Open the search terms report in a Google Ads account that hasn’t been touched for six months and you’ll usually find the same thing. Money going to searches the owner never intended to pay for. A Brisbane plumber paying for “plumbing apprenticeships”. A commercial cleaner paying for “how to clean grout yourself”. The account looks busy, the spend is going out, and a chunk of it is buying nothing.
That’s why an audit exists. A Google Ads audit is a structured review of where the money goes, what it buys, and whether the account is set up to get better over time. Here are the exact line items a good audit works through, in the order we’d check them.
The search terms report comes first
A Google Ads audit starts with the search terms report, which shows the actual searches that triggered your ads rather than the keywords you bid on. The gap between the two is where most waste hides.
Google has pushed broad match hard over the last few years. Broad match tells Google “show my ad for anything you think is related”, and Google’s idea of related can be generous. Without a well-maintained negative keyword list, the account pays for job seekers, DIY researchers, students and people looking for a completely different product.
The maths on this is simple and worth doing. Say an account spends $3,000 a month and 20 per cent of clicks come from irrelevant searches, which is not unusual in an unmanaged account:
- $3,000 x 20% = $600 a month on searches that can’t buy
- $600 x 12 = $7,200 a year
That’s a real cost with no return, and it’s usually the fastest fix in the whole audit. The check itself is straightforward: pull the last 90 days of search terms, sort by cost, and read every term that spent more than a few dollars. Anything irrelevant goes on the negative list. Then look at how the negative list has been maintained historically. An account with no negatives added in the past year tells you nobody has been reading this report.
Is the conversion tracking measuring real business?
Conversion tracking tells Google’s bidding system what a valuable outcome looks like, so an audit checks that it counts genuine enquiries and sales rather than page views or button clicks. If the tracking is wrong, everything downstream is wrong, because Google’s automated bidding will spend your budget chasing whatever you told it to chase.
The common problems we find, in rough order of frequency:
- No conversion tracking at all. The account is bidding blind on clicks.
- Conversions that aren’t conversions. A “contact” button click counts as a lead even though most people who click it never send the form.
- Double counting. The same enquiry fires two or three conversion actions, so the reported cost per lead looks half its real size.
- Every micro action set as a primary conversion. Newsletter signups, PDF downloads and 30-second visits all mixed in with actual sales enquiries, so the bidding system can’t tell a browser from a buyer.
- Phone calls not tracked at all, which in trades and services is often where most of the leads arrive.
A pattern we keep seeing in reviews: the owner believes the account produces leads at one cost, the tracking says another, and the truth sits somewhere else entirely because half the conversion actions are junk. Until the tracking is clean, no other decision in the account can be trusted.
Account structure, keywords and match types
The structure check looks at how campaigns and ad groups are organised, because structure controls where budget flows and how relevant the ads can be. Two failure modes show up constantly.
The first is one giant campaign with everything in it. Emergency repairs, routine servicing, commercial work and the brand name all sharing one budget and one bid strategy. Google will send the money wherever clicks are cheapest, which is rarely where margin is highest.
The second is the opposite: hundreds of tiny ad groups built to an old playbook, most with too little data to ever teach the bidding system anything. Modern accounts generally work better consolidated into fewer, tighter campaigns with enough conversion volume per campaign for automated bidding to function.
The audit also checks match types keyword by keyword, whether brand and generic terms are separated (they perform completely differently and shouldn’t share a budget), and whether high-value services have their own campaign so you can push budget at them deliberately.
Which settings quietly drain the budget?
A handful of account settings default to options that favour Google’s reach over your return, and an audit checks every one of them. These take minutes to review and they’re missed constantly.
- Location settings. The default includes people who “showed interest in” your area, not just people in it. A Brisbane service business can end up paying for clicks from overseas because someone searched “plumber Brisbane” from another country.
- Network settings. Search campaigns often have search partners and Display expansion switched on by default. Both tend to produce cheap clicks and few conversions.
- Auto-applied recommendations. If this is switched on, Google has been making changes to the account automatically, including adding broad match keywords. An audit checks the change history to see what’s been altered and by whom.
- Bidding strategy. Whether the strategy matches the account’s conversion volume. Target CPA bidding with three conversions a month has nothing to learn from.
- Ad schedule and devices. Whether spend at 2am or on tablets is earning its keep.
Ads, assets and where the click lands
The final section of an audit reviews the ads themselves and the landing pages behind them, because a well-targeted click still fails if the page doesn’t convert. The checks here: does the ad copy match what the person actually searched, are all the available assets in place (sitelinks, callouts, call assets, location), and does the click land on a page about that specific service or on a generic homepage?
Sending every ad to the homepage is one of the most expensive habits in small business accounts. Someone searching “office fitout Brisbane” who lands on a homepage about six different services has to go looking for the thing they wanted. Many won’t. Page speed on mobile matters here too, since most service searches happen on a phone.
What a healthy account looks like next to a neglected one
| Line item | Neglected account | Healthy account |
|---|---|---|
| Search terms | No negatives added in months, irrelevant terms spending freely | Negative list reviewed regularly, waste under control |
| Conversion tracking | Missing, double counted or counting button clicks | Counts genuine enquiries and calls, primary actions only |
| Structure | One catch-all campaign, or hundreds of starved ad groups | Consolidated campaigns split by service value, brand separated |
| Settings | Default location and network settings, auto-apply on | Presence-only targeting, networks chosen deliberately |
| Landing pages | Everything to the homepage | Each service ad lands on its matching page |
An audit doesn’t need to find all five broken to be worth doing. Even one, fixed, usually pays for the exercise.
Common questions about Google Ads audits
What should a Google Ads audit include?
A complete Google Ads audit covers the search terms report, conversion tracking accuracy, campaign structure and match types, account settings (location, networks, bidding, auto-applied recommendations) and the ads and landing pages. If a review skips conversion tracking, it isn’t an audit, it’s a skim.
Is $20 a day good for Google Ads?
It depends entirely on what a click costs in your market. In competitive Australian service categories a single click can cost more than $10, so $20 a day might buy two clicks, which is too little data to learn anything from. The audit question isn’t whether the budget is big, it’s whether the budget is concentrated on the searches most likely to buy.
What happens if I don’t verify my Google Ads account?
Google requires advertiser verification for many accounts, and unverified accounts can have their ads paused until it’s completed. An audit includes a check of account status, billing and any policy or verification flags, because a paused account is the one problem no amount of setup work can fix.
How often should a Google Ads account be audited?
A full audit makes sense once or twice a year, and always when an account changes hands between agencies or comes back in-house. The search terms report deserves a look monthly regardless, since that’s where waste accumulates fastest.
Can I audit my own Google Ads account?
Yes, and the search terms report plus the conversion actions list are the two places to start because they need no technical skill to read. The limit on self-auditing is knowing what good looks like, which is why a second set of eyes tends to find things the owner has scrolled past a hundred times.
Why is my spend going up but my leads staying flat?
Usually one of three things: broad match expanding into irrelevant searches, conversion tracking miscounting so the trend line is wrong, or auto-applied recommendations changing the account without anyone noticing. All three show up in the first hour of an audit.
If you’d like a second set of eyes on your account
We run Google Ads audits as part of the growth side of the practice, and the first step is a short conversation about what the account is meant to be doing for the business. Bring your last 90 days of data, or just read-only access, and we’ll tell you plainly what’s working, what’s leaking and what we’d fix first. No obligation past that first chat.