How to audit your own Google Ads account: a 12-point checklist

Here is how to audit a Google Ads account: check 12 things in order, starting with conversion tracking, because every other decision rests on it. Then review search terms, negatives, match types, networks, location settings, budget, branded traffic, ad diagnostics, change history and Performance Max.

Most published checklists stop at “review your keywords”. This one tells you where each check lives in Google Ads, what a problem looks like when you find it, and what to fix first. You need nothing but access to your own account.

Is your conversion tracking telling the truth?

Your conversion tracking is telling the truth only if each conversion action is recording, counts the right number of times, and feeds bidding only when it should. Checks 1 to 3 test those three things. A conversion action is anything you’ve told Google Ads to count as a result: a form, a call, a purchase.

Check 1: status. Google Ads gives every conversion action a status. Google’s troubleshooting page lists five: Active, Needs attention, Misconfigured, Awaiting conversions and Removed. Misconfigured means conversions have stopped recording because of a setup error or a broken tag. Awaiting conversions means nothing has been recorded in the last 7 days. If your ads ran all week and an action still shows Awaiting conversions, find out why before you read any other number.

Check 2: what counts, and how often. Google Ads sorts conversion actions into two kinds. Primary conversion actions appear in the “Conversions” column and are used for bidding. Secondary actions are for observation only and appear in “All conversions”. A newsletter signup or a page view set as primary can teach your bidding to chase it.

Then check how each action counts. Google’s counting options are “Every”, which counts every conversion after an ad interaction, and “One”, which counts one per click. Google recommends One for leads and Every for purchases. A lead form set to Every counts each repeat submission that follows a click. If you sell to businesses, the real test sits further down the funnel, in your CRM, which is why cost per lead alone misleads B2B accounts.

Check 3: auto-tagging. Auto-tagging adds a Google Click Identifier (GCLID) to your ad URLs, so each click can be matched to what happened next. Google describes it as required when you use Google Ads conversion tracking or Google Analytics, and for tracking offline conversions. If it’s off, switch it on.

The status column won’t catch everything. These are the failures we list on the page that explains how we run Google Ads accounts:

• Duplicate conversions from a tag firing twice
• Form fills counted on page load
• Phone calls untracked
• Offline conversions never imported
• No CRM connection
• The wrong conversion window

A quick test for the first two: submit your own form once, then check how many conversions it produced.

At Crisolva, we fix tracking before we optimize anything. Optimizing against a number you can’t trust is just moving budget around with confidence. If you’d rather have someone else check your tracking first, a free Google Ads audit starts there.

What are people actually searching when your ads show?

The search terms report answers this directly. It shows how your ads performed when real searches triggered them. That makes it the single best place to find wasted spend. Checks 4 to 6 live here.

Check 4: read the search terms. A keyword is what you added to the account. A search term is what a person actually typed. Google’s search terms report sits under Campaigns › Insights and reports › Search terms. Some low-volume terms are left out, so treat it as most of the picture, not all of it.

Say you run a plumbing company and bid on “emergency plumber”. For example, the report might show terms like these:

We review search terms weekly, not monthly. A self-audit only needs one careful pass, but sort by cost, not by clicks, so the most expensive mistakes surface first.

Check 5: make the negatives complete. Negative keywords stop your ads from showing on searches you exclude, but they have a gap. Google’s documentation on negative keywords says they don’t match close variants. Synonyms and singular or plural versions have to be added yourself. Excluding “job” does not exclude “jobs”. The same page notes that account-level negatives apply across eligible search and shopping inventory, which is the right home for terms you never want, like “jobs”.

Check 6: match types and keyword count. Match types decide how far a keyword can stretch. With broad match, Google says ads may show on searches related to your keyword, using signals like your landing page content and the other keywords in the ad group. That reach can find new buyers. It can also drift, and the search terms report is where you see which one is happening. On how many keywords to run, our answer is fewer than most accounts have. A focused list puts budget where it converts. Hundreds of loosely related keywords spread it thin and produce too little data to judge any of them.

Where else are your ads showing, and to whom?

Your ads can show beyond Google Search and beyond your service area, depending on two settings most people never revisit. Checks 7 and 8 cover them.

Check 7: networks. Search partners are included by default when you create a Search campaign. To opt out, clear “Include Google search partners” under Networks in the campaign settings, which leaves the campaign on Google Search only. A second setting, “Include Google Display Network”, controls Display Expansion, which lets a Search campaign also show on the Google Display Network. The problem is a ticked box nobody chose. Compare each network’s conversions with Google Search, and keep only what earns its place.

Check 8: the location option. Google’s advanced location options offer two choices. “Presence or interest”, the default and the one Google recommends, reaches people in your area and people who have shown interest in it. “Presence” shows ads to people likely to be located, or regularly located, there. A national brand may want the wider reach. A plumber who only serves one county usually doesn’t.

Is your budget going where it should?

Your budget is going where it should when lost impressions come from choices you made, not from settings you never chose, and when branded searches aren’t hiding weak results elsewhere. Checks 9 and 10 test both.

Check 9: budget or rank. Impression share is the percentage of impressions your ads received compared with the total they could have received. Google defines two columns that explain the gap. Search lost IS (budget) is the share of time your ads didn’t show because the budget ran out. Search lost IS (rank) is the share lost to poor Ad Rank in the auction. Read them together:

Check 10: separate branded searches. People who search your business name were usually coming anyway. Counting those conversions as campaign performance flatters a weak account. Put branded searches in their own campaign, and report them separately, so you can see what the non-brand campaigns really produce. To stop a campaign from serving on brand queries you want to keep out, Google offers brand exclusions for Search and Performance Max.

Do Quality Score and Ad Strength actually matter?

Quality Score and Ad Strength matter as clues, not as levers. Google’s help documentation says Quality Score “is not an input in the ad auction”. It is a 1 to 10 diagnostic at keyword level, built from three parts: expected clickthrough rate (CTR), ad relevance and landing page experience.

Use it to decide where to look. If a keyword is weak on landing page experience, the fix is on the page, not in the bid. If it’s weak on ad relevance, the ad isn’t answering the search.

Ad Strength rates responsive search ads from Incomplete to Excellent. Google says it doesn’t decide whether an ad can serve, and isn’t used to calculate Ad Rank, Quality Score or auction wins. Treat it as a writing prompt. An “Excellent” ad that doesn’t convert is still a bad ad.

Who changed your account, and was it you?

Change history answers this. It’s the check almost every published audit skips. Google’s change history lists changes to the account, campaigns and ad groups over the past two years, including who made each one. You’ll find it in the Campaigns menu.

Check 11: changes nobody made on purpose. Look for budget changes, new keywords or bid strategy switches that nobody on your side remembers. Some may come from recommendations applied automatically, a feature that lets Google apply its suggestions to your account. Applied recommendations are summarized in the History tab on the Recommendations page, and can be reviewed one by one in change history. Decide which, if any, you want running without review, and switch the rest off.

What should you check when Google Ads performance starts slipping?

When performance starts slipping, re-run four checks in this order: tracking status (check 1), change history (check 11), search terms (check 4), then lost impression share (check 9). Check what you control before you blame the market.

Check 12: Performance Max visibility. Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type that reaches all Google Ads inventory, including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps, from one campaign. It shows you less than a Search campaign does, but it isn’t a black box. Open the Search terms report and choose “Search terms and landing pages for Performance Max”. That report shows which searches triggered your Performance Max ads, with data from March 2023 onward. For Search and Shopping inventory, you can block terms with account-level or campaign-level negative keywords.

Two things to look for: spend on your own brand name, which brand exclusions can address, and spend on searches no one would have approved. On Performance Max, our stance is simple: we use it where it fits and say so when it doesn’t. For most lead-generation accounts, we start with controlled Search.

When is a self-audit the wrong move?

A self-audit is the wrong move when the account is too small to produce data, or when you’ve found more problems than you have time to fix.

Small accounts first. We usually don’t recommend PPC management below $1,000 a month in ad spend, because there isn’t enough conversion data to make meaningful optimization decisions. That’s our published minimum ad spend, and the same logic applies to an audit. Below that level, most checks will show too little data to act on. Fix tracking and the landing page first, then come back to the rest.

If this list turned up five or six problems, the hard part is no longer finding them. It’s fixing them in the right order without breaking the conversion history the account has built. That is the work behind how we manage PPC accounts.