Google Ads Audit Checklist: Nine Places Your Budget Bleeds
This Google Ads audit checklist covers the nine settings we check first in every account, in the order we check them. Most wasted ad spend comes from those settings, not from the ads.
Key takeaways
- Fix conversion tracking first. Smart Bidding optimizes toward whatever your primary conversion actions count, including duplicates.
- Several defaults, such as “Presence or interest” location targeting and search partners on Search campaigns, favour reach over precision.
- Keep brand and non-brand keywords in separate campaigns so each can be judged on its own numbers.
Google Ads accounts lose money through settings more often than through bad ads. Several of the defaults on a new campaign favour reach over precision, and an account that has been running for a few years usually carries leftovers from past experiments. The sections below follow the order we check them in.
Conversion actions
Go to Goals, then Conversions, then Summary. Look at which actions are set as primary, because those are the only ones Smart Bidding optimizes toward. Check three things:
- Each primary action is a real business outcome, such as a completed lead form, a booked call or a purchase.
- No outcome is tracked twice, for example by both the Google Ads tag and an imported GA4 key event.
- Lead actions count “one” conversion per click, not “every” conversion.
If any of these fail, fix them before changing anything else. Every bid the system places is based on these numbers.
Location targeting option
In each campaign’s settings, open Locations, then Location options. The default is “Presence or interest”, which includes people who have shown interest in your target area without being in it. A Surrey accounting firm targeting Greater Vancouver can end up paying for clicks from people in other countries who once searched for Vancouver. For most local and regional businesses, switch this to “Presence”. Google explains both settings in its help article About advanced location options.
Search partners and Display Network on Search campaigns
New Search campaigns include Google search partners by default, and campaigns created before mid-2025 usually have the Display Network switched on as well, so check the Networks setting in every campaign. Segment your Search campaign results by network. If the partner or Display traffic converts at a fraction of the Google Search rate, turn it off.
Search terms report
Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what people actually typed. Pull the search terms report for the last 90 days, sort by cost, and read the top 100 lines. You will usually find job searches, competitor names you did not intend to target, free-tool searches and unrelated meanings of your keywords. Add those as negative keywords, at the account level where they apply everywhere.
Broad match without Smart Bidding
Google recommends pairing broad match keywords with Smart Bidding, because the bidding system uses signals that limit how far broad match wanders. Broad match keywords on a manual CPC or Maximize Clicks campaign have no such limit. Check for this combination and either change the bid strategy or tighten the match type.
Auto-applied recommendations
Open Recommendations and check the auto-apply settings. When enabled, Google can add keywords, switch keywords to broad match, change your bid strategy and bid targets, and opt campaigns into search partners without anyone approving each change. Many account owners do not know it is on. Turn off anything you would not approve by hand.
Related: the optimization score shown on the account is Google’s estimate of how well the account is set up to perform, and it rises as you apply or dismiss Google’s recommendations. It does not measure whether the account is profitable.
Brand and non-brand split
Searches for your own company name convert at a much higher rate than generic searches, because those people already know you. When brand and non-brand keywords share a campaign, the brand results hide how the generic keywords perform. Put brand terms in their own campaign. If you run Performance Max, apply brand exclusions so it does not claim credit for people searching your name. Our post on branded search and ROAS explains why this matters for your reported return.
Device and schedule performance
Segment conversions by device and by hour of day. For a B2B lead form, mobile clicks at 11 p.m. rarely turn into sales calls. You do not need to exclude them outright; a bid adjustment or an ad schedule is usually enough.
Landing pages
Click your own top ads on a phone. Confirm that the page loads quickly, that it repeats the offer from the ad, and that the form submits and fires the conversion tag. A broken form makes every other optimization in the account irrelevant.
How often to run this
Run the full checklist once a quarter and the search terms review monthly. Re-check conversion tracking any time your website, forms or CRM change, since those changes break tags without warning.
Google Ads is one channel. For the wider picture, see what a full marketing audit covers, and for SaaS companies, how attribution distorts channel reports.
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