How to Audit Your Google Ads Account in 2026

The average Google Ads account wastes $1,127 per month on useless spend (WordStream, study of 15,666 accounts, 2025). A full 25% of accounts have never added a single negative keyword. And 29% haven’t recorded a single conversion in 90 days. This isn’t a budget problem. It’s a management problem.

A proper audit identifies exactly where the money goes and what to change to get it back. This guide gives you an 8-step checklist you can run yourself, prioritized by impact.

In 30 seconds:

• The average account wastes $1,127/month (WordStream, 15,666 accounts, 2025)
• 25% of accounts have no negative keywords
• Each Quality Score point above the 5 baseline cuts CPA by 16% on average (WordStream)
• Only 12% of accounts reach a Quality Score of 8 or higher (WordStream, 2025)
• Recommended cadence: deep audit quarterly, mini-audit monthly

Step 1: Check your conversion tracking

Everything starts here. If your conversions are misconfigured, every data point in your account is contaminated. You can’t optimize what you aren’t measuring correctly.

What to check:

• Go to Tools > Conversions and verify each conversion action has recent data. If any action hasn’t fired in over 7 days, something’s broken.
• Make sure conversion values are accurate. A common mistake: assigning a flat $1 value to every conversion when they should pull dynamic cart values.
• Confirm Enhanced Conversions is active. Google has documented double-digit conversion lift in published case studies. ASOS, for example, reported +8.6% in Search and +31% in YouTube after rolling it out (Google Ads Help, 2025).
• Cross-reference your Google Ads conversions with your ecommerce platform. If the gap exceeds 15%, you’ve got an attribution or tag implementation issue.

When I audit a new account, conversion tracking has some kind of error in 60-70% of cases. Sometimes it’s duplicate conversions. Sometimes the tag fires on the wrong page. Sometimes Enhanced Conversions is off and the account is quietly losing data.

Step 2: Analyze the search term report

A quarter of all accounts have never added a single negative keyword (WordStream, 2025). That means 25% of advertisers are paying for searches that have nothing to do with their business, and doing nothing about it.

What to do:

• Download the search term report for the last 30 days.
• Filter by high impressions and zero conversions. Any term with significant spend and no conversions is a negative keyword candidate.
• Look for patterns. Are there entire categories of irrelevant searches? If you sell running shoes and you’re showing up for “cheap kids shoes,” you need negatives at the ad group or campaign level.
• Well-managed negative keywords can cut wasted spend significantly. In the accounts I audit, adding negatives after the first search term report review typically eliminates 15% to 30% of spend on irrelevant traffic.

In accounts spending $3,000-$10,000/month, I typically find 50 to 200 irrelevant search terms in the first 30 days alone. Adding negatives for those terms delivers the biggest immediate impact in any audit.

To avoid the most common mistakes that cause this kind of waste, check the complete guide to Google Ads mistakes.

Step 3: Evaluate Quality Score

Accounts with a Quality Score of 6 or higher get up to a 50% CPC discount versus the QS 5 baseline, while accounts at QS 4 or below pay up to 400% more per click (WordStream Quality Score guide). Yet only 22% of accounts have a QS of 7 or above, and barely 12% reach a QS of 8+ (WordStream, 15,666 accounts, 2025).

How to evaluate it:

• Go to Keywords > Columns > Quality Score and add the columns for QS, ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected CTR.
• Filter for keywords with a QS below 5. Those are the ones costing you the most money.
• For each low-QS keyword, identify which component is failing. Is the ad irrelevant to the search? Does the landing page not match the intent? Is historical CTR poor?

Improving Quality Score isn’t a sprint. It’s ongoing work to align keywords, ads, and landing pages. But the CPC impact is massive: every Quality Score point above the 5 baseline drops cost-per-acquisition by 16% on average (WordStream).

For a deeper look at how it works and how to improve it, see the Quality Score guide for Google Ads.

Step 4: Review campaign and ad group structure

Poor structure makes proper optimization impossible. If you have a single ad group with 50 keywords spanning different topics, the ads will never be relevant to every search.

Signs of bad structure:

• Ad groups with more than 15-20 keywords covering different intents.
• Campaigns that mix branded and generic terms without separation.
• Automated bidding on campaigns without enough conversion volume (fewer than 30/month).
• Performance Max as the only campaign, with no separate Shopping or Search campaigns for branded terms.

There’s no universally “perfect” structure. But the general rule is this: each ad group should have a clear theme, with ads that speak directly to that theme. If you can’t write an ad that’s relevant to every keyword in a group, the group needs to be split.

Step 5: Check the bidding strategy

Manual bidding isn’t necessarily worse than Smart Bidding. It depends on context. But Smart Bidding without enough conversion volume is worse than either option.

What to verify:

• Does your bidding strategy have enough conversions to work? tROAS and tCPA need at least 30-50 conversions per month.
• Are the tROAS or tCPA targets realistic? If your tROAS is set to 800% and the campaigns are barely generating impressions, the target is too aggressive.
• Are any campaigns stuck in learning that have been there for over 2 weeks? If the learning phase won’t end, something’s wrong with the setup.

For a clear breakdown of when Smart Bidding works and when it doesn’t, see the Smart Bidding guide.

Step 6: Audit the ads and extensions

A good ad with a bad Quality Score still costs more than it should. But a bad ad with a good QS also wastes money on clicks that don’t convert.

Ad checklist:

• Does each ad group have at least one active RSA with 15 headlines and 4 descriptions?
• Are the shortest headlines under 20 characters? Shorter headlines have a CPA of $9.35 vs. $18.27 for longer ones (Optmyzr, 20,000 accounts, 2025).
• Have you pinned your best headlines to positions 1 and 2?
• Are extensions (sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets) active and up to date?

Check the PPC ad copy guide to improve the ads that need work.

Step 7: Verify the landing pages

The ad makes a promise. The landing page keeps it, or doesn’t. If there’s a disconnect between what the ad says and what the user finds, Quality Score drops and conversion rate falls.

What to check:

• Does the landing page match the keyword intent? If the ad talks about “women’s running shoes,” the landing page should show exactly that, not the general shoe category.
• Is load speed acceptable? LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) should be under 2.5 seconds.
• Is the CTA clear and visible without scrolling?
• Does it work well on mobile? Most Google Ads ecommerce traffic comes from mobile devices. If your landing page doesn’t load properly on an iPhone, you’re losing sales.

Step 8: Set your audit frequency

The standard industry recommendation: deep audit every quarter, mini-audit every month. Melissa Mackey (Compound Growth Marketing) recommends auditing accounts at least quarterly to keep small mistakes from escalating (Optmyzr PPC Town Hall, 2025).

Monthly mini-audit (30 minutes):

• Review the search term report and add negatives.
• Confirm conversion tracking is still working.
• Check ad performance and pause the lowest-CTR ads.

Quarterly audit (2-3 hours):

• All 8 steps from this guide.
• Review bidding strategy and tROAS/tCPA targets.
• Update ad extensions with current offers or news.
• Evaluate campaign structure and decide if it needs restructuring.

Only 12% of accounts reach a Quality Score of 8 or higher, and only a fraction of that 12% combines high QS with conversion rates above 10% (WordStream, 15,666 accounts, 2025). Regular audits are what separate elite performance from the rest.

Want a professional audit of your account?

If you’d rather have a specialist review your account using these 8 points and give you a clear diagnosis, I can do it in 30 minutes.

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Frequently asked questions about Google Ads audits

How often should I audit my Google Ads account?

Deep audit every quarter (all 8 steps) and a monthly mini-audit focused on search terms, conversion tracking, and ad performance. If you’ve just made major changes to the account (new structure, new Smart Bidding strategy), move the audit up to 2-3 weeks after the change.

How long does a full audit take?

Between 2 and 3 hours for a mid-sized account (10-20 campaigns). The first time takes longer because you need to get familiar with the structure. After that, it’s faster because you already know the problem areas.

What’s the first thing I should check if my account is losing money?

Conversion tracking and the search term report. If conversions are misconfigured, you don’t know what’s working. If you have no negatives, you’re paying for irrelevant traffic. These two items alone tend to fix 50% of an account’s problems.

Can I do the audit myself or do I need a professional?

Yes, you can do the audit yourself with this guide. But if the account has more than 20 campaigns, multiple campaign types (Search + PMax + Shopping), or a monthly budget above $10,000, a professional will catch problems that a non-specialist is likely to miss.

Sources

1. WordStream. 7 surprising findings from our study of 15K+ Google Ads accounts. https://www.wordstream.com/blog/google-ads-account-study. 2025.
2. WordStream. The complete guide to Quality Score. https://www.wordstream.com/quality-score. 2026.
3. Optmyzr. How to conduct a Google Ads audit. https://www.optmyzr.com/blog/google-ads-audit/. 2025.
4. Optmyzr. Google RSA performance study. https://www.optmyzr.com/blog/google-rsa-performance-study/. 2025.
5. Google Ads Help. Enhanced Conversions best practices. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/14795081. 2025.