I've audited hundreds of Google Ads accounts over 20 years. The majority were wasting money, and in most cases the account owner had no idea where or why. The average waste I find sits between 20% and 40% of total spend. For an account spending £2,000 a month, that's £400 to £800 going on clicks that were never going to convert.
A Google Ads audit isn't a vague health check or a sales pitch dressed up as advice. It's a structured review of every setting, decision, and data point in your account. Here's what I look at, what I typically find, and what happens next.
The most recent audit I completed before writing this was for a trades directory business in North Wales spending £1,400 a month. Within the first 20 minutes I had found conversion tracking that wasn't firing (a form tracking tag was misfiring on page load rather than on form submission, so every page view was being counted as a conversion), ads running on the Display Network by default, and a search terms report with no negative keywords applied since the account launched. Those three issues alone accounted for most of why the account's data was meaningless.
People often assume an audit will reveal something complex and technical. Usually it doesn't. The most expensive problems in Google Ads accounts are the basic ones, and they're basic precisely because they're easy to miss during setup and easy to overlook during ongoing management.
Conversion tracking
This is always the first thing I check, because if your conversion tracking is broken, nothing else matters. Google's Smart Bidding strategies, the ones most accounts are running on, need accurate conversion data to function. Without it, the algorithm has no signal to optimise towards. It's bidding blind.
I check whether conversions are set up at all, whether they're tracking the right actions (a form submission, a phone call, a purchase), whether they're firing correctly, and whether there's any double-counting. I'd estimate that around half the accounts I audit have at least one conversion tracking issue. Some have no tracking at all. I've written about the full consequences of this in The costly downfalls of not using conversion tracking in Google Ads, and the short version is: without it, you're spending money with no feedback loop.
Search terms report
Your keywords are what you bid on. Your search terms are what people actually typed before clicking your ad. These are different things, and the gap between them is where most of the waste lives.
I pull the search terms report and go through it line by line. What I'm looking for are irrelevant queries that are burning budget, patterns of low-intent searches, and opportunities for new keywords you haven't thought of. In accounts with no negative keyword management, I routinely find 30% or more of spend going on searches that have zero chance of converting. Someone bidding on "plumber Llandudno" whose ads are showing for "plumbing apprenticeships" or "plumber salary UK" is paying for every one of those clicks.
Negative keywords
This follows directly from the search terms review. I check whether the account has any negative keyword lists, whether those lists are comprehensive enough to catch the common irrelevant queries, and whether they're applied at the right level, campaign or ad group.
Most accounts I audit either have no negative keywords at all or have a handful that were added once and never revisited. A proper negative keyword strategy isn't a one-time task. It's an ongoing discipline. For a full walkthrough of how to build and maintain one, read The power of negative keywords: how to stop wasting money on irrelevant clicks.
Quality Scores
Quality Score is Google's rating of how relevant your ads and landing pages are to each keyword you're bidding on. It's scored 1 to 10 and it directly affects how much you pay per click and where your ad appears.
I look at Quality Scores across the account, but specifically at the three components: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Each of those tells me something different. A low ad relevance score means the ad copy doesn't match the keyword's intent. A low landing page score means the page the ad links to isn't giving searchers what they expected. Low expected CTR means the ad isn't compelling enough relative to competitors. Keywords scoring 4 or 5 out of 10 are costing significantly more per click than they need to, and the fix is usually straightforward once you know which component is dragging them down.
Campaign structure
How an account is organised tells me a lot about whether it was set up with a plan or thrown together quickly. I look at how campaigns and ad groups are structured, whether keywords are grouped tightly by intent, whether ad copy matches those keyword themes, and whether there are campaigns competing against each other for the same searches.
A common problem I see is the "one campaign, one ad group" setup where dozens of unrelated keywords are bundled together with a single set of ads. This guarantees mediocre Quality Scores because no single ad can be relevant to 30 different search intents. I also check for the opposite problem: accounts that have been over-segmented to the point where campaigns don't have enough data to optimise.
Bid strategy
I review which bid strategy each campaign is running and whether it's appropriate given the account's conversion volume and history. Smart Bidding strategies like Target CPA and Target ROAS work well, but only when campaigns have enough conversion data, roughly 30 to 50 conversions per month. Accounts that switched to Target CPA after five conversions are asking the algorithm to do something it doesn't have enough data for.
I also check whether targets are realistic. A Target CPA set at £10 when the account's historical CPA is £35 will cause the campaign to underspend dramatically, because Google won't bid where it can't hit the target. I see this regularly.
Landing pages
Your ads bring people to your site. Your landing pages decide whether those people convert or leave. I review the pages that each campaign is sending traffic to, checking whether the page matches the ad's promise, whether the call to action is clear, whether the page loads quickly on mobile, and whether there's anything obviously blocking conversions like a buried phone number or a form asking for too many fields.
I've seen accounts where landing page changes alone cut CPA by 30% or more without touching a single campaign setting. The full list of mistakes that undermine Google Ads performance, including landing page issues, is covered in 20 ways to kill your Google Ads performance.
Wasted spend
Everything above feeds into this. I calculate how much of the account's total spend is going on clicks that are unlikely to convert, whether that's irrelevant search terms, poor geographic targeting, ads running at times that don't convert, or budget going to Display Network placements that were left on by default. The number is usually uncomfortable. In a typical audit, I identify between 20% and 40% of spend as waste that can be redirected or eliminated entirely.
What happens after the audit
The audit itself takes me around 2 to 3 hours, depending on the size and complexity of the account. I document everything I find in a clear report, not a 40-page deck full of charts you'll never read, but a prioritised list of problems and specific fixes.
I'll walk you through the findings on a call so you understand what's happening and why it matters. From there, you have options. You can take the report and implement the changes yourself, hand it to whoever manages your ads, or ask me to do it. There's no obligation either way. The audit is free because it lets you see exactly what's going on in your account and whether there's enough opportunity to make working together worthwhile.
If you're spending money on Google Ads and you're not sure whether it's working as well as it should, get in touch for a free audit. I'll show you where your budget is going and what I'd change. Google Ads management in North Wales.
