculate the targets.
• Manual CPC across hundreds of keywords is rarely a strategy; it is usually an artifact of when the account was built.

End in Reviewable Changes, Not a PDF

The reason most audits change nothing is that they end at the finding. The finding is the cheap part. The expensive part — deciding, applying, and being able to undo — is left as an exercise for the reader, and the reader is busy.

So close the loop. Every finding becomes a drafted change: previewable before it runs, approved by a human, logged when applied, reversible after. This is exactly the model Decisa is built around — proposed changes move through draft, review and apply as an auditable changeset instead of dying in a slide deck — but the principle holds whatever tooling you use. Your audit checklist, restated as actions:

1. Verify conversion counting — remove duplicate primary actions, fix counting settings, reconcile against your backend.
2. Pull 90 days of search terms and draft the negative keyword lists per campaign.
3. Compare spend share to conversion share and write the specific budget moves, with amounts.
4. Fill asset gaps in the worst ad groups: headlines with distinct angles, unpinned where possible, sitelinks and images added.
5. Match each bidding strategy to its conversion volume, and recalculate targets if tracking changed.
6. Convert every finding into a drafted, reviewable change — and apply them one batch at a time, so you can attribute what moved.

An audit that ends in a document is a diagnosis without treatment. The 40-page PDF flatters the auditor; the ten applied changes fix the account.