Google Ads Audit: A 10-Step Checklist for 2026

A Google Ads audit is a structured review of your account that answers two questions: can you trust the data you’re making decisions with, and where is money going that never comes back? The order matters. If conversion tracking is broken, everything you analyse afterwards (bids, keywords, ads) is built on bad data.

There’s good reason to do one. WordStream analysed 15,666 accounts run through its free Performance Grader between January and November 2025. The average account wasted $1,127 a month, 25% had never added a single negative keyword, and 29% recorded zero conversions over 90 days (WordStream, summarised by PPC Land). Keep the sample in mind: these are accounts whose owners chose to run the Grader, so it doesn’t represent every advertiser. Still, the patterns match what I find when I open a new account.

This guide is the checklist I use, adapted so you can audit Google Ads on your own. If you still search for it as an “AdWords audit”, it’s the same thing: in June 2018 Google announced that AdWords was becoming Google Ads (Google). What has changed is the scope. Performance Max, AI Max and Consent Mode didn’t exist back then, and today they’re part of any serious audit.

In 30 seconds:

• Audit in this order: conversions, settings, search terms, keywords, structure, bidding, ads, Performance Max, landing pages and budget.
• In WordStream’s study (15,666 accounts, 2025), 25% of accounts had no negative keywords and 29% recorded no conversions in 90 days.
• The Quality Score shown in your account is a diagnostic tool: it doesn’t go into the auction as-is (Google). It helps you find problems; your KPI is still CPA or ROAS.
• Since 2025, Performance Max has a search terms report, channel reporting (in beta) and campaign-level negative keyword lists (Google). You can audit it almost like a Search campaign.
• Cadence: a full audit every quarter, a quick review every month.

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What a Google Ads audit is (and isn’t)

An audit isn’t your optimisation score or the Recommendations tab. Those tools suggest changes Google likes (more budget, broad match, more automation), but they don’t know whether your margin can absorb a higher CPA, or whether half your “conversions” are clicks on the phone number in your header.

A useful audit ends with three things:

1. A list of problems ranked by how much money they cost, even when the most expensive one isn’t the easiest to fix.
2. An estimate of spend that isn’t doing anything: irrelevant search terms, campaigns with no conversions, locations outside your market.
3. An ordered plan of changes, because touching bids before fixing tracking just speeds up the problem.

Before you start

• Access: ask for Standard or Admin access. With limited access you may miss part of the setup and be unable to run diagnostics.
• Date range: compare the last 90 days against the previous 90. Anything under 30 days is too noisy for smaller accounts.
• Change history: go to Tools > Change history. It keeps the last 2 years of changes (Google) and often explains drops nobody remembers causing.
• A spreadsheet: one row per finding, with columns for “what”, “where”, “estimated impact” and “proposed change”.

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Step 1: Check your conversion tracking

Everything starts here. If conversions are set up wrong, Smart Bidding optimises towards the wrong goal and every report you read afterwards misleads you. In the accounts I audit, this is where I most often find something broken: duplicated conversions, a tag firing on the wrong page, or an “email click” counted as if it were a sale.

The most common duplicate has a recognisable signature: the purchase tag lives both in Google Tag Manager and hard-coded in the store template (often added by a plugin or a previous agency). In Tag Assistant, the order confirmation page fires two conversion events, and in the account Google Ads purchases run at roughly double the real orders for the same period.

Which actions count and how they’re set up

• Status of each action. In Goals > Conversions > Summary, look at the tracking status column. If you see “Unverified”, “Tag inactive” or “Needs attention”, Google lets you launch Tag Assistant from there to diagnose it (Google).
• Primary or secondary. Only primary actions feed the “Conversions” column that bidding uses; secondary actions sit in “All conversions” for observation (Google). The classic mistake: a micro-conversion (time on page, scroll, WhatsApp click) set as primary alongside the real purchase or lead.
• Values. A flat value of 1 for everything makes Target ROAS meaningless. In ecommerce, values should be dynamic from the cart. In B2B, assign different values by lead quality or import offline conversions from your CRM (covered in offline conversions for B2B Google Ads).

Signal quality: enhanced conversions, consent and a sales cross-check

• Enhanced conversions. They send your own customer data (email, phone) hashed with SHA256 to improve measurement (Google). Check they’re on and that the diagnostics report shows no errors.
• Consent Mode v2. If you have users in the European Economic Area, Google requires you to collect their consent and pass those signals on; without them you lose personalisation and measurement features for those users (Google). Check that your cookie banner sends the ad_user_data and ad_personalization parameters.
• Cross-check with the source of truth. Compare Google Ads conversions with orders in your store or leads in your CRM for the same period. They won’t match 100% (attribution, consent, windows), but a large gap with no explanation points to an implementation problem.

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Step 2: Review each campaign’s settings

Reviewing settings means checking, campaign by campaign, where, on which networks and with which automations your ads run. These choices are made once when the campaign is built and rarely looked at again, which is why they hide wasted spend: traffic from outside your market, networks nobody chose, or changes Google applied on its own.

• Location options. By default Google uses “Presence or interest”, which includes people who aren’t in your area but have shown interest in it (Google). If you only sell or serve in one country, switching to “Presence” is usually the right call. Then open the locations report: when the broader option is leaking traffic it shows quickly, as clicks from countries you don’t sell to or, for local businesses, from regions you don’t serve.
• Networks. In Search campaigns, check whether the Display Network and search partners are switched on. They aren’t always bad, but someone should have switched them on deliberately. Segment performance by network before you decide.
• Auto-applied recommendations. Under Recommendations > Auto-apply, review which types are active. What was applied shows in the “History” tab and in Change history (Google). I’ve seen accounts where match types were broadened this way without the advertiser knowing.
• Automatically created assets. Headlines and descriptions generated from your site may be accurate, or may promise things you no longer offer. Read them.
• Schedule and devices. Look at performance by hour, day and device before adding adjustments. With Smart Bidding, the system already adjusts bids in every auction, so the useful question is usually different: is there a time slot or device you should exclude entirely?

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Step 3: Analyse search terms and negative keywords

This is the step with the fastest payback in almost any account. In WordStream’s study, accounts with at least one negative keyword had an average conversion rate of 13%, versus 4.6% for accounts with none (PPC Land). That’s a correlation: people who add negatives tend to manage everything else better too, so part of the gap comes from that. Even so, few audit actions are this cheap.

What to do:

• Open the search terms report for the last 90 days. Google leaves out low-volume terms for privacy reasons (Google), so you’ll see most of the spend, but never 100% of it.
• Sort by cost and filter for terms with no conversions. Anything with meaningful spend that doesn’t fit your offer is a negative keyword candidate.
• Look for patterns, not just single terms: “free”, “course”, “jobs”, “second hand”, competitor brands you don’t want to bid on, products you don’t sell. Those patterns go into shared negative keyword lists.
• If you use AI Max in Search campaigns, the report shows “AI Max” as a match type and a source column that tells you whether the match came from broad match or keywordless technology (Google). Review those terms separately.
• Use account-level negative keywords for things you never want in any campaign. There’s a limit of 1,000 per account, and they apply to search and shopping inventory in Search, Performance Max, Shopping, Smart, Local and App campaigns (Google).

I have dedicated guides on reading the search terms report and on negative keyword strategy and lists.

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Step 4: Review keywords, match types and Quality Score

The previous step looked at what Google gives you. This one reviews what you ask it for.

Keywords and match types:

• Keywords with no impressions in 90 days: delete or consolidate them. They only add noise.
• Keywords with spend and no conversions: is it an intent problem (wrong keyword) or a page problem (good keyword, poor landing page)?
• Broad match: it works well with Smart Bidding and solid conversion tracking. Without both, it’s usually the biggest source of irrelevant terms. More in the keyword match types guide.
• Duplicate keywords across ad groups or campaigns that compete with each other.

Quality Score, read properly:

Google calls it “a diagnostic tool” and makes clear that the score shown in your account doesn’t go into the ad auction as-is (Google). It runs from 1 to 10 and is built from three components: expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. It only appears for keywords with enough exact-match searches.

To audit it, add the Quality Score columns and the three component columns, filter for your highest-spend keywords and see which component shows “Below average”. Each points to a different fix:

Weak component	What it usually means	Where to fix it
Expected CTR	The ad doesn’t stand out for that search	Headlines, assets, tighter ad groups
Ad relevance	The keyword and the ad text talk about different things	Split the ad group, rewrite RSAs
Landing page experience	The page doesn’t answer the search, or loads badly	Dedicated landing page, speed, message

In WordStream’s study, the average Quality Score sat between 5 and 6, only 12% of accounts reached 8 or above and 36% fell below 4 (PPC Land). The Quality Score guide covers what actually moves it.

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Step 5: Evaluate account structure

Auditing structure means checking whether the way campaigns and ad groups are split lets you read results and gives Smart Bidding enough data. Poor structure makes optimisation impossible, because it lumps together searches that need different ads, bids and pages.

Red flags:

• Brand and non-brand in the same campaign. Brand converts far cheaper and “subsidises” non-brand in reports, so you never know whether non-brand is profitable.
• Ad groups with keywords of different intent. Practical rule: if you can’t write one ad that fits every keyword in the group, the group needs splitting.
• The opposite: dozens of campaigns with very few conversions each. Smart Bidding needs volume, and over-fragmenting starves it of data.
• Performance Max and Search or Shopping campaigns chasing the same traffic without anyone deciding what role each plays. If you’re unsure, read Google Shopping vs Performance Max.

There’s no single perfect structure. The right one lets you see separately whatever has different margins, intent or budgets.

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Step 6: Check your bidding strategy

Smart Bidding works well when it has enough reliable data. Without it, it usually performs worse than well-run manual bidding.

What to verify:

• Minimum volume. For Target ROAS on Search and Shopping, Google asks for at least 15 conversions in the past 30 days (Google). That’s the minimum to switch it on. At exactly that volume, the target tends to be unstable.
• Realistic targets. If the target ROAS is well above the actual ROAS of recent months, the campaign stops bidding and loses impressions. Compare the target with history before blaming the algorithm.
• Learning. Changing strategy or settings, or adding and removing keywords, can send a campaign back into “Learning”. Google says calibration can take a few conversion cycles, typically one or two (Google). If Change history shows weekly edits, the campaign never finishes learning.
• Strategy matches the goal. Maximise clicks on a campaign that should sell, or Maximise conversions with no cap when margins are thin, are two common mistakes.

To choose the right strategy for each case, see the Smart Bidding guide.

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Step 7: Audit ads and assets

This part checks whether your ads have enough headlines and assets, whether pinning is deliberate, and whether the message filters out people who won’t buy. An ad that attracts clicks from people who’ll never buy wastes as much as one nobody clicks.

Ad checklist:

• Responsive search ads. They take up to 15 headlines of 30 characters and 4 descriptions of 90 (Google). Ad groups with 3 or 4 headlines give the system very little to work with.
• Pinning. Google doesn’t recommend pinning for most advertisers because it limits combinations. In Optmyzr’s study of around 20,000 accounts (April 2026), partial pinning had the best average CPA (Optmyzr). If everything is pinned, revisit it.
• Headline length. In the same study, headlines under 20 characters had an average CPA of $9.35, against $18.27 for headlines of 21 to 30 characters. The accounts belong to Optmyzr customers, mostly experienced practitioners, so treat it as a hypothesis worth testing in your own account.
• Message. Does the ad state price, timing, guarantee or whatever sets you apart? Or could it belong to any competitor?
• Assets (sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, images). Check that they exist, point to working pages and don’t advertise expired offers.

To test copy variants properly, see the guide to RSA ad testing.

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Step 8: Audit Performance Max

For years, auditing Performance Max was close to impossible because the data wasn’t there. That changed in 2025: Google launched the channel performance report in beta at Google Marketing Live and extended full asset stats to all campaigns; in August 2025 it added search terms reporting for all PMax campaigns and campaign-level negative keyword lists (Google).

What to review:

• Channel report. How much spend goes to Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube or Gmail? If most of it goes to channels that don’t convert for your business, you have an asset or signal problem.
• Search terms. Same as step 3. If PMax is taking your brand searches, compare it with your brand campaign.
• Negative keywords. PMax negatives only apply to Search and Shopping inventory (Google).
• Asset groups. Stats per asset: which images, videos and texts drive conversions and which just spend.
• Feed (for ecommerce). Disapproved products, weak titles, outdated prices. PMax can’t sell what the feed describes badly.

The Performance Max for ecommerce guide goes deeper into structure and signals.

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Step 9: Check your landing pages

The ad makes a promise and the page either keeps it or doesn’t. When they don’t match, conversion rate drops, along with the landing page experience component of Quality Score.

What to check:

• Intent match. If the ad talks about “women’s trail running shoes”, the page should show exactly that, not the general footwear category.
• Speed. Google’s benchmark is an LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) of 2.5 seconds or less at the 75th percentile of page loads, on both mobile and desktop (web.dev).
• A clear CTA that nobody has to hunt for.
• Working forms. Sounds obvious, but fill in the form yourself or place a test order. It’s the only way to confirm the conversion actually records.
• Mobile. Open each landing page on a real phone and fill in the form with your thumb, the way a customer would.
• If you use AI Max, review final URL expansion: it can send traffic to pages you didn’t choose. URL exclusions exist for exactly that (Google).

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Step 10: Review budget and allocation

The last step ties everything back to money: it checks whether budget sits where the profit is, and how much goes to campaigns, ad groups and terms that return nothing. That figure is also the one that best supports your changes with whoever signs off on them.

• Impression share lost to budget vs to rank. If a profitable campaign is losing impressions to budget, it’s capped. If it’s losing them to rank, the problem is bids or quality, and more budget won’t fix it.
• Spend with no return. Add up spend on campaigns, ad groups and search terms with no conversions in 90 days. That number is what you put in front of whoever makes decisions.
• Allocate by margin. A campaign with lots of sales of low-margin products can contribute less profit than a smaller one.

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How to prioritise what you find

A full audit rarely turns up a single problem; it turns up a long list. If you apply every change at once, you won’t know what worked, and you’ll push several campaigns back into learning at the same time. I apply changes in four batches:

1. Whatever corrupts the data. Duplicate conversions, micro-conversions set as primary, wrong values. This goes first even though it doesn’t directly save a cent, because everything else depends on it.
2. Spend you can cut without risk. Negatives, location options, networks nobody chose, automatic assets promising things you don’t offer. These changes rarely affect bid learning.
3. Whatever touches learning. Structure, bid strategy, ROAS or CPA targets. One change per campaign, logged with a date, and at least one conversion cycle before you judge it.
4. What gets validated with a test. Ads, landing pages, AI Max. Here you need an experiment or, at the very least, a dated before-and-after comparison.

The “proposed change” column in your spreadsheet should carry the batch number too.

Summary checklist

Step	Where to look	Red flag
1. Conversions	Goals > Conversions > Summary	”Unverified” or “Tag inactive” statuses; micro-conversions set as primary
2. Settings	Campaign settings	”Presence or interest” for no reason; Display switched on in Search by default
3. Search terms	Search terms report	Spend on terms unrelated to your offer; no negative lists
4. Keywords and QS	Keywords + QS columns	Expensive keywords with “Below average” components
5. Structure	Campaigns view	Brand and non-brand together; many campaigns with very few conversions each
6. Bidding	Bid strategies + Change history	Targets far above history; weekly edits
7. Ads	Ads and assets	RSAs with few headlines; everything pinned; expired offers
8. Performance Max	Channel report, search terms, assets	Spend concentrated in channels with no conversions
9. Landing pages	The site itself, PageSpeed	Slow LCP; untested forms
10. Budget	Impression share	Profitable campaigns limited by budget

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How often to audit Google Ads

Melissa Mackey of Compound Growth Marketing recommends auditing accounts “at least every quarter to prevent small mistakes from escalating into costly problems” (Optmyzr, 2025). I agree, with one caveat: some checks can’t wait three months.

Monthly review (about 30 minutes):

• New search terms and negatives.
• Conversion action statuses.
• Auto-applied recommendations and Change history.

Quarterly audit (half a day on an account with 10 to 20 campaigns):

• All 10 steps in this guide.
• ROAS or CPA targets against your current margin.
• Structure: does it still reflect how you sell today?

An extra audit after any big change: a new website, a tag migration, a bidding strategy switch, or when you inherit the account from someone else. If you’re around mid-year, I also have a mid-year campaign audit checklist that leans more towards planning.

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If you’d rather I ran the audit

This guide lets you do it yourself. But auditing your own account has a limit: it’s hard to spot mistakes you set up yourself, and some problems (attribution, Consent Mode, overlap between PMax and Search) take having seen them in many accounts to recognise quickly.

I’m Lionel Fenestraz, a freelance Google Ads consultant, Google Partner and CXL Certified Optimizer, with more than 7 years managing accounts for businesses in Spain and other markets. Here’s how my audit works:

• A free 30-minute call. I go through your account with you live and point out the 2 or 3 problems costing you the most. No compulsory sales pitch; if you don’t need help, I’ll tell you.
• A full audit, if we decide to work together. It covers the 10 steps in this guide and ends with a list of changes ranked by impact. It can be a one-off consulting project (I hand over the plan and your team carries it out) or the start of ongoing management, as part of the initial setup, which also includes restructuring and configuring GA4 and enhanced conversions.
• I work in your account, never an agency account. If we stop working together one day, the history stays yours.

Book the 30-minute call or see how I work on my freelance Google Ads consultant page. If you’d like to know pricing first, it’s in how much a Google Ads consultant costs.

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Frequently asked questions about Google Ads audits

How long does a Google Ads audit take?

For a mid-sized account (10 to 20 campaigns), a first full audit takes me about half a day. The first time you do it yourself will take longer, because part of the work is understanding how the account was built. Later audits are faster because you already know where to look.

Is an AdWords audit the same as a Google Ads audit?

Yes. Google announced the switch from AdWords to Google Ads in June 2018, and the audit follows the same logic. What differs is the content: today you also need to review Performance Max, AI Max, enhanced conversions and Consent Mode, none of which existed under the old name.

Is the optimisation score an audit?

No. The optimisation score measures how many of Google’s recommendations you’ve applied or dismissed. Many are useful, but none of them check whether your conversions are real or whether your CPA is profitable. Treat it as one more source of ideas.

What should I check first if my account is losing money?

Conversion tracking (step 1) and search terms (step 3). If conversions are wrong, you don’t know what works. If you have no negatives, you’re paying for traffic that will never buy. Fix those two before touching bids or budget.

Can you audit a Performance Max campaign?

Yes. Since 2025, Performance Max has search terms reporting, full asset stats, a channel report (in beta) and campaign-level negative keyword lists (Google). It’s still less transparent than a Search campaign, but there’s now enough data to audit it methodically.

Can I audit my account myself or do I need a professional?

You can do it yourself with this guide. Bringing in someone external makes more sense if the account mixes several campaign types (Search, Shopping, PMax), if tracking includes offline conversions, or if results have been getting worse for months and you don’t know why. In that case, a 30-minute call is usually enough to tell whether it’s worth going further.

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Sources

Main sources. The Google help pages used in each step are linked in the text.

1. WordStream. Our Biggest Google Ads Performance Study Yet: What We Found. wordstream.com. Data from January to November 2025.
2. PPC Land. Most Google Ads accounts waste $1,127 a month, study of 15K accounts finds. ppc.land. February 2026.
3. Google Ads Help. About Quality Score. support.google.com.
4. Google Ads Help. Unlock more visibility and control in Performance Max. support.google.com. August 2025.
5. Google Ads Help. How AI Max for Search campaigns works. support.google.com.
6. Google Ads Help. About account-level negative keywords. support.google.com.
7. Google Ads Help. About Target ROAS bidding. support.google.com.
8. Google Ads Help. Duration of the learning period for campaigns and what affects it. support.google.com.
9. Google Ads Help. About responsive search ads. support.google.com.
10. Google Ads Help. Updates to consent mode for traffic in the EEA. support.google.com.
11. Optmyzr. Google RSA performance study. optmyzr.com. April 2026.
12. Optmyzr. How to conduct a Google Ads audit. optmyzr.com. August 2025.
13. web.dev. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). web.dev.