How to Audit Your Google Ads Account in 30 Minutes

You don't need an entire afternoon to identify the biggest problems in a Google Ads account. In fact, with a structured approach, you can uncover the most impactful issues – wasted spend, tracking gaps, poor quality scores, and misaligned bid strategies – in roughly 30 minutes.

This isn't a replacement for a comprehensive PPC audit (those are worth doing annually), but it's a quick health check that any marketer or business owner can run to identify the low-hanging fruit. Think of it as a diagnostic scan: you're looking for the red flags that warrant deeper investigation.

Set a timer. Open your Google Ads account. Let's get started.

Minutes 0–5: Conversion Tracking Verification

Before you look at anything else, confirm that your conversion tracking is actually working. Every other metric in your account is meaningless if conversions aren't being recorded accurately.

What to Check

1. Navigate to Goals > Conversions > Summary. Review each conversion action listed. Are the right actions being tracked? For ecommerce, you should see purchase/transaction events. For lead generation, form submissions and phone calls.
2. Check the "Status" column. Every active conversion action should show "Recording conversions." If you see "No recent conversions," "Inactive," or "Tag inactive," you have a tracking problem that needs immediate attention.
3. Look for duplicate conversions. A common issue is having multiple conversion actions tracking the same event – for example, a Google Ads tag and an imported Google Analytics goal both counting purchases. This inflates your reported conversions and makes your CPA appear artificially low.
4. Verify attribution settings. Check which attribution model each conversion action uses. If it's still set to "Last click," consider switching to "Data-driven" – Google's recommended model, which distributes credit across multiple touchpoints.
5. Check enhanced conversions. If you're not using enhanced conversions, you're likely underreporting by 10–25% due to cookie restrictions and cross-device journeys. This is particularly important in 2026 with increasing browser privacy restrictions.

Red Flags

• No conversion actions set up at all (surprisingly common)
• Conversion actions counting views or page visits as primary conversions
• A sudden drop or spike in conversion volume with no business explanation
• Conversion lag not accounted for (comparing yesterday's conversions to last month's is misleading for long sales cycles)

Minutes 5–10: Wasted Spend Analysis

The fastest way to improve account performance is to stop paying for traffic that will never convert. Here's where to look for waste.

Search Terms Report

Navigate to Insights & Reports > Search terms. Set the date range to the last 30 days and sort by cost (highest first).

Ask yourself:

• Are the top-spending search terms relevant to your business?
• Are there obvious irrelevant queries consuming budget? (e.g., "free," "jobs," "DIY," competitor employee names)
• What percentage of your spend is on search terms you can actually see? (Google hides a growing proportion – if more than 30% of spend is in "other search terms," your keyword targeting may be too broad.)

Make a quick list of terms to add as negative keywords. Don't overthink it at this stage – just catch the obvious waste.

Network and Placement Check

For Search campaigns, check whether "Search Partners" is enabled. While not always wasteful, Search Partners often has lower conversion rates than Google Search proper. Review the segment data (Segment > Network) to compare performance.

For Display or PMax campaigns, review the placement report. Look for:

• Mobile app placements (often low quality for most advertisers)
• Parked domains and MFA (made-for-advertising) sites
• Placements with high impressions but zero conversions

Geographic Waste

Navigate to Audiences, keywords & content > Locations. Check whether your ads are showing in locations that matter to your business. Common issues:

• Targeting set to "Presence or interest" instead of "Presence" – this means people merely interested in your target area see your ads, even if they're thousands of miles away
• Spend in countries or regions where you don't operate
• No location bid adjustments for high and low-performing areas

Minutes 10–15: Quality Score Analysis

Quality Score directly impacts your cost per click and ad position. Low Quality Scores mean you're paying more than competitors for the same placements.

How to Check

Navigate to your keywords tab and add columns for Quality Score, Expected CTR, Landing Page Experience, and Ad Relevance. Sort by cost to focus on your highest-spend keywords first.

What to Look For

• Quality Scores below 5: These keywords are significantly underperforming. Either the ad copy doesn't match the keyword intent, the landing page is poor, or the keyword is too broad.
• Expected CTR "Below Average": Your ads aren't compelling enough for these queries. Review your ad copy – does it address the specific intent behind the search?
• Landing Page Experience "Below Average": Your landing pages need work. Common causes: slow load times, poor mobile experience, content that doesn't match the ad promise, aggressive pop-ups.
• Ad Relevance "Below Average": There's a disconnect between your keywords and ad copy. This often means your ad groups contain too many unrelated keywords. Tighter theming is needed.

Quick Win

Identify your 10 highest-spending keywords with Quality Scores below 6. Improving these – through better ad copy, more relevant landing pages, or tighter ad group theming – will have the biggest impact on your overall account costs.

Minutes 15–20: Negative Keywords Review

Negative keywords are the unsung hero of Google Ads management. A well-maintained negative keyword list prevents wasted spend, improves CTR, and increases Quality Scores. An unmaintained one is a slow budget leak.

Audit Your Existing Negatives

1. Check for conflicts. Navigate to Tools > Troubleshooting > Negative keyword conflicts (or use the Recommendations tab). Google will flag cases where a negative keyword is blocking a keyword you're actively bidding on. This is more common than you'd think, particularly with broad match negatives.
2. Review negative keyword lists. Under Tools > Shared Library > Negative keyword lists, check whether you have centralised lists applied across campaigns. If your negatives are only at the ad group or campaign level, you're likely missing coverage.
3. Look for missing obvious negatives. Common categories that should almost always be excluded:
   • Job-related: "jobs," "careers," "salary," "hiring," "vacancy"
   • Educational: "course," "training," "how to," "tutorial" (unless you sell courses)
   • Free-seekers: "free," "cheap," "discount code" (depending on your strategy)
   • DIY: "DIY," "homemade," "template" (for service businesses)

Build a Negative Keyword Habit

Negative keyword management shouldn't be a one-time audit task. Build a weekly process: spend 10 minutes reviewing the search terms report and adding negatives. Over time, this compounds into significant savings.

Minutes 20–25: Bid Strategy Assessment

Your bid strategy determines how Google allocates your budget. An incorrect bid strategy can quietly undermine performance even when everything else is set up correctly.

What to Check

1. Is the bid strategy appropriate for your goals?
   • Manual CPC: Gives full control but requires constant attention. Only appropriate if you have the time and expertise to manage bids actively.
   • Maximise Clicks: Optimises for volume, not quality. Rarely appropriate for campaigns focused on conversions.
   • Maximise Conversions: Good when you want to spend your full budget efficiently on conversions but don't yet have a clear CPA target.
   • Target CPA: Appropriate when you know your target cost per acquisition and have at least 30 conversions per month.
   • Target ROAS: Best for ecommerce when you have sufficient conversion volume and clear return targets.
2. Check bid strategy status. Navigate to the bid strategy report (Campaigns > Bid strategy type column). Look for "Learning" status – if a campaign has been in learning for more than two weeks, something is wrong (usually too many changes, too few conversions, or targets set too aggressively).
3. Review target CPA or ROAS settings. Are they realistic? If your target CPA is £10 but your average CPA has been £35, you've set a target the algorithm can't achieve, which means it will drastically limit your traffic. Start with a target 10–20% above your current average and optimise down gradually.

Common Bid Strategy Mistakes

• Using "Maximise Clicks" on a campaign that should be optimising for conversions
• Setting target CPA or ROAS before accumulating enough conversion data
• Making frequent changes that keep the bid strategy in "Learning" mode indefinitely
• Different campaigns competing against each other for the same audience (portfolio bid strategies can help here)

Minutes 25–30: Ad Copy and Extensions

In the final five minutes, do a quick scan of your ad copy and extensions (now called "assets" in Google's interface).

Ad Copy Check

• Are you running Responsive Search Ads (RSAs)? Google has fully deprecated Expanded Text Ads. Every ad group should have at least one RSA with maximum headlines (15) and descriptions (4) filled in.
• Check ad strength. Google rates RSAs from "Poor" to "Excellent." While ad strength isn't a direct ranking factor, ads rated "Poor" typically have gaps – too few headlines, not enough keyword relevance, or missing descriptions.
• Pin critical messages. If you have specific USPs or CTAs that must always appear, use headline pinning. But don't over-pin – pinning every position removes the algorithm's ability to optimise.
• Count active ads per ad group. Each ad group should have 1–3 RSAs. Zero ads means the ad group is paused or broken. More than 3 means the data is split too thinly.

Extensions / Assets Check

Extensions improve CTR and Quality Score. Verify you have:

• Sitelinks: At least 4 per campaign, linking to your most important pages
• Callouts: Short USPs like "Free Delivery," "14-Day Returns," "24/7 Support"
• Structured snippets: Product categories, service types, or brands
• Call extensions: If phone leads matter to your business
• Location extensions: If you have a physical location
• Image extensions: Increasingly important for standing out in search results

Missing extensions is one of the easiest wins in any Google Ads audit. They cost nothing to add and can improve CTR by 10–15%.

Your Quick Audit Summary

After 30 minutes, you should have a clear picture of:

1. Tracking health: Is conversion tracking working correctly, and is it counting the right actions?
2. Wasted spend: Where is money being spent on irrelevant searches, poor placements, or wrong locations?
3. Quality Scores: Which high-spend keywords are costing you more than they should?
4. Negative keywords: Are there obvious gaps in your negative keyword coverage?
5. Bid strategy: Is the automated bidding set up correctly and performing as intended?
6. Ad copy and extensions: Are you giving Google enough to work with?

This quick audit will surface the 20% of issues causing 80% of your wasted spend. The fixes are often straightforward: add negative keywords, correct tracking, adjust bid targets, and fill in missing ad copy and extensions.

When to Go Deeper

This 30-minute audit catches the obvious problems. But for a thorough review – including account structure, audience strategy, landing page analysis, competitor benchmarking, and attribution modelling – you need a comprehensive PPC audit.

If your quick audit revealed multiple red flags, or if your Google Ads account simply isn't performing as well as it should, our team at Dynamically can help. We offer detailed Google Ads audits that go well beyond the surface, identifying structural issues, competitive opportunities, and a clear roadmap for improvement. Whether you need a one-off audit or ongoing PPC management, we'd be happy to take a look. Get in touch for a free initial review of your account.