Google Ads Account Audit: A 60-Minute SOP

Most Google Ads accounts are never actually audited — they are glanced at. Someone opens the dashboard, checks that clicks are coming in, and closes the tab. A real audit takes an hour, follows a fixed order, and catches the handful of faults that quietly waste the most budget: broken measurement, dead keywords still spending, and settings nobody remembers choosing.

This is the SOP we run on every new account before touching a single bid. Follow it in order — each block depends on what the one before it establishes.

Quick answer: A 60-minute Google Ads account audit works through five 10-15 minute blocks in order: account structure and settings, conversion tracking, search terms and negative keywords, ads and assets, then budget pacing and impression share. Check measurement before targeting and targeting before budgets, because a spend decision made on broken tracking data is a guess dressed up as an optimisation.

What is a Google Ads account audit?

A structured pass through an account's settings, tracking, keywords, ads and spend, in a fixed order, to find what is wasting budget or blocking performance. It is different from glancing at the dashboard because it checks things that don't show up in the top-line numbers — a Secondary conversion action, a negative keyword list that was never applied to a campaign, a bid strategy nobody chose on purpose. Most of what an audit finds was set correctly once and then drifted as the account grew.

How long should a Google Ads account audit take?

About an hour for a single-campaign account with standard lead-generation goals; longer for multi-campaign, multi-market or e-commerce accounts. Sixty minutes is enough to work through every category below once. It is not enough to fix everything you find — treat the hour as diagnosis, not repair, and prioritise fixes afterward by how much budget each one touches.

What should you check first in a Google Ads audit?

Account structure and conversion tracking, in that order, before keywords or ads. Checking keyword quality or ad copy before confirming tracking works means judging performance against numbers that might not be real. This SOP is sequenced so that block 2 tells you whether the account's own data can be trusted before block 3 asks you to act on it.

The 60-minute audit SOP

Block 1 (0-10 min): account structure & settings

Open every active campaign and confirm, for each one: the campaign type matches its actual goal (a lead-gen campaign should not be Display-only by accident), the bid strategy was chosen deliberately rather than left on a default, and the Search Network partner and Display expansion checkboxes weren't left ticked from setup. Also check who has account access and at what level — an old freelancer or a previous agency still holding Admin access is a common, low-visibility loose end.

Location and language targeting are the fastest wins in this block. "Presence: people in your targeted locations" versus the looser "presence or interest" setting can quietly spend budget on searches from outside the country you serve, especially for local-service businesses.

Block 2 (10-25 min): conversion tracking

This is the block that determines whether the rest of the audit means anything. Confirm a conversion is recorded at all when a real enquiry happens, not just that the dashboard shows a number (About conversion measurement). Then check three specific things:

• Primary vs Secondary. Only Primary actions feed Smart Bidding. A correctly firing lead conversion left as Secondary means the algorithm is optimising toward nothing.
• Counting: One vs Every. Lead-generation actions should almost always count once per click, not every time — "Every" is built for repeat purchases.
• Where the tag actually sits. A tag on a thank-you page reachable without submitting the form counts visits as leads. Set up your web conversions covers correct placement for both URL-based and code-based tracking.

If the account collects leads that later become customers or drop off, check whether that outcome ever comes back into Google Ads. Enhanced conversions for leads and offline conversion imports both feed real sales outcomes back into bidding — without them, the account is optimising toward form fills, not revenue. Finally, if the site runs a consent banner, confirm it isn't silently discarding conversions before acceptance (Consent mode).

Block 3 (25-40 min): keywords & search terms

Pull 30-90 days of the search terms report and read the actual queries the account paid for, not the keyword list that was added. This is where you find a course-search term draining budget on a services campaign, or a competitor's brand name absorbing clicks that never convert.

Cross-check that finding against the negative keyword lists — many accounts have a negative list built once at launch that was never applied to campaigns added later, or never updated as new irrelevant queries appeared. Broad match campaigns need this check more urgently than exact match, since broad match paired with Smart Bidding on a weak conversion signal is a fast way to drift into adjacent intent.

Block 4 (40-50 min): ads & assets

Check Ad Strength on the top-spending ad groups and confirm every eligible asset type — sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call assets — is actually attached, not just available. Missing assets is one of the most common gaps in accounts that were built once and never revisited, because Google periodically adds new asset types that older campaigns never picked up.

Separately, open a Performance Max campaign if the account runs one and review it apart from Search — Performance Max spans Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Maps in a single campaign, and its lead quality depends heavily on the conversion signal and audience inputs it's given, which block 2 and 3 should already have confirmed are solid.

Block 5 (50-60 min): budget pacing & impression share

Check Search impression share and, specifically, impression share lost to budget versus lost to rank. Budget-constrained top campaigns are being held back by a number someone chose, not by the auction — that's a different fix than a rank problem, which is a bid or quality issue. Segment spend by device and location to confirm budget isn't concentrated somewhere the account never intended to target, then close the hour by writing down every finding with which block it came from, so fixes can be sequenced the same way the audit was: tracking first, then targeting, then spend.

What mistakes does a quick audit usually catch?

The same handful, repeatedly: a lead conversion left as Secondary, a negative keyword list that exists but isn't linked to every campaign, Display expansion left on for a Search-only budget, and at least one asset type available but never attached. None of these show up by glancing at a performance graph — they only surface by opening the specific setting.

How often should you audit a Google Ads account?

Quarterly for a stable account, and immediately after any major change — a new campaign, a website redesign, a tracking migration, or a change of who manages the account. Settings drift silently between audits; nobody disables Display expansion on purpose, but nobody remembers to check it either.

An account audit is not the same job as ongoing management

Auditing finds what's broken. Fixing it, then keeping it fixed as the account, market and competition change, is a different and ongoing job — which is what our Google Ads management service covers day to day. An audit is the entry point; management is what stops the same issues reappearing next quarter.

What we find across our own accounts

Every account we take on gets this audit before any bid is touched, regardless of its size. Here is the spend range across the nine of our published case studies that report a total spend figure, each one audited before scaling:

Method and limits: nine of our ten published case studies appear here — every one that reports a total spend figure, since spend is the figure they have in common, unlike conversion rate, CTR or ROAS, which only some report as a headline metric. The tenth is a keyword-level audit of an account already in this table, so including it would count the same spend twice. Figures are shown in the currency each account actually spent in (INR, SAR, AED), not converted to a common currency, since a currency conversion would introduce an exchange-rate assumption this data doesn't need. The range, from roughly AED 4K to ₹92K equivalent, is our own account sample across two quarters, not an industry benchmark — the point is that the same five-block audit applies whether the monthly spend is small or substantial.

When a 60-minute audit isn't enough

• Multi-market or multi-currency accounts. Each market's settings, negative lists and Performance Max asset groups need their own pass — budget an hour per market, not one hour total.
• Brand-new accounts with under 30 conversions in 30 days. There isn't enough data yet to judge Smart Bidding or impression-share patterns meaningfully; note settings issues, but hold off judging performance.
• Accounts under active suspension or policy review. Fix the policy issue first — an audit of bidding and structure is wasted effort on an account that isn't allowed to serve.
• E-commerce accounts with Shopping feeds. These need a feed-quality pass (product data, disapprovals, merchant centre issues) that this SOP doesn't cover — treat it as an additional block, not a replacement for one of the five above.

Getting this run against your account

We run this exact SOP, plus the deeper checks it opens onto, before we ever touch a bid on a new account. If clicks are arriving but leads aren't, our 12-step diagnostic goes deeper into block 2 specifically.

Want this audit run against your account? Request an account audit — we'll tell you what block 1 through 5 actually found, no commitment.