Google Ads Audit Checklist (2026): How to Audit Your Account

Short version: Audit in the order money leaks, not the order the interface presents. Conversion tracking first, because every other number depends on it. Then wasted spend, structure, budget allocation, feed, creative, and finally bidding. Most audits find between five and fifteen percent of spend going somewhere it should not, and almost all of it sits in the first three sections.

An audit is not a list of every setting in the account. It is a search for the specific places where money is leaving without coming back. This checklist is the one we run on accounts before taking them over, arranged so that the highest-value findings surface first.

Work through it in order. The sequence matters because a finding in section one invalidates the analysis in every section below it. There is no point tuning bids against conversion data that is counting purchases twice.

1. Conversion tracking: does the data mean anything?

Everything downstream depends on this. Smart Bidding optimises toward the conversions you report, so if the reporting is wrong, the algorithm is confidently steering toward the wrong outcome.

• Is every conversion action counting something real? Open Goals, then Conversions. For each action ask what it represents and whether anything else already counts the same event.
• Check for duplicates. The classic failure is a platform app and a manual tag both firing on the same thank-you page, doubling reported revenue. Compare a full week of Google Ads conversions against the back-end order count, segmenting Google Ads by conversion date rather than click date so you are comparing like with like.
• Is only one action set to Primary? Purchases should be primary. Add to cart and begin checkout should be secondary, so they stay visible in reports without feeding the bidding.
• Is conversion value dynamic? A hardcoded average order value destroys value-based bidding. The tag must pass real order totals.
• Is the attribution window sane, and is the model consistent across actions you compare?
• Enhanced conversions enabled? If not, you are likely under-reporting and the bidding is working with less signal than it could.

If tracking is broken, stop here. Fix it, let two weeks of clean data accumulate, then resume. Any other conclusion drawn from a broken account is guesswork wearing a spreadsheet. For the Shopify-specific version of this, see our guide to Shopify Google Ads conversion tracking.

2. Wasted spend: where is money going for nothing?

This section usually pays for the audit on its own.

• Search terms report, last 90 days. Filter to clicks greater than zero and conversions equal to zero, sort by cost descending. The top twenty rows are your immediate answer.
• Is there a negative keyword list applied to every campaign? Check Tools, then Shared library. A shared list of universal junk applied everywhere is the baseline hygiene most accounts lack. Our guide on how to add negative keywords covers match types and levels.
• Are you paying for job seekers, researchers, and freebie hunters? Look for "jobs", "salary", "how to", "diy", "free", and "cheap" in the search terms.
• Are you paying for products you do not stock? The biggest e-commerce leak by some distance.
• Placement report on Display and Performance Max. Look for mobile game apps and low-quality sites absorbing impressions. Exclude aggressively.
• Location settings. Check that "Presence" is selected rather than "Presence or interest", unless you deliberately want people merely interested in your area.
• Is brand traffic separated from non-brand? Mixed together, brand conversions flatter everything and hide non-brand failure.

3. Account structure: can this account be managed?

Structure determines whether anyone can read the account and act on what they see.

• Do campaign names follow a convention that tells you type, funnel stage, and geography at a glance?
• Is brand in its own campaign with its own budget, so it cannot absorb prospecting spend?
• Are ad groups tightly themed? An ad group with forty unrelated keywords cannot have relevant ad copy for all of them.
• Are campaigns competing with each other for the same searches? Check for the same term triggering multiple campaigns.
• Is Performance Max swallowing brand traffic? Without brand exclusions, PMax will claim conversions that would have happened anyway and report a flattering ROAS. Our piece on what Performance Max really does with your budget covers this.
• How many campaigns are actually active, and does each have enough budget to exit the learning phase? Ten underfunded campaigns perform worse than three funded ones.

4. Budget and bidding allocation

• Where is the money actually going? Sort campaigns by cost. Does the ranking match your commercial priorities, or has spend drifted toward whatever the algorithm found easiest?
• Which campaigns are budget-limited? A campaign hitting its cap with a strong ROAS is a growth opportunity sitting in plain sight.
• Are bid strategies appropriate? Target ROAS needs conversion volume to work. On a campaign with three conversions a month it will thrash.
• Are targets realistic? A tROAS set far above what the account has ever achieved will simply throttle delivery until the campaign stops spending.
• Is the ROAS target built on margin? A 4.0 ROAS on a 60 percent margin product and a 4.0 on a 20 percent margin product are completely different outcomes. See what counts as a good ROAS.
• Check the change history before concluding anything. If someone changed targets last week, current performance reflects the learning period, not the strategy.

5. Product feed, for e-commerce accounts

On an e-commerce account the feed is the campaign. Shopping and Performance Max cannot show a product the feed describes badly.

• Merchant Center diagnostics. How many products are disapproved, and how many are approved but limited? Both are invisible in Google Ads.
• Are titles front-loaded with the words buyers actually search, rather than starting with an internal SKU or the brand name alone?
• Are GTINs, brand, and product attributes populated? Missing identifiers restrict eligibility.
• Are images clean and compliant? The image is the ad in Shopping.
• Is pricing and stock synced? Mismatches between feed and site cause silent disapprovals.
• Are products segmented by margin or priority, or is the whole catalogue in one undifferentiated bucket bidding equally on everything?

More detail in our guides to Google Shopping feed optimization and why the feed is the most ignored asset in Google Ads.

6. Ads, assets, and landing pages

• Does every ad group have at least one responsive search ad with a reasonable strength rating and genuinely distinct headlines?
• Are all relevant assets in place? Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, images. Missing assets cost you both click-through rate and the space your competitors occupy.
• Do ads match the landing page promise? An ad advertising a discount that the page does not mention wastes the click.
• Do landing pages load fast on mobile? Run PageSpeed Insights. LCP above 2.5 seconds and CLS above 0.1 are both costing you conversions and ad rank.
• Is the mobile experience actually usable, or is the form unusable below the fold?

7. Audiences, geography, and schedule

• Are remarketing lists active and populated? Lists below the size threshold silently do nothing.
• Are customer match lists uploaded and refreshed? Stale lists decay.
• Does performance vary meaningfully by device, location, or time? Check before assuming it does not. Most accounts have at least one segment quietly underperforming.
• Are exclusions in place for locations you cannot ship to or serve?

Score your own account

The checker below takes sixteen of the most important checks from the seven sections above. Tick each one your account already passes. The weights follow the order of this checklist, so tracking and wasted spend count for the most, and the result lists the three unticked checks worth the most points. If your browser allows it, your ticks are saved so you can come back after making changes.

A score is a starting point, not a verdict. If conversions do not match real orders, fix that first, whatever the total says.

How to turn the findings into a plan

An audit that produces a forty-item list helps nobody. Sort what you find into three groups:

• Fix now. Anything broken: tracking errors, disapproved products, obvious waste. These are not judgement calls and carry no risk.
• Change deliberately. Structure, targets, and budget shifts. One meaningful change at a time, with at least a week between them so you can attribute the effect. Changing five things at once means learning nothing from any of them.
• Test. New ad copy, new campaign types, new audiences. Genuine experiments with a hypothesis and a defined read date.

Resist the urge to act on everything in week one. An account that has three changes made carefully will beat one that has thirty made at once, because the second is unreadable for a month afterwards.

The five findings that show up in almost every audit

After enough audits the same problems recur, and they are rarely exotic. Knowing what usually breaks lets you check the likely culprits first rather than working through an account front to back.

Conversions counted more than once. A purchase fires from the Google Ads tag, from the Google Analytics import, and sometimes from a third tag installed by a previous manager. The account reports double or triple the real conversions, the ROAS looks excellent, and every bidding decision downstream is made on inflated numbers. The check is simple: compare Google Ads conversions to actual orders in the store backend for the same period. If they do not roughly agree, nothing else in the account can be trusted.

Brand and non brand mixed in one campaign. Brand searches convert cheaply and abundantly. When they share a campaign with cold traffic, the brand performance masks the non brand waste, and the algorithm spends into the blended average. Separating them almost always reveals that non brand is performing far worse than anyone believed.

Target ROAS set from a number nobody calculated. A target of 400 percent gets chosen because it sounds healthy, not because anyone worked out the contribution margin underneath it. The result is either a target so high the campaign cannot spend, or one so low it buys unprofitable revenue. Our guide to break-even ROAS covers the arithmetic that should sit behind that number.

Search terms nobody has read in months. The report exists, it is one click away, and on most accounts the last negative keyword was added a long time ago. This is the fastest money in any audit. See how to add negative keywords for the method.

A product feed left at whatever the platform exported. Titles truncated, no category attributes, missing GTINs, no custom labels for margin segmentation. For any Shopping or Performance Max account the feed is the campaign, and an unoptimised feed caps performance no matter how well the campaign is structured.

What an audit cannot tell you

An honest audit names its own limits. Looking at an account from the outside, there are things the data will not reveal, and pretending otherwise produces confident recommendations that turn out to be wrong.

You cannot see true profitability without margin data. ROAS is revenue divided by spend, and revenue is not profit. An account at 300 percent ROAS on 70 percent margin products is thriving; the same number on 25 percent margin products is losing money. Without the margin figures from the business, an auditor is guessing.

You cannot see the effect of anything that happened off platform. A stock outage, a price change, a competitor's promotion, a PR moment, a broken checkout. Sharp performance changes frequently have causes that live nowhere in the Google Ads interface, and an auditor who attributes every dip to campaign settings will misdiagnose.

You also cannot judge creative quality from performance data alone in a low volume account. If a set of ads has run 400 impressions, the difference between them is noise. Statistical patience is part of a competent audit, and calling a winner early is one of the more common ways audits do damage.

Doing it yourself versus paying someone

This checklist is genuinely runnable by anyone with access to the account and a few hours. Working through conversion tracking, search terms and structure will surface most of the obvious waste, and doing it yourself builds an understanding of the account that a delivered report never quite transfers.

The case for paying someone is pattern recognition rather than access. Someone who has audited a few hundred accounts recognises a structural problem in the shape of the data in a way that a checklist cannot encode. They also have no attachment to the decisions already made, which matters more than it sounds: auditing your own work honestly is difficult, and most people quietly justify the setup they built.

The practical middle path is to run the checklist yourself first, then get a second read on the two or three findings you are least sure about. That costs little and avoids paying someone to tell you things you already knew.

Auditing Google Ads conversion tracking, step by step

Section one tells you what to look for. This is the order to do it in when you are auditing tracking on its own, for example after a site change or when the numbers stop matching the store. Every step is read-only, so it is safe to run on a live account.

1. List every conversion action. In Goals, then Conversions, note each action, its source (Google tag, Google Analytics import, upload or phone calls), whether it is Primary or Secondary, and whether its status shows it is recording.
2. Look for two actions counting the same event. A purchase tracked by the Google Ads tag and also imported from Google Analytics, both set to Primary, is the most common cause of inflated results.
3. Check the count setting. Purchases should usually count every conversion; leads should usually count one per click, so a form submitted twice is not two leads.
4. Check the value. Purchase values should be the real order total, in the right currency, with tax and shipping treated the same way you treat them in your own reporting.
5. Run a live test. Place a test order or submit a test form with Tag Assistant open and confirm the tag fires once, on the confirmation page, with the right value.
6. Check enhanced conversions and consent. Confirm enhanced conversions are on, and if you have visitors in the EEA or UK, that consent mode is implemented so conversions are modelled rather than lost.
7. Reconcile with the back end. Compare a full week of Google Ads conversions, segmented by conversion time, against real orders or qualified leads for the same days.

If the numbers still do not line up after these seven steps, our guide to Google Ads conversion tracking that is not working walks through the usual causes one by one.

E-commerce Google Ads audit: the extra checks for online stores

An e-commerce Google Ads audit covers everything above plus a layer that lead generation accounts do not have: the product catalogue. In an online store, Shopping and Performance Max often carry most of the spend, and their results depend on data that lives outside the Google Ads interface.

Merchant Center and feed health

Open Merchant Center before Google Ads. Note account-level warnings first, because a misrepresentation or website issue can limit the whole catalogue, then product-level disapprovals and limited products. Our Google Shopping audit checklist covers the feed side in full.

Performance Max visibility checks

Performance Max is far less of a black box than it was. Google now offers a search terms report for all Performance Max campaigns, campaign-level negative keywords that apply to Search and Shopping inventory, full asset reporting, and a channel performance report (Google's summary of these controls). An audit should use all of them: read the search terms, check which channels the spend actually reached, confirm brand exclusions are in place, and look at which assets and products are doing the work. If a Performance Max campaign is spending without results, our guide to fixing a Performance Max campaign that is not converting picks up from here.

Products, not just campaigns

Look at performance by product as well as by campaign. Most catalogues have a small group of products that take a large share of spend and a long tail that never gets impressions. Check whether spend is going to products with healthy margins and stock, whether custom labels exist to separate them, and whether new and returning customers are reported separately, so repeat buyers do not make prospecting look better than it is.

Campaign-level audit checklist

The seven sections above audit the account. When you need to check a single campaign, for example before raising its budget, run this shorter list against it.

• Goal: is the campaign optimizing toward the right conversion actions, and only those?
• Bid strategy: is the target realistic against what the campaign has actually achieved over the last 30 to 90 days?
• Budget: is it limited by budget, and if so, is its return good enough to deserve more?
• Networks: on a Search campaign, are Search Partners and the Display Network on or off by decision rather than by default?
• Search terms: what are the top ten spending terms with no conversions?
• Locations: is targeting set to presence, and are excluded areas in place?
• Ads and assets: does each ad group have a responsive search ad with distinct headlines and a full set of assets?
• Landing pages: do the final URLs load, match the ad, and still sell what the ad promises?
• Change history: what changed in the last two weeks, and is the campaign still in a learning period?

Google Ads audit template: how to write up the findings

A Google Ads audit report is only useful if someone can act on it. The simplest template that works is one row per finding, with the evidence and the action next to it. Copy this structure into a sheet or document, or print this page to PDF and use the seven sections as your checklist.

Keep the "Group" column to the three groups from the plan section above: fix now, change deliberately, test. Put the fix-now rows at the top, and give every row a named owner and a date. A report that ends with a ranked list of five actions gets used; one that ends with forty findings in no order does not. If you want to know what a professional audit report usually contains, our guide to what to expect from a PPC audit covers it.

Is the optimization score a Google Ads audit?

No. Google describes optimization score as "an estimate of how well your Google Ads account is set to perform", running from 0 to 100 percent, and it changes as you apply or dismiss Google's recommendations (source). It is a useful list of things to consider. It does not check whether your conversions are real, whether your targets match your margins, or whether your search terms are relevant to what you sell.

Tools for a Google Ads audit

You do not need a paid audit tool to run this checklist. The free tools that do most of the work are already in your accounts: the search terms report and change history in Google Ads, Tag Assistant for testing conversion tags, Merchant Center diagnostics for the feed, PageSpeed Insights for landing pages, and Google Ads scripts for pulling large reports. For a quick structured score, our free account health check works alongside the self-audit above. Paid tools can save time on large accounts, but they apply generic rules; the judgement about which findings matter for your business still has to come from a person.

How to audit your Google Ads agency before renewing the contract

If you are deciding whether to renew an agency, the account itself is the best evidence. You need read access, and about an hour.

• Change history: how often were changes made over the last three months, by whom, and were they meaningful, or mostly small bid edits?
• Search terms: when was the last negative keyword added? A long gap is a sign nobody is reading the report.
• Reports versus the account: do the numbers in the agency's monthly report match what you see in Google Ads for the same dates, and do they match your own orders or leads?
• Tests: what did the agency test in the last six months, and what did it learn?
• Ownership: is the Google Ads account in your name, with the agency given access, or does the agency own it?

If you would rather have an independent second opinion before the renewal conversation, request a free Google Ads audit and we will run this checklist against your account and send you what we find.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a Google Ads audit take?

A thorough audit on a mid sized e-commerce account takes three to six hours of focused work. Larger accounts with many campaigns and a complex feed take longer. Anything delivered in under an hour is a template with your numbers dropped in.

What access does an auditor need?

Read only access to the Google Ads account is enough for most of it. Read access to Google Analytics and Merchant Center makes the tracking and feed sections far more reliable. An auditor asking for admin access before agreeing scope is worth questioning.

Should I audit before or after changing agencies?

Before, if you can. An audit run while the incumbent is still in place gives you a factual basis for the conversation and tells you whether the problem is the manager or the account, and whether you are getting real ecommerce PPC management or just monitoring. Auditing after the handover mixes the previous manager's decisions with the transition itself.

Is a free audit worth anything?

It depends entirely on whether it is a genuine review or a sales document. A real free audit names specific things in your account and includes findings that are inconvenient for the person delivering it. If every finding leads to the same conclusion that you should hire them, it is a pitch.

How much of an audit can be automated?

The data gathering, largely. Scripts can pull search terms, flag disapproved products, surface budget constrained campaigns and check tracking coverage. The judgement of what matters and in what order is the part that is not automatable, and it is the part worth paying for.

What is a Google Ads audit?

A Google Ads audit is a structured review of an account to find where money is being wasted and what is holding results back. A good one checks conversion tracking first, then wasted spend, structure, budget and bidding, the product feed for e-commerce, ads and landing pages, and audiences and targeting, and ends with a short list of prioritised actions rather than every setting in the account.

How do I audit my Google Ads account myself?

Work through seven areas in order: conversion tracking, wasted spend, account structure, budget and bidding, the product feed if you sell online, ads and landing pages, then audiences, locations and schedule. Fix tracking before judging anything else, use the last 90 days of search terms to find waste, and sort what you find into fix now, change deliberately and test.

What should a Google Ads audit report include?

Each finding should have the area, what was found, the evidence, the likely impact, the recommended action and who owns it. The report should open with the few actions that matter most, starting with any tracking problems, and it should name the limits of the audit, such as missing margin data.

Is there a Google Ads audit checklist template?

Yes. The seven sections of this page work as the checklist, and the audit template table above gives you a ready structure for the write-up: area, finding, evidence, impact, action and group. Copy it into a sheet, or print the page to PDF if you prefer a paper checklist.

How do I audit conversion tracking in Google Ads?

List every conversion action and its source, look for two actions counting the same purchase or lead, check that only the right actions are Primary, confirm purchase values are real order totals, test the tag live with Tag Assistant, and compare a week of Google Ads conversions by conversion time against real orders or leads.

What is different about an e-commerce Google Ads audit?

An e-commerce audit adds the product catalogue: Merchant Center account and product issues, feed titles and attributes, product-level spend and margin, brand exclusions and search terms in Performance Max, and whether new and returning customers are reported separately. In many stores those checks find more money than the campaign settings do.

How do I audit my Google Ads agency before renewing the contract?

With read access to the account, check the change history for meaningful work over the last three months, see when the last negative keyword was added, compare the agency's reported numbers with the account and with your own orders or leads, ask what was tested and learned, and confirm that the Google Ads account is owned by your business.

Is a 100 percent optimization score a sign of a good account?

Not on its own. Google describes optimization score as an estimate of how well an account is set to perform based on its recommendations, and the score changes as recommendations are applied or dismissed. It does not check whether conversions are accurate or targets are profitable, so treat it as a list of ideas rather than an audit.

How often to audit

A full audit twice a year is enough for a stable account, plus one whenever something changes materially: a new manager, a platform migration, a website replatform, or a sudden performance shift nobody can explain. Between full audits, a monthly pass on sections two and four catches most drift in about thirty minutes.

1. Twice a year: a full audit of all seven sections.
2. Every month: a 30-minute pass on wasted spend and budget allocation, sections two and four.
3. Whenever something changes: a new manager, a platform migration, a website replatform, or a performance shift nobody can explain.

A Google Ads daily and weekly checklist between audits

Audits catch drift; a short routine stops most of it from happening. These checks take a few minutes a day and under an hour a week.

If you are an agency auditing accounts for clients rather than running your own, the same sequence works, and the first two sections are where you will find the credibility-building wins. We cover delivery in white label Google Ads for e-commerce agencies.

Where to start

If you only have an hour, do sections one and two. Verify that conversion tracking counts each sale exactly once, then pull the 90-day search terms report and filter to spend with no conversions. Those two checks find the majority of what a full audit would surface, and they require no changes to the account to complete.

If you want an independent read on your account, book a free audit call and we will run this checklist against it and send you what we find, whether or not you decide to work with us.

About the author

This guide is written by Vasant Chaudhary, founder of Improtics, a Google Ads agency, with more than five years of experience managing over 50 e-commerce accounts across the US, UK, and India. He focuses on Google Shopping, Performance Max, and product feed management. Get in touch or start with a free audit call.