Most accounts we audit have never had a full structural review. Budgets get adjusted, a few campaigns get paused, new ones get added — but nobody steps back and checks the fifteen things below in one sitting. Run through this list in order. Each section builds on the last, and skipping ahead usually means missing the real problem.
Account structure and settings (1-4)
1. Campaign type mix. Check whether Search, Performance Max, and Display budgets are split in proportion to actual lead quality, not just volume. We regularly find 30-40% of budget sitting in Performance Max campaigns that are reporting conversions Search never would have counted as qualified.
2. Location targeting. Confirm "Presence" targeting is selected over "Presence or Interest" unless you genuinely want to serve ads to people researching your service area from elsewhere. This single setting alone can waste 10-15% of spend on irrelevant geography.
3. Ad schedule. Pull performance by hour and day of week. B2B accounts in particular often keep ads running 24/7 when 80% of qualified conversions happen within business hours.
4. Shared budgets vs. individual budgets. Shared budgets across campaigns with different priorities almost always starve your best-performing campaign. Split them unless you have a specific reason not to.
Keywords and search terms (5-7)
5. Match type distribution. As a rule of thumb, if more than two-thirds of spend sits in broad match and you're running under 30 conversions a month, you don't have enough data volume for the algorithm to use broad match efficiently yet.
6. Negative keyword lists. Check the last negative keyword update date. If it's more than 30 days old, you're bleeding spend on irrelevant search terms — this is the single most common finding in our audits.
7. Keyword overlap across campaigns. Search for the same or near-identical keywords running in multiple campaigns. This creates internal competition that inflates your own cost per click.
Bidding and conversion tracking (8-10)
8. Conversion action values. Confirm which actions are marked "primary" for bidding purposes. If low-value actions like newsletter signups count equally with sales-qualified leads, Smart Bidding will optimize toward the easy, cheap action every time.
9. Conversion tracking accuracy. Cross-check Google Ads conversion counts against your CRM for the same date range. A gap larger than 10-15% means your tracking has a leak — usually duplicate firing, lost click IDs, or form submissions that don't match CRM records.
10. Bid strategy maturity. If a campaign changed bid strategy in the last 14 days, treat its data as unreliable. Smart Bidding needs a learning period, and judging it too early leads to premature, wrong decisions.
Ads and assets (11-12)
11. Ad strength and asset coverage. Check that every ad group has at least 3 unique responsive search ads with distinct headlines, not just reworded variations. Thin asset coverage caps your Quality Score and your eligibility for top placements.
12. Ad relevance to landing page. Read your top five ads next to the page they send traffic to. If the specific offer, price range, or service mentioned in the ad doesn't appear on the page within the first scroll, you have a relevance gap costing you both Quality Score and conversion rate.
Landing pages and measurement (13-15)
13. Page load speed on mobile. Anything over 3 seconds on mobile is costing you conversions before the page even finishes loading. This is a frequent, fixable issue that doesn't require touching the campaign at all — see our landing pages and websites service for what a properly built page should hit.
14. Form length and friction. Count the fields on your lead form. Every field beyond name, email, and phone measurably reduces completion rate for cold paid traffic. If you need more information, collect it after the lead converts, not before.
15. Attribution window and reporting cadence. Confirm your team is judging performance on a 30-day rolling view, not week-to-week swings, and that whoever reports on performance understands the difference between leads and sales-qualified leads.
How to use this list
Don't try to fix all fifteen at once. Work through them in order — structure and settings first, because changes there affect everything downstream. Tracking accuracy comes before bidding changes, because you can't trust a bid strategy fed by broken data. Landing page and form changes come last because they take longer to test properly.
- Week 1: Items 1-4 (structure and settings)
- Week 2: Items 5-7 (keywords)
- Week 3: Items 8-10 (tracking and bidding)
- Week 4+: Items 11-15 (creative and landing pages)
An account that's never been structurally audited usually has at least 4-5 of these fifteen issues active at once. Fixing even two or three of them typically shows up in cost per lead within a month.
If you manage Google Ads for a business with location-specific service areas — home services, local B2B, multi-location retail — the structure issues above compound quickly because location targeting and campaign segmentation both need to be right. See our industries page for sector-specific considerations, or get in touch via contact us for sector-specific recommendations.
Running through this checklist yourself takes a few hours if you know where to look. If you'd rather have a second set of eyes do it and hand you a prioritized list, that's exactly what a Google Ads audit is for — a structured, documented pass through all fifteen areas with specific recommendations attached.