Google Ads Audit Checklist: 12 Places Wasted Spend Hides
Most Google Ads accounts leak money in the same dozen places. Some leaks are small and chronic; some quietly consume a third of the budget. Here’s the checklist we use when auditing an account for the first time — work through it and you’ll know more about your account than most agencies report.
Measurement First (Because Everything Else Depends on It)
1. Conversion tracking accuracy
Are conversions double-counted (a form thank-you page firing alongside a button click event)? Are calls tracked at all? Is anything counting page views as conversions? Broken measurement makes every downstream optimization wrong, which is why we always fix tracking before touching bids.
2. Conversion actions worth money
Check what the account optimizes toward. Newsletter signups and “engaged visits” train Google to find you more of exactly that — instead of leads.
Structure and Targeting
3. Broad match sprawl
Review the actual search terms report. Broad match plus smart bidding can work, but unsupervised it buys queries that are embarrassingly unrelated to your business.
4. Negative keyword discipline
When was a negative keyword last added? Accounts without a living negative list pay a permanent irrelevance tax: jobs, free, DIY, competitors’ brand names you can’t convert.
5. Location settings
The default “presence or interest” setting happily spends your local budget on people in other countries reading about your city. Verify it.
6. Brand vs. non-brand separation
If brand terms are mixed into performance campaigns, your reported results are flattered by clicks you would have won for a fraction of the price — or organically.
Spending and Bidding
7. Budget allocation vs. results
Rank campaigns by cost per qualified conversion, then compare with budget split. It’s routine to find the worst performer spending the most, purely by inertia.
8. Bidding strategy fit
Target CPA with ten conversions a month starves itself; maximize clicks on a lead-gen account buys traffic, not customers. The strategy has to match the account’s data volume and goal.
9. Search partners and Display expansion
Check where ads actually served. These checkbox defaults frequently consume budget at dramatically worse conversion rates.
The Part After the Click
10. Landing page message match
Does the page continue the exact promise of the ad, or dump visitors on a generic homepage? Message mismatch is the most common conversion killer in paid search — and a core reason we pair ads with CRO.
11. Mobile experience
Most local and many B2B clicks are mobile. Slow load, tiny tap targets, and forms that fight autofill silently burn spend.
12. Ad copy and offer testing
Look at when ad copy last changed. Accounts that haven’t tested an offer in a year aren’t being managed; they’re being billed.
What to Do With the Findings
Score each item: fine, needs work, or on fire. Fix measurement first, stop the worst leaks second, and only then think about scaling spend — scaling a leaky account just buys bigger leaks.
Want the audit done for you, with the findings priced in dollars of wasted spend? That’s the standard first step of our Google Ads Strategy & Management service. Book a free consultation and we’ll take a look.