What a Google Ads audit should actually tell you.
A useful Google Ads audit answers three questions with numbers, not opinions. Where is the money going, which of that spend produced nothing, and what would change if each finding were fixed. Anything that lists settings without attaching a cost to them is a checklist rather than an audit. The test to apply is simple: if every finding were corrected tomorrow, could the person who wrote it tell you roughly what the account would do differently, and why.
Why most audits look identical
The free audit is a sales document, and it is generated the same way every time: run a tool over the account, list every setting that differs from a default, and present the length of the list as evidence of neglect. It works because a long list is alarming and nobody checks whether the items matter.
The tell is that nothing in it carries a number. Ad extensions missing. Single keyword ad groups recommended. Quality score below seven. All true, possibly, and none of it tells you whether fixing it is worth an afternoon or a quarter.
Where the money went is the whole first section
Start with the spend, sorted by what it produced. Usually a small share of the account is doing most of the work, a larger share is doing a little, and a meaningful share produced nothing at all over a period long enough to judge.
That last group is the finding. Not that it exists, because it always does, but how big it is and what is in it. Spend that produced nothing over ninety days is either a targeting problem, a page problem, or a tracking problem, and separating the three is the job.
The search terms report is where the truth usually is
An audit that has not read the search terms report has not read the account. This is where you see what people actually typed, as opposed to what the keyword list intended, and it is where most wasted spend sits in plain sight.
Sorted by cost, the top fifty terms will tell you within twenty minutes whether the account is buying its market or buying everything adjacent to it. If you are unsure how the match types are behaving, our keyword match type simulator shows what each one will and will not catch before you commit budget to it.
Then the part most audits skip entirely
The account is half the system. The other half is what happens after the click, and an audit that stops at the account boundary cannot tell you whether the problem is even in the account.
So a real audit looks at the pages the ads point to, the form on them, and whether the conversions being optimised towards are real enquiries or something that merely fires. We have written separately about how to tell an ads problem from a page problem, and an auditor who does not make that distinction will confidently recommend changes to the wrong half.
Every finding needs a size and an order
Three columns turn a list into a plan: what it is, what it is costing, and what it takes to fix. With those, the order sorts itself, and you can start on the thing that matters rather than the thing that is easiest to write down.
It also makes the document honest. Some findings are worth a few hundred a month, some are worth nothing measurable, and saying so is what makes the rest credible.
What would you do differently on Monday
That is the only question the document has to survive. If you read it and know which three things to change first and roughly what each one is worth, it was an audit. If you read it and feel vaguely worried, it was a brochure.
If you have had an account running for a while and nobody has ever shown you where the money actually goes, we will do that properly and tell you the size of each finding. Send us access with the enquiry form and you will get a document you can act on, whether or not you ever work with us.
Questions we get asked.
What should a Google Ads audit include?
- Where spend went and what each part produced, the search terms report read by a person, the conversion actions checked against real enquiries, the landing pages the ads point to, and every finding given a size and a fix. Settings alone are a checklist, not an audit.
Are free Google Ads audits worth anything?
- Sometimes, but read them for what they are. Most are generated by a tool and built to alarm rather than inform. Apply one test: does every finding carry a number, and can the person who wrote it say what changes if you fix it.
How often should an account be audited?
- A thorough look twice a year is usually enough if somebody competent is in the account weekly. An account nobody has reviewed in a year almost always has spend running against terms that stopped being relevant, so the first audit after a long gap tends to find the most.
Should the agency running my account audit it?
- They should review it constantly, but an audit by the people who built the thing has an obvious limit. A second opinion is most useful when performance has drifted and the explanations have started sounding the same each month.
Will I need to give an auditor full account access?
- Read only access is enough for an audit and is what you should give. Nobody needs the ability to change a live account in order to tell you what is in it.
