Your Google Ads account is where the money hides.

Search engine optimisation problems are slow and arguable. Google Ads problems are neither. The money leaves your account every day, and the evidence of where it went is sitting in a report your agency may never have shown you.

That is what makes an ads audit worth doing first. It is the fastest way to get a factual answer to "is this being managed?"

What a Google Ads audit actually covers

A real audit is not a scan and a score out of 100. These are the areas that determine whether an account is being managed or merely running.

Area	What we are looking for
Conversion tracking	Does it exist, does it fire, and does it count something real
Search terms	The actual queries being paid for, not the keywords bid on
Negative keywords	Whether anyone is excluding the obvious waste
Match types and structure	How much control has been handed to broad match
Branded vs non-branded	How much "performance" is people who already knew you
Performance Max	What is inside it and how much goes to Display and YouTube
Bidding strategy	Whether it suits the conversion volume the account actually has
Landing pages	Whether ads point somewhere relevant or all at the homepage
Change history	A timestamped record of what has been done, and when

Conversion tracking comes first, and it is broken more often than not

Everything else depends on this. If conversions are not tracked correctly, then the bidding is optimising toward the wrong signal, the reporting is fiction, and no judgement about performance means anything.

The failures we find most often, in order:

• Nothing recorded at all. Tools → Conversions shows actions with a status of "No recent conversions" or "Inactive".
• Page views counted as conversions. A thank-you page that anyone can reach, or worse, a general page view. This is how an account reports 400 leads a month while the phone stays quiet.
• Double counting. The same lead recorded by two overlapping actions, which quietly doubles the reported result.
• Calls not tracked. For most service businesses the phone is the main conversion, and it is frequently the one nobody set up.

The search terms report settles most arguments

Keywords are what your agency bid on. Search terms are what people actually typed. The gap between those two is where budget disappears.

You will find it under Campaigns → Insights and Reports → Search Terms. Sort by cost and read the top fifty. You do not need any expertise to do this. You just need to ask, for each line, whether you would pay for that click.

What turns up, reliably: job seekers looking for careers, students doing research, people looking for free versions of what you sell, competitors' brand names, and cities you do not serve.

Negative keywords tell you if anyone is home

Negative keywords are how you stop paying for the irrelevant queries above. They are the most basic ongoing maintenance task in Google Ads.

An account with no negative list, or with a dozen added at launch and never touched since, is an account nobody is managing. Check Tools → Shared Library → Negative keyword lists, and campaign-level negatives too.

Performance Max deserves a hard look

Performance Max campaigns spend across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Maps from a single budget, and Google decides the split. Used deliberately, they work. Used as a default, they are a way to spend a lot of money on cheap Display and YouTube impressions while the Search results underneath make the whole thing look acceptable.

The questions worth answering: how much of the total budget sits in PMax, was that a decision anyone explained to you, and are brand terms excluded so it is not simply harvesting people who were already searching for you.

Change history is the one that ends the debate

Under Tools → Change history there is a timestamped log of every change made to your account, and who made it. Set the range to the last 90 days.

This is the single most useful screen for a client, because it is not open to interpretation. Either work happened or it did not. Long empty stretches are an answer. So is a log containing nothing but "auto-applied recommendation", which is Google making changes on autopilot, not your agency working.

Doing it yourself

Most of the above you can check without us. If you would rather run it yourself, our free checklist covers all forty checks, including nine for Google Ads with the exact screens to open and what a bad answer looks like.

The honest limitation of a self-audit is that it tells you that something is wrong more easily than it tells you how much it is costing you, or which of five problems to fix first. That is the part that takes experience.

How our audit works

1. Send us your website through the form. Two minutes, no call required.
2. Grant read-only access. We email instructions. It takes about thirty seconds and we cannot change or spend anything.
3. We audit the account and write up what we find, ranked by what each issue is costing you rather than by how easy it was to spot.
4. You get the report. Yours to keep, act on, or forward to your current agency with some pointed questions.

If your account turns out to be in good shape, that is what the report will say. We are not going to invent problems to win your business.

Common questions

What is a Google Ads audit?

A structured review of an existing account to find wasted spend and missed opportunity, covering tracking, search terms, negatives, structure, bidding, landing pages and change history.

Do you need access to my account?

Yes, read-only. We cannot change bids, pause campaigns or spend money, and you can revoke it whenever you like.

Will my agency find out?

Not from us. An account admin can see the user list, so an attentive agency might notice a new read-only user. Say so in the form if that matters and we will work around it.

What does it cost?

Nothing. We do it hoping some people will want help fixing what we find. Most will not, and that is fine.

How often should an account be audited?

Every three to six months for an active account, and straight away if performance shifted sharply, you changed agency, or you have never been shown a search terms report.