How to Audit Your Google Ads Account: A DIY Checklist

Audit a Google Ads account in eight passes: conversion tracking, wasted search spend, budget pacing, bid-strategy fit, keyword match types, ad relevance and assets, negative keywords, and geo/device/schedule targeting. An owner can run all eight in an afternoon. Each step below names the exact report and column to open.

Set your date range and scope first

Start with the last 30 to 90 days: enough volume to mean something, recent enough to describe the account today. Set the campaign filter to show everything, paused campaigns included, and open the raw search terms behind them. Keep a running note, one line per issue with the campaign name and the number that flagged it. That note is the audit, and it becomes your worklist the moment you start changing things.

1. Conversion tracking: get this wrong and the rest is noise

Smart Bidding optimizes toward whatever you count as a conversion. If tracking double-counts, fires on a pageview, or drops purchase value, the algorithm chases the wrong signal and every downstream report quietly lies. Audit it before you judge a single campaign.

Open Tools, then Conversions. For each action, decide whether it counts real money, a purchase or qualified lead, or a soft signal like a pageview or button click. If you run a shop, confirm purchase value passes on every transaction. Without it, ROAS and tROAS bidding have nothing to steer by, and the conversion-value column reads blank or suspiciously flat.

Verify with Google Tag Assistant or your tag manager's preview mode, then run a live test purchase or fill in a lead form yourself and watch it register, usually within a few hours. Check the attribution window while you're there: a 30-day click window credits conversions a 7-day window drops, so a recent shortening can sink your numbers for a reporting reason rather than a real one.

• A lead form set to count “Every” conversion when “One” is usually right
• A “primary” action that's really a button click or a pageview
• Purchase value missing, so ROAS reads as blank or flat
• Two tags firing for the same event, inflating your numbers

2. Wasted spend hides in the search terms report

Most small accounts leak money here, and it's the most satisfying part to fix. The search terms report shows the queries people actually typed, which rarely match the keywords you bid on, and broad match will surprise you. One broad keyword pulling 200 clicks at $2 each on “free” variants burns $400 on traffic that was never going to buy: illustrative, but painfully common.

Sort by cost, high to low, and read down. Flag wrong intent, wrong product, job seekers, “free” searches, competitor names you don't want, DIY queries when you sell done-for-you. Each is a click that could never convert. Add them as negatives (step five) and you've found your first quick win. To lower cost per acquisition, this is the fastest lever there is, and the same logic runs through our guide to how to lower your CPA.

A worked example: one report, top to bottom

Say you sell handmade leather wallets on roughly $1,500 a month. Sort the search terms report by cost and read the top 30 rows. Four jump out: “free wallet” at 18 clicks and $41 with zero conversions, “how to make a leather wallet” at 26 clicks and $52 with zero, “wallet repair near me” at 12 clicks and $30 with zero, and a competitor's brand name at 9 clicks and $22 with a single sale at a cost you'd never repeat. That's about $145 in one month on intent you don't want, recurring until you add the negatives. The numbers are illustrative, but the shape, a long tail of near-miss queries broad match happily paid for, shows up in nearly every account.

3. Budget pacing and bid-strategy fit

Two questions. Is budget flowing to the campaigns that earn, and does each campaign's bid strategy fit its goal? Find campaigns marked “limited by budget” that are also profitable, because those are asking for more money. Then find campaigns burning spend with no conversions, which need a fix or an honest pause.

A campaign with almost no conversion history running tCPA or tROAS can't bid well, because both need a steady flow of conversions to learn from. A rough floor is 15 to 30 conversions in the last 30 days before a target strategy has enough to chew on. Below that, Maximize Clicks or manual bidding usually behaves more sanely until volume builds. A portfolio strategy you don't remember choosing is worth tracing; inherited settings hide a lot of quiet waste.

4. Match types, ad relevance, and assets

Match types set how loosely Google reads your keywords. Broad match with weak negatives is the classic waste recipe; phrase and exact tighten control over which searches you pay for. Broad can perform, but only with solid conversion tracking and a hard negative list behind it. Performance Max hides its search terms almost entirely, so there your leverage is feed quality and asset strength, not keyword control. When you inherit an account, audit the match types before you trust the traffic.

In each ad group, check that responsive search ads carry enough distinct headlines and that the copy reflects the keyword. Search “emergency plumber” landing on a headline that reads “Home Services” drops relevance, lowers quality score, and raises your CPC. Fill in sitelinks, callouts and structured snippets while you're there: these assets take free space on the results page and lift click-through at no extra cost per click.

5. Negatives, geo, device, and schedule

Negative keywords stop the bleed you found in the search terms report. Build a list, add the junk, and keep a shared negative list reused across campaigns so one fix protects the whole account. It's the highest-leverage housekeeping you have, and worth its own read in our guide to negative keywords done right.

Then the targeting trio. Geo: confirm you show where your customers actually are, and set location to “presence” rather than “presence or interest” if that matters; plenty of accounts advertise worldwide because nobody changed the default. Device: if mobile converts worse than desktop, set a bid adjustment to match the gap instead of paying the same for both. Schedule: if leads never close on weekends, full spend every Saturday is a slow leak. All three drift as your traffic mix changes.

A one-off audit fixes today, then the account drifts

A manual audit has a hard limit. Clean everything on Sunday and the account is genuinely better Monday. But new search terms arrive every day, budgets get eaten, competitors change their bids, and any big edit resets the learning period. Within a few weeks half your fixes have eroded, and the checklist is only ever as fresh as the last time you ran it.

That's the gap AdPilot fills. The agent reads your connected account and surfaces the same checks, wasted search terms, budget mismatches, bid-strategy fit and missing negatives, as concrete proposals. Connect once with Google OAuth, no API keys, no setup. State a goal in plain language and fixes arrive as cards you approve or reject; nothing writes to your account without your click, and every change you approve is written for real, behind a snapshot, a full audit log and Revert. AdPilot is in early access, with limited spots while our app finishes Google's verification.

Guardrails keep automation from wrecking an account. Campaigns can't be deleted, shared budgets are never touched, and before an approved change runs, AdPilot takes a metric snapshot. Every action lands in an audit log with the old value and the new one, and can be reverted with one click. Tokens are stored AES-256 encrypted. The same safety question drives our deeper look at letting AI touch your account.

Run it yourself, or keep the checklist running for you

You don't need us to audit your account. Everything above is doable by an owner willing to read the search terms report and think clearly about intent. Staying fully hands-on is a legitimate call, and the case for it runs through our guide to running Google Ads without an agency. An agency mainly buys you time and expertise, usually for a retainer or a share of your ad spend.

AdPilot changes who remembers to look. The agent runs the review daily and hands you the fixes; you keep the final say on each. Connect with one-click Google OAuth, state your goal in plain words, and watch the before and after build on the dashboard. A single account gets a free 7-day trial, then Growth is $99 a month and Pro is $249, and you can see one real, consented account we've documented as a worked example. AdPilot is an independent product, not affiliated with or endorsed by Google.