A Google Ads account can look busy without necessarily doing a good job.
Clicks are coming in, Google is reporting conversions and the budget is being spent. But are those conversions actually valuable? Are you appearing for the right searches? And, most importantly, is the advertising generating enough business to justify what you’re spending?
If you’re carrying out a Google Ads audit, these are the areas I’d check before worrying about individual optimisation scores or Google’s latest recommendations.
1. Is Your Conversion Tracking Actually Working?
Start here, because almost every other decision depends on it.
What is Google Ads counting as a conversion?
For a service business, that might be a completed enquiry form or phone call. For ecommerce, it could be a purchase with the correct transaction value.
Problems start when less valuable actions, such as page views, button clicks or add-to-baskets, are treated as primary conversions. Google may then optimise campaigns towards people completing those easier actions rather than the customers most likely to buy.
Test your important conversion actions and make sure you’re measuring what genuinely matters to the business.
If tracking is an area you’re unsure about, my guide to UTM tracking explains another useful way to understand where website visitors and enquiries are coming from.
2. Where Is Your Budget Actually Going?
Next, look at where Google is spending your money.
Which campaigns receive most of the budget? Which products or services generate the most clicks? And does that match what the business actually wants to sell?
A campaign can look successful while spending heavily on low-margin products or enquiries for work you don’t particularly want.
Don’t just ask whether a campaign generates conversions. Ask whether those conversions are commercially valuable.
3. Check the Search Terms You’re Paying For
Your keywords aren’t necessarily the searches you’re paying for.
Look at the actual search terms that triggered your ads.
You’ll often find relevant searches you hadn’t considered, but you may also find searches that are too broad, irrelevant or unlikely to turn into customers.
Use negative keywords where appropriate, but don’t add them blindly. The aim isn’t to make your search-term report look perfectly tidy. It’s to stop spending money on searches that don’t make commercial sense.
4. Are You Targeting the Right Locations?
This is particularly important for local businesses.
Check where your campaigns are targeting and whether those settings match the area you can realistically serve.
A Telford business doesn’t necessarily want enquiries from across the whole of the UK just because somebody elsewhere included “Telford” in their search.
Also look at where your clicks and conversions are actually coming from. If you’re spending heavily in locations that rarely generate useful enquiries, investigate why.
5. Does Your Account Structure Still Make Sense?
Google Ads accounts evolve.
New campaigns get added, services change and old experiments remain running long after anyone remembers why they were created.
Your audit is a good opportunity to ask whether the structure still reflects the business today.
That doesn’t mean rebuilding the entire account because a checklist says you need tightly themed campaigns. Sometimes the existing structure is perfectly capable of doing the job.
Change things because there’s a reason, not because an audit needs to produce a long list of recommendations.
6. What Happens After Somebody Clicks?
Not every Google Ads problem is actually a Google Ads problem.
If the right people are clicking but nobody is enquiring, look at where you’re sending them.
Does the landing page match what the advert promised? Is it easy to use on mobile? Can visitors quickly understand the service or product? Is the next step obvious? Does the form work?
Sending more paid traffic to a page that isn’t converting usually just means paying to discover the same problem faster.
7. Are Google’s Recommendations Right for Your Business?
Google Ads will regularly suggest changes to your campaigns.
Some can be useful. Others may encourage you to broaden targeting, increase budgets or use more automation.
Don’t accept recommendations purely to increase your optimisation score.
Ask what the recommendation is likely to change and whether that supports what the business is trying to achieve.
Google knows a huge amount about advertising performance. It doesn’t necessarily know your margins, capacity, ideal customer or which enquiries you actually want.
8. Is Google Ads Making You Money?
This is ultimately the most important part of the audit.
Clicks, impressions, CTR and conversion rates can help diagnose performance, but they aren’t the final objective.
How many genuine leads or sales did Google Ads generate? What did each one cost? What revenue resulted? And, where you can measure it, was the activity profitable?
If you can’t answer those questions yet, improving the measurement may be more important than changing the campaigns.
What Should You Do After a Google Ads Audit?
A useful Google Ads audit shouldn’t leave you with 47 things to fix.
It should identify the handful of changes most likely to improve performance, ranked by their likely impact.
Fix broken tracking before adjusting bids. Stop obvious wasted spend before increasing the budget. Improve a poor landing page before paying to send more people to it.
And if you’ve worked through your account and decided you’d rather have somebody manage it for you, you can see how I approach PPC management.
If you’re still not sure whether Google Ads itself is the problem, book a free Seed Session. I’ll help you work out what’s worth fixing first.
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