Most people asking what a Google Ads audit includes are trying to work out one of two things. Either they've been quoted for one and want to know what they're paying for, or they've received a "quarterly audit" from their current agency that turned out to be a slide deck of screenshots and want to know if that was actually the job.
Fair questions on both sides. So here's what a proper Google Ads audit includes, section by section, based on how I run them.
What a Google Ads audit is (and isn't)
An audit is a full read of your account: settings, structure, tracking, spend, keywords, ads, bidding, targeting, and landing pages. The output is a prioritised list of things to fix, with the reasoning behind each one.
What it isn't: a login, a screenshot tour, and a generic "you should try Performance Max" recommendation. If the deliverable you get can't tell you which three things to change first and why, it wasn't an audit.
The rest of this post is the section-by-section breakdown of what actually gets covered.
1. Account structure and campaign settings
This is the boring but essential part. Every audit starts by pulling every campaign setting, one at a time, and checking whether it matches the goal.
That means location targeting (is Presence set correctly, or is the account bidding on "interest" and paying for clicks from three countries you don't service), network settings (is Search Partners on when it shouldn't be), ad rotation, bid strategy, budget caps, sitelinks at the account vs campaign level, and negative keyword lists actually applied.
The other half of this section is structure. Ad groups too broad? Too fragmented? Are campaign types doing what they're meant to do (Search bidding on brand terms while Performance Max eats them, that kind of thing)?
Real example: an Australian auction marketplace we audited had the whole account fragmented across dozens of ad groups organised by product category. Smart Bidding never got enough conversion data in any one ad group to learn properly. Rebuilding around search intent instead of product taxonomy took bid completions from ~15 per day to over 100. Same budget. Same ads. Different structure. Full case study here.
2. Conversion tracking
This is where audits find the biggest wins, and it's also where most audits skip the actual work.
A proper conversion tracking review checks that every conversion action is firing, firing once (not three times), attributed to the right source, imported into Google Ads correctly, marked as Primary or Secondary appropriately, and reconciling against GA4. If Enhanced Conversions are meant to be running, they need to be verified, not just enabled.
Why does this matter so much? Because Smart Bidding optimises against whatever signal you tell it to. If your tracking is silently broken, you're not underperforming, you're bidding blind.
Real example: a Melbourne paediatric clinic had a healthy-looking account on paper. Cost per conversion looked reasonable, spend was steady, the agency's reports said everything was fine. The audit found conversion tracking had quietly broken months earlier. The events were still firing, just against a broken signal. Smart Bidding was optimising for the wrong thing. Fixing the tracking was the whole story. Leads went up 5x. Full case study here.
If a Google Ads audit doesn't include a proper tracking review, walk away. It's the single section most likely to move the number.
3. Keywords, match types, and search terms
This section reads your keyword list, checks the match types, and pulls the last 90 days of search term data to see what your money is actually being spent on.
Specifically: are you paying for competitor brand terms you never intended to bid on? Are broad match keywords pulling in queries with no commercial intent? Are your top spending search terms even converting? Is your negative keyword list current, or is it a list from three years ago that no one has touched since?
The audit also checks the keyword-to-ad-group mapping. If a single ad group has 40 keywords across five distinct themes, no ad copy in the world can be relevant to all of them. Quality Score suffers, CPCs go up, and you're stuck.
Something worth checking yourself before an audit: pull your search terms report for the last 30 days, sort by cost, and read the top 50. If more than a handful make you go "wait, we were paying for that?", that's a signal your account has drifted.
4. Ads and extensions
For Responsive Search Ads: is every ad group actually running an ad? Are ads at Excellent or Good ad strength? Are there pinned headlines and, if so, are they pinned for the right reason (there is one, and it's compliance or brand)? Are the headlines and descriptions selling the actual thing you sell, or are they generic filler?
For extensions (assets, technically, but everyone still calls them extensions): sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, price extensions, promotion extensions, location, call, and lead form. Every one of these should be reviewed for relevance, freshness, and whether they're actually showing.
The audit will also flag disapproved ads, policy issues, and any campaigns quietly running with only one active RSA, which caps performance.
5. Bidding, budgets, and pacing
This is where audits find money that's being burned quietly.
Bid strategy: is Max Conversions running on a campaign that doesn't get enough conversions per week to make Smart Bidding work? Is Target CPA set at a number the account has never actually hit? Is the campaign in "learning" mode because someone kept changing the target?
Budgets: are campaigns capped so tightly they never get out of first gear? Are budgets pooled where they shouldn't be (shared budgets across mismatched campaigns), or split where they should be pooled?
Pacing: is the account overspending in the first two weeks of the month and starving itself in the back half? Are there days of the week or times of day the account performs badly at, and if so, is it bid-scheduled or just wearing the losses?
Real example: Viking Industrial's cost per lead had drifted well above what the account could actually support. The audit found the bid strategy, the budget cap, and the campaign structure were all working against each other. Three months after untangling those three things, cost per lead was down 90%. Same channel. Same intent. Different mechanics. Full case study here.
6. Performance Max and Shopping (where relevant)
If the account runs Performance Max, the audit reviews asset group structure, signal strength (audience signals, first-party data feeding in), brand exclusions, campaign-level negatives, and the Insights report for search categories and channel breakdown.
For Shopping (or the Shopping side of PMAX): product feed health, disapprovals in Merchant Center, product performance segmentation, priority settings, and whether the feed is doing the job it's meant to do.
Performance Max is the campaign type where "set and forget" costs the most. It needs active management, and any audit that skips it is missing where a real chunk of spend now lives.
7. Audiences, geo, and device
The audit reviews audience targeting (custom segments, in-market, remarketing lists, customer match), geographic bid adjustments and exclusions, and device performance.
Common finds: audiences added as "observation" that should be "targeting" or vice versa. Geographic bid adjustments that were set two years ago and never re-checked. Mobile performing well but bid down 30% because someone did that once and forgot.
8. Landing pages and post-click
An audit doesn't stop at the click. The landing page is where the conversion is either won or thrown away.
The audit reviews load speed (Core Web Vitals), message match between ad and page, form length and friction, mobile experience, and whether the page has a single primary call to action or is trying to do everything at once.
If you're driving qualified traffic to a page that takes 8 seconds to load on mobile and asks for 14 form fields to book a call, no amount of bidding optimisation will save it.
What separates a good audit from a bad one
My take: a good audit is judged on the "what to do about it" section, not the "what we found" section. Anyone can screenshot your settings back at you. The value is in the prioritisation. Which three things do I fix first, why those three, and what should I expect to happen when I do?
If the deliverable is 40 slides of screenshots with recommendations like "review keyword performance regularly", it wasn't an audit. It was a document.
What you should walk away with
At the end of a proper Google Ads audit you should have:
- A written report that names specific issues in specific campaigns, not generic best-practice advice
- A prioritised action list: top three fixes, then everything else
- The reasoning behind each fix, not just the fix itself
- Estimated impact where it's estimable (and honesty where it isn't)
- Enough detail that you or your current team could implement it without hiring the auditor
If you'd like to see what one of these looks like on your account, that's what I do here. Or read Google's own guide to reviewing account performance if you want to have a first swing at it yourself.
Key Takeaways
- A Google Ads audit covers settings, structure, tracking, keywords, ads, bidding, PMAX/Shopping, audiences, and landing pages. Anything less is a partial review.
- Conversion tracking is the single most valuable section. Broken tracking silently breaks bidding.
- Structure and bidding together account for most of the wins we see (Viking's 90% CPL drop was both).
- A real deliverable includes prioritised actions with reasoning, not just a list of findings.
- If the audit report can't tell you what to fix first and why, it wasn't an audit.
If you've been paying for "audits" that read like slide decks, or you're picking an auditor and want to know what you should expect, that's exactly the gap I built my audit process to fill. Have a look at what's included and book a call if it's the fit.