A Google Ads account can have hundreds of things wrong with it. That is not useful. This checklist cuts it to 12 checks that account for the majority of wasted budget, ranked by how often we find them and how much they typically cost.
You can run this yourself in under two hours. Some items require pulling reports. Most just require knowing where to look.
The order matters. Start with conversion tracking. If your measurement is wrong, every other finding is suspect.
Why Most Accounts Are Wasting 20 to 30% of Budget Without Knowing It
In the accounts we audit, we find at least 5 significant structural issues in the majority of cases. The median waste we identify is about 23% of monthly spend. That is not a dramatic number. But at $30K/month, it is $6,900 going to the wrong places.
The reason these issues persist is not that teams are careless. It is that Google Ads accounts accumulate technical debt quietly. A campaign setting changes in an update, a match type expands, a conversion action stops firing. The performance line does not fall off a cliff. It just drifts. And drift is hard to notice until you pull it apart.
This checklist gives you a systematic way to pull it apart.
1. Conversion Tracking Verification
Before anything else: confirm that the conversions Google Ads is counting match the conversions your CRM or backend is counting. Pull a 30-day comparison. If the gap is more than 20%, something is miscounted.
Common causes: duplicate conversion actions firing on the same event, the wrong event tagged as a conversion (a scroll or a page view), or a thank-you page URL that changed and broke the tag. Fix this before you do anything else in the account.
2. Campaign Structure
Look at the number of active campaigns and the logic behind the segmentation. Signs of accumulated technical debt: campaigns named 'Copy of Campaign 2021', ad groups with more than 20 keywords, a single campaign with a $20K/month budget that mixes branded and non-branded traffic.
Campaign structure determines how the algorithm allocates budget and how meaningful your reporting is. If a single campaign mixes traffic with fundamentally different conversion rates, Smart Bidding cannot separate the signal.
3. Keyword and Match Type Health
Pull the search term report for the last 30 days. Sort by cost. Look at the top 50 queries by spend. How many of them are genuinely relevant to your product? If more than 20% of the top queries are irrelevant or ambiguous, you have a match type problem.
Check the distribution of exact, phrase, and broad match across your campaigns. Broad match above 50% of impressions in non-branded campaigns is usually a signal that the algorithm is spending too freely. Negative keyword lists are a symptom of this: if your negative list has 500 terms, something upstream is wrong.
4. Audience and Targeting Gaps
Check whether audience segments are applied to your campaigns (in observation or targeting mode). At minimum: remarketing lists, customer match lists if you have CRM data, and in-market audiences for your category.
Then check the audience performance tab. If certain segments convert at 3x the campaign average, they should have a bid adjustment or be in a separate campaign with a tighter target. If no bid modifiers exist anywhere, the algorithm is treating all audiences identically.
5. Bidding Strategy Alignment With Conversion Volume
Smart Bidding requires a minimum conversion volume to work reliably. The threshold Google recommends is 30 to 50 conversions per month per campaign for tCPA, and more for tROAS. Below that threshold, the algorithm does not have enough data and performance becomes inconsistent.
If you are using tCPA or tROAS on campaigns with fewer than 30 monthly conversions, consider switching to Maximize Conversions (without a target) until volume builds. Or consolidate campaigns so each one gets adequate signal.
6. Budget Allocation Across Campaigns
Pull monthly spend by campaign and compare to performance by campaign. Flag any campaign that is limited by budget (Google labels these) and any campaign spending well but converting poorly.
The most common waste pattern: a high-funnel awareness campaign with no conversion intent receiving budget that should go to a bottom-funnel campaign that is limited by budget. Budget flows toward spend, not toward ROI, unless you structure it explicitly.
7. Ad Copy Quality and Test Coverage
Check how many Responsive Search Ad variants are active per ad group and what the Ad Strength ratings are. Poor or Average ratings on RSAs are a signal the asset library is weak (too few unique headlines, headlines that repeat the same message).
More importantly: check whether any meaningful copy tests are running. If every ad group has one RSA and it has never been tested against another variant, you are leaving performance on the table. CTR improvements compound with scale.
8. Landing Page Relevance
Click through from your highest-spending ads to their landing pages. Ask: does this page answer the specific promise in the ad? Does the headline on the page match the search intent that triggered the ad?
Landing page relevance affects Quality Score, which affects ad rank and cost per click. A landing page mismatch is invisible in the campaign interface but shows up in Cost per Click that is higher than it should be.
9. Quality Score Distribution
Pull the Quality Score column for your top keywords by spend. A Quality Score of 7 or above on your core terms is reasonable. Scores of 4 or below on high-spend keywords are worth investigating. They indicate that the landing page experience, expected CTR, or ad relevance is underperforming.
Low Quality Scores on high-spend terms means you are paying more per click than competitors with better relevance. Fixing a single keyword cluster from QS 4 to QS 7 can reduce CPC by 20 to 30% on that segment.
10. Shopping Feed Quality (For Ecommerce Accounts)
If you run Shopping or Performance Max with a product feed, check the feed diagnostics in Google Merchant Center. Look for disapproved items, missing attributes (GTINs, brand, product category), and items in the feed that have not served in the last 30 days.
Feed quality directly affects which products appear and for which queries. A 10% disapproval rate on a 1,000-item feed means 100 products are not eligible to serve. Often those products are in high-margin categories.
11. Attribution and Reporting Consistency
Check the attribution model in Google Ads (under Conversions settings) and compare it to the model in GA4. If Google Ads is on data-driven attribution and GA4 is on last click, your dashboard numbers will always disagree. That is not wrong, but the team needs to know which one to trust for which decision.
Also check the conversion window. The default is 30 days for click conversions. If your sales cycle is longer than 30 days (common in B2B), you are systematically undercounting conversions attributed to paid campaigns.
The 12-Point Google Ads Audit Checklist
Run through these in order. Start with conversion tracking. If measurement is wrong, every other finding is suspect.
- Conversion tracking accuracy (CRM vs. Google Ads 30-day comparison)
- Campaign structure (technical debt, naming logic, mixing of traffic types)
- Match type distribution (broad match share, search term quality)
- Negative keyword coverage
- Audience segments applied and bid-adjusted
- Bidding strategy vs. conversion volume threshold
- Budget distribution vs. performance by campaign
- RSA asset variety and Ad Strength
- Landing page to ad copy alignment
- Quality Score on top spend keywords
- Shopping feed approval rate and attribute completeness
- Attribution model and conversion window settings
If you want to run the first 5 checks automatically, our Google Ads Audit tool covers conversion tracking, campaign structure, bidding strategy, and more in 60 seconds.