How to run a Google Ads PPC audit

Three ways to run it

Pick by how much time you have and who does the work. The checks are the same; the reading differs.

What changed in 2026

Six shifts change what an audit has to look at this year. Each returns in the stage it belongs to.

Stage one · Section 01

Set the frame before you open a campaign

An audit without a target is a tour. Fix the window at 90 days, long enough to show patterns and current enough to matter, and note anything anomalous inside it: a sale event, a stockout, an outage. Then write down the commercial target: the CPA or ROAS the business actually needs, derived from margin, not inherited from last year's dashboard. Everything that follows is judged against that number.

Confirm access and the plumbing next. Read-only access is enough. Check that Google Ads is linked to GA4 and Merchant Center, note where conversions are imported from, and map the account hierarchy before you draw a single conclusion.

Pull your baseline: spend; revenue or leads; blended ROAS or CPA; impression share; and the top twenty queries and products by spend. Findings only count if you can show the before.

Stage two · Section 02

Audit the signal first, everything learns from it

Bad signal makes every later finding unreliable, so this stage comes before structure, budget or bids. Start with primacy: Smart Bidding optimises toward whatever is marked primary, so one primary action per goal. Two primaries for the same outcome means double counting, and a purchase firing from both the Google tag and a GA4 import is the classic case. Retire what is dead alongside it: actions with no conversions in 90 days, legacy tags still firing, page-view style actions marked primary.

Then check the richness of the signal, not just its existence. Enhanced conversions recover signal lost to browser privacy; for lead generation, import qualified or closed outcomes from the CRM so bidding learns from deals rather than form fills. Send values, not just counts: revenue, or better margin, for ecommerce, and scored values for leads. If every conversion is worth 1.00, the system cannot tell a good customer from a cheap one.

Finally, verify the pipes and the maths. Consent Mode gaps in Europe directly shrink the conversions your bidding sees; browser-only tracking on a large account is a risk flag, and server-side tagging is the fix at scale. Only data-driven and last click remain as models, so confirm conversion windows match the purchase cycle, and re-check imports after GA4's April 2026 change.

The tell. A CPA or ROAS that moved sharply without a matching change in spend, creative or competition is a measurement finding until proven otherwise. Re-verify before you react.

Stage three · Sections 03, 04, 05

Audit the architecture: structure, budget, targets

Structure decides what the algorithms can learn and what your reports can tell you. Isolate brand from non-brand, in Search and in Performance Max via brand exclusions: blended together, brand inflates every average and hides the true cost of acquiring a new customer. Segment by objective and margin rather than history, because structures inherited from old team org charts fragment budget and blur accountability. Consolidate the starved: campaigns limping below roughly thirty conversions a month learn slowly and pay for it in the auction. Then look for overlap, search terms served by both Search and Performance Max, and Demand Gen audiences claiming credit Search would have won anyway.

Budget headroom is where the cheapest growth hides. Campaigns beating their target while losing impression share to budget are demand you have already earned and are handing to a competitor; fund them before you fund anything new. Kill zombie budgets, small amounts scattered across many campaigns that keep each one too starved to learn. Check pacing against seasonality: seasonality adjustments and data exclusions are the sanctioned levers for known events under Smart Bidding, so confirm past sale periods were excluded and the next one is planned. And know what share of spend sits in your top five campaigns, and whether that concentration is a decision or an accident.

On bidding, the most common finding in a mature account is not waste. It is throttling: targets so conservative that Smart Bidding turns profitable demand away. Match the strategy to the volume, value-based bidding wants at least 15 conversions in 30 days and two or more distinct values, Google's published floor; below that, target CPA or maximise conversions is the honest choice. Calibrate targets to margin, not history. Change them with discipline, one move per conversion cycle, in steps rather than swings, because frequent changes keep the bidder re-learning instead of performing. And strip the legacy controls: most manual bid adjustments are ignored under Smart Bidding, so the levers that still work are conversion data quality, value rules, seasonality adjustments and hard exclusions at minus 100 percent.

The tell. Strong ROAS plus high impression share lost to rank means your targets are throttling delivery. Strong ROAS plus impression share lost to budget means your budget is.

Stage four · Sections 06, 07, 08

Audit the demand you buy: queries, creative, catalogue

Query expansion is wider in 2026 than it has ever been, and negatives are the guardrail. Read the search terms report weekly on major spenders and triage what it found: scale the good, negate the bad. Use match types deliberately, broad match where tracking is clean and volume supports it, exact and phrase to keep control on the money terms; the mix should be a decision, not sediment. Keep negative lists shared and applied to Performance Max as well as Search, put brand negatives inside non-brand campaigns, and make your competitor policy deliberate. Hunt duplicates and conflicts, the same query served from multiple ad groups splits data and bids against itself, and negatives that block your own keywords are more common than anyone admits. Read Quality Score as a symptom, not a target: low ad relevance or landing page experience points at a real gap; optimising the number itself is a distraction.

On creative, the platforms compose ads from whatever you feed them, so the audit question is whether the inputs and the controls are deliberate. Every ad group wants a responsive search ad at good strength or better, with distinct headlines rather than fifteen rephrasings, and pinning only where compliance forces it. Complete the asset stack, sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, images, business logo, because eligibility for AI-composed surfaces depends on the assets you supply and gaps are invisible lost auctions. Review AI Max before September does it for you: set brand controls, locations of interest, URL exclusions and natural-language instructions deliberately. Approve what the machine wrote, in the automatically created assets report. And manage creative freshness beyond Search, Demand Gen and Performance Max expect formats for Shorts and in-feed, video coverage, and refresh before fatigue shows in frequency and falling engagement.

For retailers the catalogue is the campaign, and this is the heart of an ecommerce audit. Merchant Center comes first: policy issues, missing identifiers, price and availability mismatches between feed and site, because every disapproved product is demand you cannot serve. Then measure coverage, what share of eligible products received an impression in 90 days; eligible products with zero impressions are a structure problem, not a demand problem. Know your revenue concentration, if the top twenty products carry the account that should be a strategy rather than a surprise. Treat the feed as an AI surface, titles, attributes and availability now feed AI answers as well as Shopping. And structure Performance Max for control: asset groups by margin or category, brand excluded, placements reviewed, negatives applied, and the channel-level reporting actually read each month.

Stage five · Section 09

Audit the waste, and the winners it is starving

Waste hides in the tail, and so do the winners being starved to pay for it. Rank products and queries by spend, isolate those burning meaningful click spend with zero conversions across the full 90 days, and decide deliberately for each: fix, demote or exclude. Then look for the mirror image, products returning five times or more on minimal spend are proven drivers held back by budget, and redirecting spend from the noise to them is usually the single highest-return move in the audit.

Finish with the places spend leaks quietly: Display and Demand Gen placements, search partners and app inventory, excluded where they spend without converting and kept in shared, current exclusion lists; and geography and schedule, locations and hours carrying spend with no return. Confirm location settings target presence, not interest, wherever that distinction costs money.

Shortcut. Stages two to five are the sections the free instant audit checks automatically: tracking health, budget headroom, bid calibration, creative and asset readiness, product visibility and wasted spend. It will not set your commercial target or judge your structure against how the business makes money, which is why stages one and three still need you.

How to read a finding

A finding is not an observation. It is a claim with evidence, a size and a decision. Write each one in four parts, and refuse to log anything that cannot fill all four.

How to prioritise what you found

A first full audit typically produces more findings than any quarter can absorb. Score each on two axes only, how much it moves the commercial target, and how much work and risk it carries, then work the quadrants in order.

• Measurement findings go first regardless of effort, because every other estimate depends on them.
• Deadline-bound findings, the AI Max upgrade from September 2026 and the Display migration, move up a quadrant as their date approaches: the work does not get smaller, but the option to defer disappears.

Glossary

The terms this guide uses in their trade sense, not their marketing sense.

Incrementality

The sales lift caused by media, versus what would have happened anyway. Measured with holdout or matched-market tests, not attribution reports.

Smart Bidding Exploration

Default behaviour on target CPA and target ROAS campaigns that seeks conversions beyond historical query patterns, widening query expansion.

Enhanced conversions

First-party hashed data sent with a conversion to recover signal lost to browser privacy restrictions.

Offline conversion import

Sending qualified or closed CRM outcomes back to Google Ads so bidding optimises toward deals rather than form fills.

Value-based bidding

Bidding to conversion value rather than count. Google's published floor is 15 conversions in 30 days and at least two distinct values.

Consent Mode

Google's mechanism for adjusting tag behaviour to a user's consent choice. Gaps in Europe shrink the conversions bidding can see.

Impression share lost to budget or rank

The share of eligible auctions you missed, split by cause. Lost to budget means underfunding; lost to rank means targets, quality or bid ceilings.

Brand exclusions

The Performance Max and AI Max control that stops a campaign serving on your own brand terms, so brand does not inflate blended performance.

Seasonality adjustment

A sanctioned Smart Bidding lever telling the bidder to expect a short, known change in conversion rate. Paired with data exclusions for outages and tracking faults.

AI Max for Search

Google's expanded Search campaign type, generally available in 2026. Dynamic Search Ads auto-upgrade from September 2026, with a full sunset planned for February 2027.

Catalogue coverage

The share of eligible products that received at least one impression in the window. Zero-impression eligible products are a structure problem, not a demand problem.

Automatically created assets

Headlines, descriptions and other creative Google generates or selects on your behalf. Reviewable in its own report; your responsibility once it serves.

Throttling

Targets set so conservatively that Smart Bidding declines profitable demand. The most common finding in a mature account, and easily mistaken for good performance.

Starved winner

A product or query returning strongly on minimal spend. The mirror image of waste, and usually the highest-return move available.

Next quarter. Re-run the free instant audit before each quarterly review and compare it to your baseline. The findings that disappeared are your evidence the work landed; the ones that returned are structural, and belong in the plan rather than the hygiene batch. Run the free instant audit.

The audit checklist

The nine Google Ads sections in working order. Print the working template and it becomes the sheet your team reuses each quarter. Sections the free instant audit checks automatically are marked.

Work these 42 checks in the 56-point template, which also covers Meta, Microsoft, AI answers and landing pages.

PPC audit method FAQs