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?
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.
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.
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, request a free audit 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, a Google Ads specialist 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.