What a Google Ads audit actually checks

"Free audit" is a common enough offer that it has stopped meaning anything specific. Some are genuine reviews. Some are an automated score out of 100 with a sales call attached. It is reasonable to want to know which one you are agreeing to before you hand over access.

So here is the actual list, in the order it is worth doing, and what each step is looking for.

1. Conversion tracking, before anything else

This comes first because every other number in the account depends on it. If conversions are counted wrongly, then cost per conversion, conversion rate, and every optimisation the account has made are all built on a bad measurement.

What is checked: whether each conversion action requires a genuine enquiry to fire, whether calls are tracked at all, whether the same action can be counted twice, whether tracking survived the last website change, and whether soft actions are being counted equally alongside real leads.

2. The search terms report

The report showing what people actually typed, as opposed to what you bid on. Read by cost, not by volume, because the expensive irrelevant terms are the ones worth finding.

What is checked: how much spend went to terms with no commercial intent, which match types are producing the drift, and which recurring themes should become negative keywords.

3. Account structure

How campaigns and ad groups are organised, and whether that structure gives you control over where money goes.

What is checked: whether budgets are split by service and intent or pooled, whether high-value services are being crowded out by high-volume ones, whether ad groups are tight enough that a single ad can be genuinely relevant to everything inside them, and whether anything is duplicated across campaigns and competing with itself.

4. Negative keywords

What is checked: whether lists exist, when they were last updated, whether they cover the obvious non-buyer terms, and whether any negative is accidentally blocking traffic you want — which happens more often than people expect, usually through a broad negative added in haste.

5. Ads and relevance

What is checked: whether the ad text reflects the search it is answering, whether there is more than one ad to compare, whether extensions are present and complete, and whether the ad's promise matches what the landing page actually says.

Google's own quality assessment looks at expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. These are not vanity metrics — they influence your costs and your impression share. Poor relevance is charged for twice.

6. Landing pages

What is checked: load speed on a phone over mobile data, whether the page answers the search in the first screen, whether contacting you takes one obvious action, whether the phone number is tappable, and whether there is a separate page per major service or one homepage absorbing everything.

7. Targeting and settings

What is checked: location targeting radius and whether it uses presence or interest, ad scheduling against the hours you actually answer, device performance splits, bidding strategy against what the account has enough conversion data to support, and whether search campaigns have been silently opted into display.

That last one is worth its own mention. Search campaigns can be set to also run on the Display Network, which behaves completely differently and often absorbs budget with little to show. It is a single checkbox and it is on by default in some setups.

What an audit cannot tell you

Being honest about the limits is part of the job.

• —It cannot tell you whether the leads were any good. The account knows a form was submitted; it does not know whether the person answered the phone, or was a time-waster, or became a customer. Only you know that.
• —It cannot tell you your true cost per acquired customer without your close rate and job values, which live in your head or your accounting software rather than in Google.
• —It cannot predict results. Anyone offering a specific performance number before doing the work is guessing.
• —It cannot fix a demand problem. If nobody is searching for what you sell in your area, no amount of account tidying creates that demand.

What you get from ours

The findings above, in writing, within 48 hours, whether or not you ever hire us. If you do not have an account yet, we map where paid search would fit instead. Two fields to start it.