Google Ads Audit: Find Out Where Your Money Is Actually Going
You’re spending real money on Google Ads and something feels off. The leads are thin, or the reports from your agency look suspiciously clean, or you’re just not sure if this is working the way it should. You want someone to look at the account and tell you what’s actually happening.
There are two honest ways to do that. Both are here.
Option 1: Run It Yourself (Free, Takes 30 Minutes)
I published my entire audit method as a step-by-step guide — the same process I use when I pick up a new account, and the same process I use to train media buyers. It covers conversion tracking, search-term waste, campaign settings, change history, and what to do with what you find.
It’s not a teaser. It’s the whole thing.
→ How to Audit a Google Ads Account in 30 Minutes
If you’d rather do it yourself, that page has everything you need. Go run it. For a 60-second first pass, the ad account health checker scores your last 30 days of numbers against benchmarks before you commit to the full 30 minutes.
Option 2: I’ll Look at It for You (Also Free)
If you’d rather have a second set of eyes — or you ran the checklist and found something that looked wrong but aren’t sure what it means — I’ll audit the account myself.
I’ve managed $11M+ in ad spend across 200+ accounts. I’ve seen the patterns. What looks complicated from the inside usually isn’t hard to read once you’ve seen it dozens of times.
Here’s what I look at:
Conversion tracking first. Nothing else matters if the data is wrong. I check what’s being counted as a conversion, whether it makes sense, and whether the number Google is reporting bears any resemblance to what you’re actually receiving. A lot of accounts have this badly wrong — and every optimization decision downstream is based on it. If your tracking shows 100 conversions and your CRM has 10 leads, that’s not a rounding error. That’s a broken foundation.
Search terms. I sort by cost and read them. You don’t need to know anything about Google Ads to know a roofing company shouldn’t be showing for terms that have nothing to do with roofing. The expensive irrelevant terms are the ones actively hurting you — they inflate CPL, drag down conversion rate, and burn budget that should be going toward real customers.
Campaign settings. Most accounts are still running on Google’s defaults — Display Network on inside Search campaigns, location targeting set to “people who show interest in” rather than “people in,” auto-apply recommendations turned on and quietly undoing deliberate changes. These are silent drains. They don’t show up in the weekly report; they just run.
Change history. This is the one nobody outside the industry knows to check. Go to Tools → Change History and you’ll see a log of every modification ever made to the account. An account that’s been running for 90 days with no entries was not being managed. It was left on autopilot. That’s useful to know, especially if you’ve been paying someone to manage it.
Pacing and budget structure. Is the account spending what it’s supposed to? If daily budget is $200 and the account averaged $80/day last month, something’s wrong — low quality scores, bad structure, or a bid strategy that’s choking the auction. Underspending doesn’t mean you’re saving money. It means the campaigns aren’t competitive enough to actually reach people.
What You Get from the Audit
When I finish, I’ll tell you:
- The specific wasted spend I found — terms, campaigns, settings — and what it’s costing you in real dollars
- Whether your conversion tracking is trustworthy, and if not, what’s wrong with it
- Any structural issues that are working against performance
- What I’d do in the first 90 days if I were managing the account
If the account is in good shape, I’ll tell you that too. I’m not going to manufacture problems that aren’t there to justify a pitch — that’s not how this works. Sometimes an agency is doing fine, and if yours is, I’ll say so and you’ve lost nothing but 20 minutes.
Why Free?
Because this is how I find management clients. If I look at your account and it’s a mess, you’ll see exactly what the mess looks like and what it’s costing you. At that point, the question of whether to fix it — and who should fix it — becomes a lot clearer.
I’m not going to hard-sell you at the end. The audit speaks for itself. If there are real problems, you’ll know it from the findings, not from my pitch. If there aren’t, I’ll tell you.
For more on the specific patterns that signal a wasted budget, 7 signs your Google Ads are wasting money covers the ones I see most often. And if your concern is less about the account mechanics and more about whether your agency is actually doing the work, is your Google Ads agency doing a good job walks through how to evaluate that.
Who This Is For
The audit makes the most sense if you’re spending at least $1,000/month on Google Ads and something doesn’t feel right — leads are too thin, costs have been creeping up, you’re not sure what you’re getting for the management fee, or you’ve just never had anyone look at it properly.
If you’re running Google Ads management yourself and want a checkup, that works too. Same process, same output.
Tired of guessing whether your ads are working?
We manage Google and Meta ad accounts for businesses spending $500-$10,000/month. $800 setup, $200/month ongoing. You keep your account — we just make it work.