A Google Ads account can look busy while quietly wasting a sizeable part of its budget. Plenty of clicks, a healthy-looking click-through rate and regular reports do not automatically mean the campaign is producing profitable enquiries or sales. Knowing how to audit Google Ads gives you a clearer view of what is actually driving commercial results and what needs attention.

This is not about changing things for the sake of it. A useful audit should answer a few direct questions: are you measuring the right outcomes, are you paying for relevant searches, and can the website turn paid traffic into worthwhile business?

Start with the commercial goal, not the account structure

Before looking at keywords or bid strategies, be clear about what a conversion means to the business. For a local service company, that might be a qualified phone call, booked survey or completed enquiry form. For an eCommerce business, it is usually a purchase, but margin, repeat purchase value and product category can matter as much as revenue.

This sounds obvious, but it is where many accounts go wrong. Google Ads can optimise efficiently towards the wrong signal. If every contact form submission counts as a lead, including job applications, spam and low-value enquiries, the platform will learn to find more of them. That can make the cost per lead look impressive while sales remain flat.

Set out the outcomes that genuinely justify advertising spend. If different leads have very different values, separate them where possible. A £5 enquiry for a minor repair is not the same as a £5 enquiry for a large commercial contract.

Check conversion tracking before judging performance

Conversion data is the foundation of the audit. Without reliable tracking, decisions about bids, budgets and campaign performance are largely guesswork.

Check that the core actions are recorded once, at the right point in the customer journey. Form completions should fire only after a genuine successful submission, not simply when someone reaches a page that can be refreshed. Telephone call tracking needs to distinguish calls from ad visitors where practical, and eCommerce tracking should pass accurate transaction values.

Also look at what has been included as a primary conversion. Google uses primary conversions for bidding and reporting, so these should be the actions you want the account to pursue. Newsletter sign-ups, page views and button clicks may be useful observations, but they are rarely a sensible target for automated bidding.

Where lead quality is important, feed outcomes back into the account. Even a simple monthly review of which leads became customers can expose campaigns that look cheap but create little value. More advanced businesses can import qualified leads or sales from their CRM, allowing Google Ads to learn from revenue rather than form fills alone.

Review spend by campaign, not just the account total

A headline return on ad spend or average cost per lead can hide weak areas. Pull data over a meaningful period – often 90 days is a sensible starting point, although seasonal businesses may need a longer view – and compare campaigns by spend, conversions, conversion value and cost.

Look for campaigns that consume budget without a clear route to return. Brand campaigns deserve particular care. They can appear highly efficient because users already know the business, but that does not always mean paid ads deserve all the credit. Check whether the business ranks strongly for its own name, whether competitors are bidding on it and what happens to enquiries when brand spend is reduced cautiously.

At the other end of the scale, a campaign with a higher cost per lead may be more valuable if it produces larger jobs, stronger margins or better-qualified prospects. Cheap leads are not automatically good leads.

Inspect search terms and keyword matching

Keywords tell Google the themes you are willing to target. Search terms show the actual queries that triggered adverts. The difference between the two is often where wasted spend sits.

Review the search terms report regularly, especially for high-spend campaigns. Ask whether each query shows genuine buying intent and whether it matches the service, product or location you can profitably serve. A commercial electrician, for example, may get clicks from people searching for training, salaries, DIY advice or emergency work outside their service area. None are necessarily bad searches in isolation, but they may be wrong for that advertiser.

Add negative keywords where there is a consistent pattern of irrelevant traffic. Do this carefully. Overly broad negatives can block useful searches, particularly where a word has more than one meaning.

Match types also need context. Broad match can work well with accurate conversion data, strong negatives and a sensible bidding strategy. It can also burn budget quickly where tracking is weak or the market has ambiguous search intent. Exact match gives tighter control, but may restrict volume. There is no universally correct mix – the right approach depends on how clear the offer is, how much data the account has and how closely results are being monitored.

Assess bids, budgets and campaign settings

Automated bidding is not a set-and-forget feature. Strategies such as Maximise Conversions or Target CPA rely on historical data and the conversions you have chosen. If tracking is flawed, the bidding will simply automate poor decisions faster.

Check whether a campaign is limited by budget. If a profitable campaign is losing impression share because of budget while weaker campaigns are fully funded, reallocation is usually more useful than increasing total spend. Equally, do not assume every campaign should spend its full daily budget. A low-demand niche may be better managed with controlled visibility than aggressive bidding for marginal traffic.

Review locations, devices, ad schedules and audiences. Look for obvious mismatches, such as leads from areas the business does not cover, clicks outside staffed hours or mobile traffic that performs badly because the site is difficult to use on a phone. Be wary of making decisions from very small data sets, though. One or two conversions can be misleading.

For location targeting, confirm the setting is aimed at people in your target locations, rather than anyone merely showing interest in them. This is a common source of clicks from outside a genuine service area.

Read the adverts alongside the landing pages

An advert can achieve a strong click-through rate and still perform poorly for the business. The promise in the advert needs to match the page users reach. If an ad mentions a specific service, price point or location, the landing page should confirm it quickly and give visitors a clear next step.

Check whether the page loads quickly, works properly on mobile and makes it easy to call, enquire or buy. Forms should ask for enough detail to qualify the lead, but not so much that good prospects give up. For high-value services, a short form followed by a proper sales conversation often works better than forcing a long questionnaire.

Ad assets also matter. Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call assets and image assets can improve visibility and give users useful information before they click. They should support the offer, not repeat the same generic claim several times.

Turn the findings into a prioritised action plan

A proper Google Ads audit should end with decisions, not a long spreadsheet of observations. Prioritise changes by likely commercial impact and confidence. Fix broken tracking first. Then address obvious irrelevant spend, budget allocation and landing page friction. Fine-tuning ad copy can come later.

Keep a record of what changed and when. If several major adjustments are made at once, it becomes difficult to tell what improved performance. Give changes enough time to gather meaningful data, unless there is clear waste that needs stopping immediately.

For businesses that depend on lead quality, build a regular feedback loop between the person managing adverts and the team answering enquiries. The account may show a conversion. The sales team knows whether it was worth having.

The best audit is not a one-off clean-up before a monthly report. It is a practical way to keep advertising tied to real revenue, real capacity and the type of customer your business actually wants more of. When those three things change, the account should change with them.