Google Ads Audit Checklist: 12 Things to Check Before Spending Another Dollar

Most Google Ads accounts have between 3 and 5 structural issues that are actively burning budget. Not hypothetical issues. Not best-practice suggestions. Actual configuration problems that cause real money to be wasted on clicks that will never convert.

We know this because we audit accounts for a living. The patterns repeat. Conversion tracking that double-counts. Campaign structures that force the algorithm to compete against itself. Bid strategies set to targets the account cannot achieve. These are not edge cases. They appear in the majority of accounts we review, from $5K/month to $200K/month.

This checklist covers the 12 most common and costly problems. Each one is something you can check in your account today, and each one has a specific fix.

Conversion Tracking Accuracy

This is the first thing we check in every audit because everything else depends on it. If conversions are being counted incorrectly, every metric in the account is unreliable. ROAS, CPA, conversion rate, cost per conversion. All of it.

Check 1: Are conversions being counted correctly? Go to Tools, then Conversions, and look at each conversion action. Check the counting method. For lead generation, it should be set to "One" (one conversion per click). For ecommerce purchases, it should be "Every." If a lead form submission is set to "Every," a single user refreshing the thank-you page counts as multiple conversions. We see this in roughly 30% of accounts.

Check 2: Are there duplicate conversion actions? Many accounts have both a Google Ads conversion tag and an imported GA4 conversion for the same event. Both are set as primary conversion actions. This means every real conversion is counted twice. Pull up your conversion actions list and check for duplicates. You should have one primary conversion action per business outcome, not two tracking the same thing.

Check 3: Is the conversion window appropriate? The default 30-day click-through window works for most businesses, but some accounts have it set to 90 days or even 1 day. A 1-day window on a B2B product with a 3-week sales cycle means you are missing most of your conversions. The window should match your actual buying cycle. If you do not know your average time to conversion, check the Path to Conversion report in Google Ads before setting this.

Campaign Structure and Organization

Check 4: Are campaigns organized by intent level? A common mistake is mixing high-intent and low-intent keywords in the same campaign. When branded terms, competitor terms, and generic discovery terms share a budget, the algorithm cannot distinguish between someone searching for your company name (high intent, high conversion rate) and someone searching for a broad industry term (low intent, low conversion rate). The budget gets allocated across all of them with the same ROAS target, which either caps your branded conversions or overpays for generic traffic.

Best to separate campaigns into at least three tiers: branded, high-intent non-branded, and discovery or expansion. Each tier gets its own budget and bid target. This gives the algorithm a clear signal for each segment.

Check 5: Is budget distribution aligned with performance? Pull your campaign-level report for the last 30 days. Sort by cost. Check whether the campaigns spending the most are also the ones converting the most efficiently. It is common to find accounts where 40% of budget goes to one campaign that has the worst CPA in the account. This happens when budgets are set once and never revisited. Budget should follow performance, not the other way around.

Match Type Strategy

Check 6: What is your broad match exposure? Pull the match type report for your non-branded campaigns. If broad match accounts for more than 50% of impressions, you are likely paying for a significant volume of irrelevant or low-intent searches. Broad match has its place, but it needs to be controlled. In accounts without strong negative keyword lists and sufficient conversion data, broad match can absorb budget on queries that have no commercial intent.

The fix is not to eliminate broad match entirely. It is to contain it. Run broad match in separate campaigns with their own budgets and lower ROAS targets. This way it can expand reach without dragging down the performance of your high-intent campaigns.

Check 7: Are exact match keywords getting enough volume? Exact match gives you the most control over which searches trigger your ads. If your exact match keywords are limited by budget or have low impression share, you are missing out on your highest-value traffic. Check the auction insights report for your exact match campaigns. If impression share is below 80%, there is room to capture more of the traffic you already know converts.

Negative Keywords

Check 8: When was the search term report last reviewed? Open the search terms report for the last 30 days. Sort by cost. If you see queries that are clearly irrelevant to your business in the top 20 by spend, the negative keyword list is not doing its job. Common offenders: informational queries (how to, what is, tutorial), competitor brand names you do not want to bid on, geographic terms outside your service area, and job-related searches (hiring, salary, careers).

Search term review should happen weekly for active accounts. Monthly at minimum. Every week you skip is another week of budget spent on queries that will never convert. Build a shared negative keyword list at the account level for universal exclusions, and campaign-level lists for more specific filtering.

Check 9: Are negative keywords blocking good traffic? This is the other side of the coin. Overly aggressive negative keywords can block searches that would convert. Check your negative keyword lists for broad-match negatives that might be too general. A broad-match negative for "free" blocks any search containing that word, including "free trial" or "free shipping" which could be highly commercial. Use phrase-match or exact-match negatives when you need to be precise about what to block.

Bid Strategy Alignment

Check 10: Is your bid strategy appropriate for your conversion volume? tROAS and tCPA require a minimum number of conversions to function properly. Google recommends at least 30 conversions in the last 30 days per campaign for tCPA, and 50 for tROAS. If a campaign is running a Smart Bidding strategy with 5 conversions in the last month, the algorithm does not have enough data to make good decisions. The result is erratic bidding, inconsistent delivery, and unpredictable costs.

For campaigns below the conversion threshold, Maximize Clicks or Maximize Conversions (without a target) gives the algorithm more flexibility while it collects data. Switch to target-based strategies once you have the volume to support them.

Check 11: Are bid targets realistic? Pull the actual ROAS or CPA for each campaign over the last 30 days. Compare it to the target set in the bid strategy. If you are targeting a 5x ROAS and the campaign is delivering 2.5x, the algorithm is under severe constraint. It will either restrict delivery drastically (spending far below budget) or oscillate between overspending and underspending as it tries to hit an unachievable target. Set targets based on actual historical performance, then adjust gradually. A 10-15% improvement from current performance is realistic. A 100% improvement is not.

Ad Copy and Extensions

Check 12: Are you testing ad variations? Check each ad group for the number of active ads. If every ad group has exactly one responsive search ad with no variations, you are leaving performance on the table. Google's algorithm needs options to optimize. At minimum, each ad group should have one responsive search ad with the maximum number of headlines (15) and descriptions (4). Use pin positions sparingly. The more flexibility you give the algorithm, the more combinations it can test.

Check ad strength scores. They are not a perfect metric, but a "Poor" score typically indicates that your headlines and descriptions are too similar to each other, or that you are not using enough unique copy variations. Aim for "Good" or "Excellent" across all responsive search ads.

Extensions (now called assets) are free real estate in your ads. Check that you have sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and call extensions active at the account level. Missing extensions means smaller ads, lower click-through rates, and higher costs per click. Every account should have at least 4 sitelinks, 4 callouts, and 1 structured snippet set at minimum.

Landing Page Performance

You can have perfect campaign structure, flawless tracking, and optimized bidding, and still waste budget if your landing pages do not convert. This is where many accounts fail the hardest, because campaign managers focus on the Google Ads interface and ignore what happens after the click.

Check landing page load speed using PageSpeed Insights. Mobile scores below 50 are a problem. Each second of additional load time increases bounce rate measurably. If your mobile landing page takes 6 seconds to load, you are likely losing 30-40% of paid clicks before the page even renders.

Check that landing page messaging matches ad copy. If your ad promises "Free Demo" and the landing page headline says "Contact Us for Pricing," there is a disconnect. This mismatch between ad promise and page content is one of the most common causes of high bounce rates on paid traffic. The landing page should deliver exactly what the ad promised, immediately, above the fold.

Check conversion rate by landing page in your Google Ads reports. If one landing page converts at 8% and another at 1.5%, the low performer is burning budget. Either fix it or redirect that traffic to the page that works. Not all landing pages deserve traffic. Send budget to the ones that earn it.