Google Ads account audit — a step-by-step checklist (2026)

A step-by-step Google Ads account audit covers six areas, checked in a fixed order: conversion tracking (without it, the rest of the audit is meaningless), campaign and ad group structure, the search terms report for wasted spend, keywords split into converting, unproductive, and expensive due to low Quality Score, ad copy, and a period-over-period comparison of budgets and results (for example month over month). The whole audit can be done yourself in roughly an hour if you have admin access to the account. Here's the checklist with concrete steps for each item.

Step 1: Conversion tracking

Always start here — if conversion tracking is broken, every later step in the audit is built on false data. Go to Tools → Conversions and check the status of each conversion action.

• Is the status 'Recording conversions', rather than 'No recent conversions' or 'Inactive tag'?
• Does the conversion count from the last 30 days in Google Ads roughly match the number of real leads in your CRM, email, or phone log? A gap larger than 10-15% is a signal for further checking.
• Is the counter double-firing (for example, one form submission counted as two conversions due to a tagging bug) — check this by comparing numbers against GA4 as an independent source.

Step 2: Account structure

Open the campaign and ad group view and judge whether the structure reflects your actual offering, or is a random accumulation of historical decisions.

What to look for

Campaigns that lump together completely different services under one shared budget make it hard to tell what's actually working. Ad groups with dozens of unrelated keywords usually carry a lower Quality Score, because the ad can't be relevant to all of them at once. Also check whether campaigns have active extensions (sitelinks, phone number, descriptions) — missing extensions are the simplest lost-visibility fix available.

Step 3: Search terms report (waste)

This is the most tangible part of the audit — it's where you usually see concrete money to recover. Pull the search terms report for the last 30-90 days and sort by cost, descending.

• List queries with high cost and zero conversions — this is your first list of exclusion candidates.
• Check whether any of them are competitor names, 'jobs', 'course', 'free', or other signals of an intent completely different from your offer.
• Add up the cost of those queries and calculate what share of total spend they represent — write this number down and compare it after implementing exclusions the following month.

Step 4: Keywords

Split your active keywords into three groups and evaluate each separately, rather than looking at the whole account as one pool.

• Converting — check whether they have enough budget and aren't being held back by too low a bid.
• No conversions — before excluding them, check the typical conversion window for your industry; fresh keywords with spend but no conversions after only a few days may still convert.
• Expensive due to low Quality Score — the same keyword may cost a competitor less purely because their ad and landing page are more aligned with the search term.

Step 5: Ad copy

Check how many active ad variants (RSA) each ad group has — a single variant per group means zero ability to test anything. Also judge whether headlines and descriptions actually include the group's main keyword and a specific call to action, or whether they're generic and identical across every group.

Pay attention to Ad Strength in the dashboard — a 'Poor' status almost always correlates with a lower Quality Score and a higher cost per click for that group.

Step 6: Budgets and period-over-period results

Compare the current month against the previous one (or the same month last year, if the industry is seasonal) across four numbers: cost, conversions, cost per conversion (CPA), and search lost impression share due to budget. A rising cost per conversion at a flat budget signals that something in the account has degraded — usually in one of the previous five steps. A high lost-impression-share-due-to-budget on a campaign that converts well, on the other hand, is a signal to consider raising the budget rather than looking for a problem.

What happens after the audit

An audit without implementation is just a list of observations. Rank the issues you found by likely cost impact (usually the search terms report and conversion tracking come first), roll out changes one at a time or in small batches, and log the date and scope of each change so you can compare before and after in 2-4 weeks. Without that log, it's hard to later tell which change actually helped.

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