A Google Ads audit is a structured review of tracking, account setup, traffic quality, bidding, creative relevance, landing pages, and business outcomes. It should find issues to investigate. It cannot guarantee better performance.
Quick Answer
Start with measurement. If conversion tracking or conversion value data is wrong, every bidding and budget decision downstream becomes weaker.
40 Practical Checks
- Confirm the business goal for each campaign.
- Check that conversion actions match that goal.
- Verify each important conversion fires only when the action actually happens.
- Separate primary conversions from secondary diagnostics.
- Review conversion value logic before using value-based bidding.
- Check date ranges against seasonality and recent changes.
- Segment performance by campaign type.
- Review network settings.
- Review location targeting and location reports.
- Review device performance.
- Check budget pacing and lost impression share where relevant.
- Compare bid strategy with conversion volume and goal.
- Review Target ROAS or Target CPA assumptions.
- Check search terms for irrelevant queries.
- Add or refine negative keywords where appropriate.
- Review match type behavior.
- Check keyword overlap and internal competition.
- Review Quality Score diagnostics for high-volume search keywords.
- Check expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience separately.
- Review Ad Rank constraints without treating Quality Score as the only factor.
- Check ad copy against search intent.
- Review assets and extensions for usefulness.
- Remove outdated prices, offers, or claims.
- Check landing page speed and mobile usability.
- Check whether landing page content matches the ad promise.
- Review form friction or checkout friction.
- Segment new vs returning users where available.
- Review remarketing audience quality.
- Check exclusions and placements for display/video campaigns.
- Review creative fatigue signals.
- Compare CPA with margin and customer value.
- Compare ROAS with break-even ROAS.
- Review lead quality, not just lead volume.
- Check whether offline conversions should be imported.
- Review attribution settings before comparing campaigns.
- Look for recent policy, tracking, or landing page changes.
- Check automated recommendations before applying them.
- Document the most likely issue by impact.
- Prioritize tests by expected business value.
- Schedule the next review based on spend and change volume.
How To Use The Checklist
Do not treat the checklist as a universal scoring system. A small local account, ecommerce account, lead-generation account, and enterprise SaaS account need different audit depth. Use the checklist to find weak assumptions, then validate changes with account data.
Useful companion tools include the CTR Calculator, CPA Calculator, ROAS Calculator, and UTM Builder.
