When we inherit a Google Ads account — or run a fresh audit for a new client — the first instinct is to dig into everything at once. Campaign structure, bidding strategies, Quality Scores, negative keyword lists, search term reports. There’s a lot to look at, and if you’re not disciplined about the sequence, two hours can easily turn into two days with nothing actionable to show for it. At Choco Media, this Google Ads audit process is the standard starting point before we touch a single campaign setting. It’s structured enough to catch the things that matter, fast enough to complete in a single working session, and honest enough to tell you when an account needs a rebuild rather than a tweak.
This post is for performance marketers, in-house marketing managers, and founders who’ve inherited an account (or are reviewing one managed by an agency). You won’t need a Google Ads certification to follow it — you need access to the account, a spreadsheet, and about two hours of focused attention. By the end, you’ll know where the budget is going, which campaigns deserve more spend, and which ones are quietly burning money.
We’ve run versions of this audit dozens of times across accounts spending anywhere from €500 to €50,000 a month. The core structure doesn’t change much with budget size — the problems tend to cluster in the same seven areas regardless of scale.
Start with account-level health before touching individual campaigns
The first fifteen minutes should be spent at altitude. Open the account overview and look at the trailing 90-day trend for spend, conversions, cost-per-conversion, and impression share. You’re not trying to understand every number yet — you’re trying to answer one question: is this account in a stable state or a deteriorating one?
If cost-per-conversion has risen more than 25% over 90 days without a corresponding change in bids or budgets, something upstream has shifted. Auction dynamics, Quality Score degradation, or audience saturation are the most common culprits. Note the trend before you start changing things — a rising CPA that predates your involvement is different from one you’ll inadvertently create.
- Check the account change history for the past 60 days. A well-managed account shows regular, intentional changes — bid adjustments, negative keyword additions, ad rotation tests. An account with no changes for 30+ days is usually on autopilot.
- Look at the billing and budget settings. It sounds basic, but we’ve audited accounts where the monthly budget cap was set to a figure that hadn’t been revisited since 2022.
- Check which conversion actions are active and whether they’re all counting toward primary goals. Accounts that count soft conversions (page views, time-on-site) alongside hard ones (form fills, purchases) often have inflated conversion metrics.
Audit campaign structure for logic and separation
Campaign structure is where most of the silent money leaks live. Good structure separates intent types clearly so the bidding algorithm has clean data to work with. Poor structure mixes branded and non-branded keywords in the same campaign, conflates awareness and conversion traffic, or lumps all products into a single broad campaign with a single budget.
What we look for first
Check whether branded and non-branded campaigns are separate. Branded search typically converts at a much lower cost-per-click and higher rate — mixing it with non-branded campaigns inflates performance metrics and masks the true cost of acquiring new customers. If they’re mixed, that’s a structural fix before anything else.
- Are shopping campaigns (if applicable) segmented by product category or margin tier? Treating a €10 accessory the same as a €400 item in the same campaign is a signal the account hasn’t been structured with business logic in mind.
- Is there a clear funnel separation — awareness campaigns with broader match types and different bidding versus conversion campaigns with tighter targeting?
- Are campaign budgets aligned with business priorities? The campaign spending the most should be the one generating the most business value, not just the most clicks.
We typically see more wasted budget in campaign structure than in any other area. It’s not always obvious — an account can look active and well-maintained while the underlying architecture is sending the bidding algorithm in five directions at once.
Keyword audit: match types, duplication, and intent alignment
Pull the keyword report for the past 90 days and export it. Sort by spend descending. The top 20 keywords by spend are where you focus first — these are the ones where inefficiency costs the most.
Check the match type distribution. An account running almost entirely on broad match is essentially outsourcing targeting decisions to Google. Broad match can work when bid strategies are mature and conversion data is rich, but in most accounts we audit, broad match is pulling in search terms that have nothing to do with the business intent.
- Look for keyword duplication across ad groups. The same keyword appearing in multiple ad groups creates internal auction competition — you’re bidding against yourself.
- Check whether high-spend keywords are actually converting. A keyword spending €500/month with zero conversions in 90 days is a signal, not a test — it’s a budget drain.
- Flag keywords with Quality Scores of 3 or below. Low QS raises your effective CPC and reduces impression share. In most cases, it signals a mismatch between keyword, ad copy, and landing page.
Search term report — the honest view of what you’re actually paying for
This is the most revealing part of any Google Ads audit. Open the search terms report and filter for the past 90 days. Sort by cost. You’re looking for search terms that triggered your ads but have no business relevance to your product or service.
In client work, we’ve found accounts spending 20–30% of their monthly budget on irrelevant searches — terms that look superficially related to the keywords in the account but represent entirely different intent. A software company bidding on “project management” picks up searches for “project management degree,” “free project management course,” and “project management salary.” None of those are buyers.
- Add any irrelevant search terms as negative keywords immediately. Create a shared negative keyword list if one doesn’t exist.
- Identify search terms that are converting well but aren’t yet in the account as targeted keywords. These are harvesting opportunities — add them as exact match or phrase match to bid on them intentionally.
Ad copy review: relevance, freshness, and rotation logic
Open the ad copy for the five highest-spending campaigns. For each, look at three things: how many active ad variations exist per ad group, when they were last updated, and what the performance split looks like between variations.
An ad group with a single ad has no test signal. Ad groups with 10 variations split across a small impression volume tell you no learning is happening — the algorithm can’t identify a winner. The working zone is usually two to four responsive search ad variations with meaningful impression volume on each.
- Check whether the best-performing ad copy reflects current offers, pricing, or positioning. Ad copy from 18 months ago in a market that’s moved is a credibility problem as much as a performance one.
- Look at the ad strength ratings. “Poor” or “Average” ratings often signal missing ad copy variety or weak keyword inclusion in headlines.
- Verify that final URLs match landing page content. A mismatch between ad copy promise and landing page delivery is both a Quality Score hit and a conversion killer.
For a deeper look at how we handle the paid media side of creative development, the paid media service page outlines how we structure creative testing within broader campaign management.
Bidding strategy audit: is automation working for you or against you?
Google’s Smart Bidding strategies — Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions — can perform well when they have sufficient conversion data to learn from. They struggle without it. The threshold most practitioners cite is 30–50 conversions per campaign per month for Target CPA or Target ROAS to operate with reasonable accuracy.
Check each campaign’s bidding strategy against its actual conversion volume. A campaign generating five conversions a month on Target CPA is essentially running with no learning signal — Google is guessing, and you’re paying for those guesses.
- If conversion volume is too low for Smart Bidding, consider Maximize Clicks with a target CPC cap as a data-gathering phase, then switch once volume is sufficient.
- Check whether bid adjustments are layered on top of Smart Bidding. In most cases, device, demographic, and location bid adjustments are redundant when Smart Bidding is active — the algorithm incorporates these signals automatically.
- Look at the Target CPA or Target ROAS settings relative to actual performance. An account targeting a CPA of €20 when actual conversions cost €80 is suppressing impression volume without achieving the goal.
Landing page and conversion path review
This step lives at the intersection of paid media and conversion rate optimization, and it’s frequently skipped in account audits because it requires leaving the Google Ads interface. It’s also where some of the largest gains sit.
For each major campaign, identify the primary landing page and check four things: page load speed, message match between ad copy and headline, clarity of the primary call-to-action, and whether the conversion tracking fires correctly when you complete the goal.
- Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights (free) to check mobile and desktop load times. A page loading in over four seconds on mobile is losing a meaningful percentage of paid clicks before they engage with any content.
- Run the “squint test” on the landing page — blur your vision slightly and look at the page. The hierarchy of elements that remain visible tells you what the page is actually communicating. If the CTA isn’t prominent in the blur, it won’t be prominent to a distracted visitor either.
- Test the conversion tracking by completing a goal in a private browser window. It’s not unusual to audit an account where the conversion action fired correctly at setup six months ago but is now broken due to a site change.
The post on how we audit a paid media account in 90 minutes covers the broader creative and channel-level review that sits alongside this Google-specific process — the two audits tend to surface different problems and are worth running together.
Audience and targeting settings: what Google defaults get wrong
Google’s default campaign settings are designed to maximize reach, not efficiency. Several of them tend to work against performance-focused accounts and are worth checking in every audit.
Search partner networks
By default, search campaigns include Google Search Partners — a network of third-party sites that trigger your ads on their search results. In most accounts, search partners convert at a significantly lower rate and higher CPA than Google search. Check the segment breakdown in your campaigns and look at search partner performance separately. If CPAs are more than 50% higher than Google search, excluding partners is usually worth testing.
- Display expansion for search campaigns: if the “Expand your reach” setting is enabled in any search campaign, Google will show your ads on the Display Network when it predicts a conversion is likely. This is almost never worth it for accounts focused on search intent.
- Audience targeting vs. observation: make sure key audiences (customer lists, website visitors, similar audiences) are set to “Observation” in campaigns where you want to monitor performance without restricting reach, or “Targeting” where you want to focus exclusively on those audiences.
- Location targeting: check whether campaigns are targeting “Presence or interest” (the default) or “Presence only.” The difference is whether your ads show to people who are searching about your target location from elsewhere. For most local or regional businesses, “Presence only” is the correct setting.
Compile findings and prioritise fixes
By the end of two hours, you should have a clear picture of where the account stands. Organize findings into three buckets: immediate fixes (things that are actively wasting budget or breaking tracking), structural improvements (changes that require campaign rebuilds or significant restructuring), and testing opportunities (hypotheses worth running as controlled experiments).
Immediate fixes get done first — broken conversion tracking, irrelevant search terms, obvious budget misallocation. Structural improvements get scheduled with a timeline that accounts for the learning period Smart Bidding needs after significant changes. Testing opportunities get documented but not executed until the account is stable.
- Document everything you changed and when — the account change history doesn’t always capture context, and you’ll want a reference point when you review performance in 30 days.
- Communicate findings to whoever owns the account before making changes. An audit that surfaces problems but makes changes without alignment creates confusion about what moved performance and why.
- Schedule a follow-up review at 30 days to assess the impact of changes and decide what to test next.
If you’re working through an audit and finding that the problems are deep enough to require a full rebuild — new campaign structure, new bidding strategy, new creative — that’s a different project than optimization. The audit is still valuable because it documents the baseline and justifies the rebuild.
If you’d like us to run this audit on your account, or if you’re unsure whether what you’re seeing is a structural problem or a normal performance fluctuation, reach out via the contact page and we can take a look.