The Google Ads Account Audit: What We Look For, and Why It Matters
- Centre of Excellence
- 6 hours ago
- 2 min read
Most Google Ads accounts aren't badly managed, they're quietly out of date. Budgets drift toward whichever campaign spends fastest, tracking breaks silently at redesign, and automated bidding now optimises against that same broken data, teaching itself the wrong lesson at scale. The fix isn't another observation list; it's a sequenced, market-specific plan that moves from finding to funded action within thirty days.
Google Ads Audit: Three Hard Data Points
A credible audit runs a fixed eight-check sequence, settings, measurement, targeting, keywords, bidding, creative, landing pages, growth headroom — because several checks are meaningless if the one before them has failed.
Audience scale across our four markets ranges from 132,000 people in Seychelles to close to thirty million in Côte d'Ivoire, with Mauritius's domestic audience at 1.27 million, one set of assumptions will be wrong in at least three of the four.
A negative keyword gap identified in January and actioned in April has already cost three months of spend, an audit finding decays fast; a funded, sequenced plan doesn't.
Where Wasted Ad Spend Hides
Wasted ad spend is rarely one dramatic error. It's drift: budget migrating to whichever campaign spends fastest rather than whichever earns most, search queries broadening as matching behaviour turns interpretive, and measurement quietly breaking the day a website gets redesigned. None of it announces itself — the account keeps running, the reports keep populating, and the drift stays invisible until somebody deliberately goes looking for it.
The Conversion Tracking Audit Blind Spot
A conversion tracking audit is the most expensive check to skip, and the hardest place to notice being wrong. Automated bidding now optimises directly against whatever conversion data the account reports, so a mistracked goal doesn't just mislead the owner, it teaches the algorithm the wrong lesson every day, at scale, with a budget attached.
What a Proper Google Ads Account Review Covers
The eight-check sequence, in order:
Account settings and structure — including whether brand demand is quietly subsidising the rest of the account.
Conversion tracking and measurement — the conversion tracking audit itself.
Campaign settings and targeting — where permissive defaults leak budget in small, multilingual markets.
Keywords and search terms — the gap between intended and actual spend.
Bidding and budget allocation — usually a data threshold problem, not a strategy problem.
Ads, assets and creative coverage — the raw material automation is entitled to but rarely gets.
Landing pages and conversion experience — the part of the funnel media teams don't control.
Growth headroom — what the account isn't doing at all, usually the largest number of the eight.
Start With the Guide
We've published the full method as a downloadable guide: the eight checks, reference ranges for a healthy account, and a forty-point scorecard you can run against your own account, no involvement from us required.
Would You Rather We Ran It?
Request a no-cost Google Ads audit from our Centre of Excellence and receive a practitioner review of your account structure, measurement, targeting, bidding and creative — with a prioritised thirty-day action plan attached.
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