How to Conduct A Google Ads Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide (+ Checklist)

Even the most carefully planned PPC campaigns can go off the rails when not monitored closely. You can be spending big on ads, and they may even be racking up clicks. But you’ll soon find they’re delivering little to no actual value.

That’s where a Google Ads audit comes in handy. It’s like a health checkup for your account. One that allows you to identify what’s working, spot inefficiencies, and maximize every dollar spent.

Without a clear auditing strategy, you run the risk of missing key optimization opportunities, poor campaign performance, and worse—wasted budgets.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through a step-by-step audit checklist to help you take control of your campaigns and make them work smarter.

When should you perform an audit?

A Google Ads audit is not just about fixing what’s broken. Regular PPC audits are key to identifying growth opportunities and just making sure that your campaigns are working as intended. That being said, here are some of the most common scenarios where an audit is necessary.

When you take over a new account

When you’ve recently started managing a new account, an audit helps you assess its current health and identify opportunities for quick wins.

When you see a performance decline

If you observe that certain key metrics like CTR, ROAS, or conversions are showing a consistent dip, an audit helps you diagnose why it’s happening and how it can be fixed.

During routine checkups

Regularly monitoring your account health (quarterly or biannually) helps you catch issues before they escalate.

During a campaign restructuring

If you’ve made changes to your campaign or targeting settings, audits can help you make sure the new structure is properly optimized without unnecessary overlap.

When making seasonal adjustments

Audits during seasonal campaigns ensure aspects like messaging, budget allocation, and targeting are optimized for the season.

Here’s a step-by-step checklist for performing a Google Ads audit

If you’d like some guidance on performing a Google Ads audit, here’s a checklist you can use to get the job done.

1. Assess your account structure

Effective campaign management starts with a well-structured account. When auditing your account, make sure you focus on:

Campaign naming conventions

• Ensure all your campaigns follow a uniform naming structure so filtering and grouping campaigns is easier.
• Campaign names should include campaign types such as search, display, or shopping for better differentiation. It should also reflect the purpose of the campaign. For instance, you can use ‘LeadGen’ for lead generation campaigns or ‘Brand awareness’ when running awareness campaigns.

Campaign segmentation

• Review your segmentation criteria and ensure you’re targeting the right audience at the right locations with the right language.
• Create separate campaigns for brand and non-brand keywords so you have better control over bidding and performance.
• Optimize your bid strategies for each campaign type.For non-brand keywords, you may want to keep an eye on ad spend, especially for competitive keywords.
• Make sure to check the conversion tracking setup for segmented campaigns for more accurate performance measurement and better attribution.

2. Conduct a thorough performance review

During a performance review, the goal is to spot underperforming campaigns and figure out how you can improve them. For this, you can:

Analyze key metrics to spot trends and identify areas for improvement

1. Click-Through Rate (CTR): Evaluate the effectiveness of your ad copy and targeting. Be cautious of a high CTR, as it may indicate you’re inadvertently advertising on brand terms or attracting relevant search terms. This can lead to a lot of clicks but few conversions. On the other hand, a low CTR means your targeting needs improvement or that your ads are not resonating with your audience.
2. Cost Per Click (CPC): It’s essential for monitoring your ad costs so you’re not overspending on clicks that are less likely to convert. If your CPC is high, it could mean your keywords are too competitive or a low-quality score for your ads. But if your CPC is very low (especially under $1) in a non-brand search campaign, investigate further. A low CPC can be a sign of multiple issues. Your ads may be getting clicks from display campaigns rather than search. You could unintentionally be matching to brand searches, skewing performance metrics. Or there may be other underlying problems that need to be addressed.
3. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): You want to keep your CPA low so your campaigns are cost-effective. If it’s on the higher side, you’re spending too much for conversions. It’s time to dial back. To lower your CPA, focus on two key areas—improve your Quality Score, as each point above 5 can cut your CPA by 16% (optimize ad relevance, keywords, and landing pages). Also consider refining your ad copy and improving landing page relevance to turn more clicks into actions.
4. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Since ROAS is a measure of profitability, a lower number indicates that your ads aren’t generating enough revenue in relation to your spend and they need optimization. Having said that, a higher ROAS doesn’t always mean better results. Here’s Frederick Vallaeys explaining it in detail:

Identify trends over time

• Ensure you collect enough data over a sufficient time period for a meaningful analysis.
• Export data into spreadsheets and use visual elements like charts or graphs to represent data. This will make it easier to spot trends over time.
• Compare performance across different campaigns and segments so you can pinpoint where variations are happening.
• Cross-reference trends with seasonal peaks, industry events, or changes in competition to account for fluctuations due to external factors.

3. Fine-tune your keyword strategy for better performance

Monitor your keywords regularly to ensure they’re aligned with your audience’s search intent.

• Make sure negative keywords are set up properly and update them regularly to avoid irrelevant searches. Mistakes in negative keywords can lead to unwanted search traffic.
• Audit your match types (exact, phrase, or broad match) so your Google ad campaigns are balanced for both reach and relevance.
• Avoid wasted budgets and ad fatigue by identifying and eliminating duplicate keywords.

💡 Pro Tip: Optmyzr’s Keyword De-Duper checks within or across campaigns for duplicate keywords. It gives you an automatic recommendation of which ones to remove based on performance data.

4. Audit your ad creatives for better engagement and conversions

Strong ad creatives are essential for driving better engagement and increased conversions.

• Create at least two to three ad variations under each ad group for proper A/B testing.
• If ads get disapproved, review policy violation notifications to understand why it happened. Examples include restricted content, misleading messaging, or technical issues.
• Check for outdated ad formats since they could result in lower ad visibility, ad disapprovals, and inefficient budget use. Update ad formats regularly and convert them to Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) for better results.
• Use relevant ad extensions like site links, structured snippets, and callouts to improve your ad’s relevance and visibility.

Read: How to Choose the Best PPC Audit Tool: 7 Top Picks for 2025

5. Monitor your landing pages

A valid landing page is important for a smooth user experience and better ad performance.

• Check for loading speeds, add clear CTAs, and make sure your ad landing pages are optimized for mobile devices.
• Tailor landing page copy to make sure they are aligned with your ad copies and keywords.
• Test for broken landing pages or pages that show ‘404’ or ‘product not found’ errors, especially if you’re managing large shopping and ticketing sites.

💡Pro Tip: Use Optmyzr’s landing page URL checker to scan and verify the integrity of the landing pages in your Google Ads account.

6. Track your budgets and bids

Fine-tune your budget allocation and bidding strategies to maximize your ROI.

Assess budget allocation

• Analyze the historical performance data of your campaigns over a defined period to get insights into which campaigns, ad groups, or keywords have been underperforming or need budget adjustments.
• Allocate more budgets to high-performing campaigns. Consider pausing or decreasing the budget for low-priority, underperforming ads to free up spend for reallocation.
• Adjust location targeting and device bids so budgets are allocated to regions and devices that perform better.

Review bidding strategies

• Check whether your campaigns are using bidding strategies that work best to drive the desired results. For example, target ROAS is best for revenue generation while target CPA is better for conversion-focused campaigns.
• Use aggressive bidding strategies such as target impression share if you’re looking to outbid your competitors.
• Study the impact of different bidding strategies by running split tests.
• If your ads are not getting enough impressions or conversions, consider adjusting your bid caps for more flexibility.

Read more: How Google Ads bidding strategies impact performance

7. Streamline your workflow

Make sure your Google Ads and GA4 are properly linked so you can track and analyze the entire customer journey, all the way from ad clicks to conversions. If you want to get a closer look at conversions, bounce rates, and other KPIs, we recommend using the following tools.

1. PPC Investigator
The PPC Investigator tells you why your account saw a sudden increase/decrease in clicks or conversions. It studies the relationship between different metrics to highlight why there was a change and what caused the change.

2. Rule Engine
Define ‘if-and-then’ conditions using Rule Engine to automate campaign management tasks like pausing underperforming ads or allocating more budget to high-converting ones. This saves time and ensures your campaigns are consistently optimized.

3. Budget pacing tool
Avoid overspending and optimize your daily budgets with the budget pacing tool. It efficiently manages your campaign budget throughout the day or month so you don’t exhaust your budgets too early or miss out on important opportunities.

8. Check your audience settings

Validate your remarketing lists and audience settings so you’re targeting the right audience with your campaigns.

• Segment larger audiences into smaller cohorts based on parameters like behavior, interests, preferences, etc. This helps in fine-tuning your campaigns for better conversions.
• Review your audience exclusion lists periodically to make sure you’re not excluding high-value audiences or including irrelevant ones.
• Double-check Google Tag Manager so that your data sources are functioning appropriately.
• Adjust audience settings based on campaign goals.
• Tweak your audience segmentation and targeting criteria based on how different audience lists perform on your campaigns.

9. Validate scripts, recommendations, and automation logic

PPC automations are a game-changer for scaling audits and managing campaigns efficiently if used thoughtfully. Regularly reviewing and optimizing scripts, automated rules, and recommendations ensures they align with your goals and don’t create inefficiencies.

• Custom scripts are super useful for optimizing the performance of your ad campaigns. However, they need to be reviewed regularly, especially during changes to platforms or account structure.
• If you’re using automation, validate rule logic periodically to avoid conflicting actions. If there are conflicting rules, decide which rule would take precedence and prioritize it to avoid unintentional overlaps.
• Remember that optimization scores are more of a directional metric. You’ll need to assess which recommendations to execute based on your unique performance goals. If a recommendation does not seem to be meaningful, dismiss it, especially if they don’t fit your targeting strategy.

What comes after your PPC audit?

Once you’ve successfully ticked off the items in this checklist, it’s time to use your findings to refine your campaigns. Here’s how you can do this:

1. Prioritize your improvements

To start with, divide your insights according to their importance and urgency and assign a priority level to each of them. A good way to do this is to use the ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) prioritization framework. This will help you differentiate your quick wins from long-term actions by evaluating and ranking your ideas. To do this, you need to:

• Identify the potential impact from implementing each of the ideas you’ve identified. Examples include reducing wasted spend, improving landing page experience etc.
• Assess your confidence in making these changes actually work based on past data and experiences.
• Evaluate how easy it is to implement the suggested change. How much resources or effort would it take?
• Assign a score for each of the improvements based on their priority.
• Multiply the scores for different improvements to get the ICE weightage.

Once you have the scores, see which actions have the highest score and prioritize implementing those first since they are likely to have the most impact.

If you find that some recommendations have a high impact score but lower overall ICE score, it could indicate a difficult with implementation or a lack of confidence. In such cases you might want to consider going ahead with recommendations that are relatively easy to implement despite low confidence. You can test such ideas and measure their impact for better decision-making.

2. Create a roadmap for your post audit actions

After you’ve finalized your priorities, you’ll need to create a detailed roadmap to manage your implementation process. This would include:

• Timelines for implementation
• Tasks under each recommendation
• Owners and deadlines for each action item
• Key milestones to track
• Approvals from stakeholders for all the assets required to implement the recommendations (e.g. ad copies, landing pages, budgets, messaging, etc.)

3. Monitor the progress

Implementation is one part of the post-audit process. The other is to closely monitor the impact of the changes you’ve implemented. For this you’ll need to:

• Create dashboards to track the impact of changes on key metrics like conversions, CPC, etc.
• Share your insights with stakeholders and clients using comprehensive reports.
• Identify areas that are working well and the ones that need improvement and create action items to address these.

Amy, who is an Optmyzr customer, says that our PPC Audit tool helps her with the implementation.

“For our monthly audits, we use a checklist that our team has created to go through the audit. We use Optmyzr’s PPC Audits once a month and work through changes on that list from the most impactful first.”

 

-Amy McClain-Ponder

Streamline your Google Ads audits with Optmyzr.

Regular audits are critical to the health of your Google Ads campaigns. They identify inefficiencies and missed opportunities that may be hiding in plain sight. Not only does this lead to better campaign performance and budget allocation, but it also ensures your ads are driving a higher ROI.

Tools like Optmyzr offer a comprehensive suite of features that take the complexity out of auditing. It takes care of the repetitive tasks while you focus on what’s important—getting the best out of your ad campaigns.

If you’re curious to know more about how Optmyzr can help you optimize your Google Ad campaigns, sign up for a free 14-day trial. Or you can even talk to one of our experts for a consultation call.