How to Do Google Ads Audit: A Comprehensive Guide

Running Google Ads without an audit is like driving a car without ever checking the oil—it might work for a while, but it won’t be long before performance suffers.

A Google Ads audit helps you identify the gaps, leaks, and opportunities in your campaign, so you can stop wasting money and start maximizing ROI.

Whether you’re a business owner managing your own ads or a marketer optimizing client accounts, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know to conduct a proper Google Ads audit.

What is Google Ads Audit?

A Google Ads audit is a strategic deep-dive into your Google Ads account that allows you to evaluate how well your campaigns are performing in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and alignment with your marketing goals.

It involves assessing every element of your account—campaign structure, keyword strategy, ad copy, audience targeting, bidding tactics, conversion tracking, and more.

At its core, a Google Ads audit helps you answer crucial questions like:

• Are your campaigns aligned with your business objectives?
• Are you targeting the right audience with the right message?
• Are you spending your budget in the most impactful areas?
• Are there hidden opportunities or leaks draining performance?

A good audit not only points out what’s broken but also reveals what’s working well—so you can replicate that success across your account.

Whether you run ads yourself or work with an agency, auditing is the foundation of data-driven decision-making and campaign scaling.

Benefits of Google Ads Audit

Auditing your Google Ads account might sound like a tedious task, but the benefits are well worth the effort:

• Better Budget Allocation: Discover which keywords or campaigns are eating up your budget with little return.
• Improved CTR: Identify opportunities to improve your CTR through better copy or targeting.
• Higher ROI: Make informed decisions that lead to more conversions without increasing ad spend.
• Quality Score Boost: Understand what’s dragging your score down and how to fix it.
• Stronger Ad Relevance: Align your ads more closely with user intent and search queries.

10 Steps to Do Google Ads Audit

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of the key areas you should review in your audit to uncover inefficiencies and boost ad performance:

1. Review Campaign Structure and Segmentation

Check if your campaigns are logically structured by product, location, or audience type. A clean structure makes performance tracking and optimization far more effective.

If you’re running too many mixed-purpose ads under one campaign, break them into smaller, focused campaigns or ad groups.

2. Clarify and Align Campaign Goals

Each campaign should have a specific goal—whether it’s increasing web traffic, generating leads, or driving sales.

Review whether your bid strategies, targeting settings, and ad formats actually support those objectives. If a campaign’s performance doesn’t align with its intent, it’s time to reassess.

3. Check Conversion Tracking Accuracy

Without accurate tracking, optimization is guesswork. Verify that conversion actions (e.g., purchases, sign-ups, calls) are firing properly and that you’re not tracking vanity metrics like page views.

Use Google Tag Assistant or GA4 to double-check implementation.

4. Evaluate Keyword Targeting and Match Types

Dive deep into:

• Underperforming keywords with low Quality Scores
• Overlapping keywords causing internal competition
• Overuse of broad match leading to irrelevant clicks Also, review your search impression share to identify missed opportunities.

5. Analyze Ad Copy and Use of Extensions

Compare ads within an ad group to find top performers. Test different messaging angles—pain point-driven, benefit-focused, urgency-based—and iterate. Also check that:

• Headline 1 contains your main keyword
• Description includes your USP and CTA
• All eligible ad extensions are in use (especially sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets)

6. Inspect Landing Page Experience

Check load time, mobile responsiveness, CTA placement, and form simplicity. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Hotjar to identify drop-off points.

Your landing page should make conversion effortless and friction-free.

7. Refine Device, Demographic & Location Targeting

Audit how your ads perform across devices, genders, age groups, and locations.

For example, if mobile drives high traffic but low conversions, consider excluding it or adjusting bids. Similarly, exclude regions that consistently underperform or broaden reach where conversion rates are strong.

8. Dive Into the Search Terms Report

Analyze user search behavior. Are users finding your ads using relevant queries? Look for patterns in intent.

Promote strong queries as exact match keywords and filter out irrelevant terms by adding them to your negative list.

9. Analyze Key Performance Metrics

Move beyond surface-level impressions and clicks. Study:

• Click-through rates to identify weak ad creative
• CPC to find costly keywords
• Conversion rate to evaluate landing page effectiveness
• Return on ad spend (ROAS) to connect efforts to business impact Use data visualization to spot trends over time.

10. Evaluate Bidding Strategy and Budget Allocation

Match your bidding strategy to campaign goals. Manual bidding may work for control freaks, but Smart Bidding leverages machine learning to optimize for conversions.

Audit your daily budgets—are high-performing campaigns underfunded while low-performing ones burn cash?

Conclusion

A Google Ads audit isn’t just for campaigns that are underperforming. Even successful campaigns can benefit from a tune-up.

By regularly auditing your account, you ensure every dollar spent works harder and smarter.

Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t worry—that’s what we’re here for. At Ostenpowers, our Google Ads experts from Sydney can help you run a comprehensive audit and optimize your campaigns for success. Reach out today and let’s take your Google Ads performance to the next level!