July 17, 2026 · 7 min read
A Google Ads audit is the fastest way to find out whether your ad budget is buying customers or just buying clicks. Most accounts we open for the first time leak money in the same ten places — and none of them require advanced tactics to find. This checklist walks through each one in the order we check them, so you can run the same audit on your own account this week.
Grab a coffee, open your account, and work through the list. Even fixing two or three of these usually matters more than any bidding trick.
When a campaign underperforms, the instinct is to change bids, raise budgets, or rewrite ads. But those are all levers on top of the account's foundation. If the foundation is wrong — the wrong searches triggering your ads, conversions counted incorrectly, a slow landing page — every lever above it moves in the wrong direction. An audit tells you which layer is actually broken before you spend another dollar optimizing the wrong one.
Your keyword list is what you asked for. The search terms report is what you actually paid for. Open it for the last 30–90 days, sort by cost, and read every query that spent real money. In most small-business accounts you will find queries that are irrelevant, informational-only, or clearly from the wrong region or industry. Every one of those rows is budget that never had a chance to convert.
The fix for a polluted search terms report is negative keywords, and the audit question is simple: do the lists exist, are they applied to every campaign, and when were they last updated? An account with no shared negative list — or one that hasn't been touched in months — is almost always paying for the same junk queries again and again. Negatives are not a launch task; they are a weekly discipline.
Broad match hands Google wide discretion over what triggers your ads. That can work with strong conversion data feeding the algorithm, but in a small account with sparse conversions it usually means spend scattered across loosely related searches. Check what portion of spend flows through broad match and whether the search terms it attracts actually convert. If they don't, tighten to phrase and exact until the data supports loosening again.
This is the most important point on the list. Click on your conversion actions and ask: what exactly fires this? A thank-you page that only loads after a real enquiry, or a button click anyone can make? Are purchases deduplicated? Is a newsletter signup counted with the same weight as a quote request? If conversion data is wrong, every automated bid decision Google makes is built on that wrong signal — and so is every report you read. Fix tracking first; nothing else in the account can be evaluated until it's trustworthy.
Open the locations report and the ad schedule report. Are you paying for clicks from regions you can't serve, or overnight hours that never produce enquiries? For a service business targeting Canada and the US, even a rough cleanup here — excluding regions you don't sell to, trimming hours that never convert — often recovers a meaningful slice of budget with zero downside.
Quality Score itself is a summary number; the useful information is in its parts: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Add those columns at the keyword level. A pattern of "below average" landing page experience is not an ads problem — it's a website problem, and no amount of bid management fixes it. A pattern of weak ad relevance means your ad groups are too broad for one ad to speak to every keyword in them.
Check that each ad group has a responsive search ad with a full set of distinct headlines — not twelve rewordings of the same sentence. Look at the asset report to see which headlines Google actually serves. Thin ads with two or three headlines give the system nothing to test, and repetitive ones waste the slots you did fill. The goal is real variety: different angles, offers, and proof points the algorithm can mix.
Click your own ad's destination on your phone, on cellular data. Count the seconds it takes to load. Then ask: does the headline match what the ad promised? Is there one obvious next step? Can a visitor contact you without hunting? A slow or generic landing page quietly taxes everything upstream — it lowers Quality Score, raises your cost per click, and wastes the visitors you paid to bring in. This is the audit point most agencies skip, because fixing it requires a developer. (It's also why our ads management service includes landing page work — the page is part of the campaign, whether anyone treats it that way or not.)
Pull a simple table: spend and conversions by campaign for the last 90 days. It is common to find a third of the budget sitting in a campaign that produces almost nothing, purely because that's how things were set up a year ago and nobody re-asked the question. Budgets should follow demonstrated results, and reallocating between existing campaigns is free — it requires no new creative, no new pages, just the decision.
Finally, look at how success is being measured. Which attribution model is set? Are view-through conversions inflating the numbers? Does the conversion count in Google Ads roughly reconcile with the enquiries or sales you can see in your inbox and your CRM? If the platform's story and your bank account's story disagree, believe the bank account — then figure out which tracking assumption is exaggerating.
A full ten-point pass like this is worth doing quarterly, and any time you inherit an account or notice costs drifting up. Points 1 and 2 — search terms and negatives — are a weekly habit, not an audit item. If nobody has looked at your search terms report in the last month, that alone tells you how actively the account is being managed.
Everything above is doable yourself with patience and honesty about what you find. The hard part is usually not finding the leaks — it's fixing the ones that live outside the ads interface: conversion tracking wired correctly through Google Tag Manager, and landing pages that are fast and persuasive. Those are development problems as much as marketing problems, which is exactly why we bundle them together at Nova rather than pointing at your ad account from a distance.
If you'd rather have a second set of eyes, we run this exact audit — search terms to landing pages — as a free ad account audit, and you keep the written findings whether or not you work with us. And if the audit reveals the real problem is the website behind the ads, that's a conversation about building a site that can actually convert — because the cheapest click in the world is still wasted on a page that can't close. (Wondering what that investment looks like? We published our real numbers: how much a custom website costs in 2026.)