How to Audit a Google Ads Account: The 10-Point Checklist

If you're paying an agency to run your Google Ads and you're not sure whether they're doing a good job, you're not alone. It's one of the most common situations I come across: a business spending £2,000, £5,000, even £20,000 a month on paid search, with no real visibility into whether the account is being managed properly or quietly left to run on autopilot.

The uncomfortable truth is that a poorly managed Google Ads account doesn't always look broken. The ads still show. Clicks still happen. Reports still arrive. But underneath, the account could be haemorrhaging budget on irrelevant searches, targeting the wrong audiences, or running campaigns that haven't been touched in months.

This checklist covers the 10 things I look at every time I audit a Google Ads account. Whether you're reviewing your own account or evaluating the work of an agency, these are the signals that separate a well-managed account from one that's quietly failing.

Before you start: You'll need either admin access to the Google Ads account or, at minimum, read-only access. If your agency has never offered you access to your own account, that itself is a red flag worth noting.

1. Conversion Tracking: Is It Set Up and Firing Correctly?

This is the first thing I check, every single time. Without accurate conversion tracking, every decision in the account is based on guesswork.

What to look for:

• Go to Tools > Conversions in your Google Ads account
• Check that at least one conversion action is marked as "Recording conversions"
• Confirm the conversion actions are meaningful: purchases, form submissions, phone calls, or bookings. Not just page views or time on site.
• Look at the "Status" column. If it says "No recent conversions" or "Unverified," that's a problem.

A surprisingly common issue I find in audits is accounts optimising towards micro-conversions (like button clicks) rather than actual revenue events. Google's Smart Bidding strategies will chase whatever you tell them to, so if you're tracking the wrong thing, your entire campaign is optimising towards the wrong outcome.

Red flag: Conversion tracking is missing, broken, or tracking something irrelevant. If the account can't measure results, it cannot be improved.

2. Search Term Reports: Where Is the Budget Actually Going?

Your keywords are what you bid on. Your search terms are what people actually typed. These two things are often very different, and the gap between them is where budget gets wasted.

Go to Keywords > Search Terms and filter by the last 90 days. What you're looking for:

What you see	What it means
Irrelevant queries with spend	Budget is leaking to unqualified traffic
Competitor brand names with no intent to switch	Wasted clicks
Broad, generic terms with low conversion rates	Poor match type control
A long list of search terms with zero negatives added	No active management

The search term report is one of the clearest indicators of whether an account is being actively managed. An agency that reviews and refines this regularly will have a tighter, more efficient account. One that doesn't will have an account that gradually drifts towards irrelevance.

Red flag: Significant spend on search terms that have nothing to do with your product or service, with no negative keywords added to block them.

3. Negative Keyword Lists: Is the Account Protected?

Negative keywords are how you stop your ads showing for searches that will never convert. A well-managed account will have a robust, regularly updated negative keyword list. A neglected one will have almost none.

What to check:

• Go to Keywords > Negative Keywords
• Look at the account-level and campaign-level negative lists
• Count how many negatives exist. A mature account should have dozens, often hundreds.
• Check whether the negatives are logical: job seekers, competitors, irrelevant industries, free-related terms

If you're running broad match or Performance Max campaigns (which Google heavily pushes), negative keywords become even more critical. Without them, these campaign types will happily spend your budget on searches you'd never approve.

Red flag: Fewer than 20 negative keywords in an account that's been running for more than three months. Or no negative keyword lists at all.

4. Ad Copy: Is It Tested, Relevant, and Current?

Ad copy is the first impression your brand makes on a potential customer. It's also one of the most neglected areas in agency-managed accounts.

What to look for:

Go to your Ads section and check:

• How many ads are in each ad group? Google recommends at least one Responsive Search Ad (RSA) per ad group. If you only have one ad and it hasn't been touched in six months, nothing is being tested.
• What is the Ad Strength rating? Google rates RSAs as Poor, Average, Good, or Excellent. A well-managed account should have most ads at "Good" or "Excellent."
• Are the ads relevant to the keywords in that ad group? If an ad group targets "accountancy software for small businesses" but the ad copy talks generically about "business tools," that's a relevance problem that hurts both Quality Score and conversion rates.
• Are there any disapproved ads? Disapproved ads mean your budget may be running entirely on one surviving ad, with no testing happening.

Fresh, tested ad copy isn't just good practice. It directly affects your Quality Score, which in turn affects how much you pay per click.

Red flag: A single untested ad per ad group, rated "Poor" or "Average," with copy that hasn't changed in over 90 days.

5. Quality Score: Are You Paying More Than You Should?

Quality Score is Google's rating of the relevance and quality of your keywords, ads, and landing pages. It's scored from 1 to 10, and it directly affects your cost per click. A higher Quality Score means you pay less for the same ad position. A lower one means you're subsidising competitors who've done the work properly.

How to check it:

Go to Keywords, click the columns icon, and add "Quality Score," "Landing page experience," and "Ad relevance" to your view.

• Score of 7-10: Healthy. Google considers this keyword well-matched to its ads and landing page.
• Score of 4-6: Average. There's room for improvement, but it's not critical.
• Score of 1-3: Poor. You're likely paying a significant premium per click, and conversion rates will suffer.

The three components of Quality Score are expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. If any of these are rated "Below average," that's a specific, fixable problem that a good agency should be actively working on.

Red flag: Multiple high-spend keywords with Quality Scores of 3 or below, and no evidence of recent work to address them.

6. Bidding Strategy: Is It Aligned With Your Goals?

Google offers a range of bidding strategies, from fully manual to fully automated. Neither is inherently right or wrong. What matters is whether the strategy in use matches your business goals and has enough conversion data to function properly.

Common bidding strategies and when they make sense:

• Maximise Clicks: Useful for brand awareness or when you have zero conversion data. Should not be used long-term if you care about ROI.
• Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): Good for lead generation when you know what a lead is worth. Needs at least 30-50 conversions per month to work reliably.
• Target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): Ideal for e-commerce. Requires consistent conversion volume and accurate revenue tracking.
• Maximise Conversions: Can work well, but without a target CPA set, Google may spend your entire budget chasing low-value conversions.

The problem I see most often is accounts using Smart Bidding strategies without enough conversion data to support them. Google's automation is powerful, but it needs signal. An account with five conversions a month on Target CPA is essentially flying blind.

Red flag: Smart Bidding strategies running on accounts with fewer than 30 conversions per month, or a bidding strategy that hasn't been reviewed since the account launched.

7. Campaign Structure: Is the Account Built to Scale?

A well-structured Google Ads account makes it easy to control spend, identify what's working, and scale what performs. A poorly structured one creates confusion, cannibalisation between campaigns, and wasted budget.

Signs of a well-structured account:

• Campaigns are separated by intent (branded vs. non-branded), product category, or geography
• Ad groups contain tightly themed keyword clusters, not a mixture of loosely related terms
• Budget allocation reflects performance: top-performing campaigns get more budget, not equal shares across everything

Signs of a poorly structured account:

• One or two campaigns doing everything, with no logical segmentation
• Ad groups containing 50+ keywords across wildly different topics
• Branded and non-branded keywords mixed together (this inflates performance metrics and hides true acquisition costs)
• Performance Max campaigns running alongside Search campaigns with no exclusions, causing them to compete against each other

Structure problems are often invisible in high-level reports. The numbers might look acceptable, but underneath, budget is being allocated inefficiently and there's no foundation for growth.

Red flag: A flat account structure with one campaign, one ad group, and dozens of unrelated keywords. Or Performance Max campaigns with zero asset group segmentation.

8. Audience Targeting and Exclusions: Who Is Actually Seeing Your Ads?

Most accounts focus heavily on keywords and neglect audiences entirely. That's a missed opportunity at best, and a budget problem at worst.

What to audit:

Go to Audiences within your campaigns and check:

• Are audiences applied? Remarketing lists, customer match lists, and in-market audiences should all be in use for established accounts.
• Are they set to Observation or Targeting? Observation lets you gather data and apply bid adjustments. Targeting restricts your ads to only those audiences. Both have their place; neither should be set and forgotten.
• Are there any exclusions? Excluding existing customers from acquisition campaigns, or excluding low-value demographics, is basic hygiene that many accounts skip entirely.

One specific thing I always check: whether past converters are being excluded from top-of-funnel campaigns. If you're paying to re-acquire customers who already bought from you last week, that's a waste that's easy to fix and rarely gets attention.

Red flag: No audiences applied anywhere in the account, or remarketing lists sitting unused despite the account having sufficient traffic to build them.

9. Landing Pages: Are Clicks Converting Into Customers?

Getting someone to click your ad is half the job. What happens after the click is just as important, and it's an area that agencies often treat as "not their problem."

A well-managed account considers the full journey from search to conversion. That means the landing page has to be relevant, fast, and built to convert.

What to check:

• Message match: Does the landing page headline match the ad copy and the keyword intent? If someone searches "emergency boiler repair London" and lands on your homepage, you've already lost them.
• Page speed: Use Google's PageSpeed Insights to check load time, especially on mobile. A page that takes more than 3 seconds to load loses a significant portion of visitors before they even see your offer.
• Clear call to action: Is there one obvious next step on the page? Multiple competing CTAs (call us, email us, download this, read more) dilute conversion rates.
• Relevance to the campaign: If you're running five different campaigns targeting different products or audiences, are they each going to a specific, relevant landing page? Or are they all dumping traffic on the homepage?

Red flag: All campaigns pointing to the homepage, with no dedicated landing pages, and a Quality Score of "Below average" for landing page experience.

10. Budget Pacing: Is Your Spend Being Managed Through the Month?

Budget pacing is one of those issues that rarely shows up in agency reports but has an immediate impact on performance. If your monthly budget runs out by the 20th, your ads go dark for the final third of the month. If it's front-loaded, you may be paying inflated CPCs during peak competition periods and missing cheaper traffic later on.

What to check:

Go to Campaigns and look at the daily spend trend over the last 30 days. You're looking for:

• Consistent daily spend close to your daily budget limit: If you see huge spikes followed by near-zero days, pacing is not being managed
• Overspend or underspend: Google can spend up to twice your daily budget on a given day (to capture demand), but monthly spend should never exceed your monthly cap
• Budget exhaustion warnings: If campaigns are showing "Limited by budget" regularly, your ads are going dark during peak hours and you're missing impressions

Also check whether your budget is split sensibly across campaigns. A common issue is equal budget allocation across all campaigns regardless of performance, meaning your best-performing campaign is capped while a weaker one continues to spend freely.

How a well-managed account handles this:

A good agency monitors pacing weekly, adjusts daily budgets to account for seasonal demand, and reallocates spend towards campaigns generating the strongest return. Budget decisions should be dynamic, not set once and left alone.

Red flag: Campaigns regularly hitting budget limits by midday, or a monthly spend chart that looks like a cliff edge rather than a steady line. Either way, you're losing traffic you've already paid to capture.

What to Do If Your Audit Uncovers Problems

If you've worked through this checklist and found multiple red flags, you have a decision to make. Some issues are fixable with the right conversation with your current agency. Others are symptoms of a deeper problem with how the account is being managed.

Here's a simple way to think about it:

• 1-2 red flags: Raise them with your agency and ask for a specific plan to address each one. Give them the chance to fix it.
• 3-4 red flags: The account has structural or strategic problems. Ask for a formal account review and a clear timeline for improvements.
• 5+ red flags: The account is not being managed to a professional standard. It's worth getting an independent second opinion.

At DomiSearch, we offer an independent Google Ads account review for businesses who want an honest, second-opinion assessment of their account. No obligation, no sales pressure. Just a clear picture of what's working, what isn't, and what we'd do differently.

If you'd like one, get in touch here and we'll take a look.