How to Effectively Audit a Google Ads Account

How to Conduct a Google Ads Audit in 5 Efficient Steps

Carolina

When it comes to your Google Ads campaigns, knowing what is working and where changes need to be made is crucial.

Yet, your Google Ads account can be tricky to effectively manage, involving several parts that can slip past you if you’re not paying close attention.

Conducting a Google Ads Account audit can help.

Auditing this account can provide you with valuable information as to where to make beneficial changes, and it can also potentially guide other areas of your digital advertising strategy.

Keep reading to know more!

Why Does Your Business Need a Google Ads Audit?

There are a number of reasons why your business needs a Google Ads audit.

For one, it helps gain a starting point if you are new to the company or taking over a Google Ads account for whatever reason.

Also, in daily management of your marketing and advertising efforts, you rarely drill down to take a good look at each activity or channel you are undertaking.

The audit allows you to focus on this one channel solely and ensure you are making the best use of it.

Here are additional reasons why your business needs a Google Ads Audit.

To ensure relevancy of ads

While your ads may be successful now or in the past, that doesn’t mean they always will be. Relevancy of ads can fade quickly or over time, depending on what is going on in the world.

With the audit, you can learn where the low performers are that can negatively affect your Google Quality Score.

Alert you to the value of your keywords

Analyzing the usefulness of your keywords can alert you to their value, which can diminish over time.

Change requires you to know when to update those keywords and find new ones that target your audience more effectively, thus boosting engagement, conversions, and sales.

Provide a way to stay in sync with your audience

By conducting regular Google Ads audits, you can get to know and stay in sync with your target audience. You’ll find out the content that reaches and entices them the most and what doesn’t, aiding your content strategy.

To confirm budgeting and ROI

To make the most of advertising budgets, you need to know what you are doing is working. Without an audit, you could be wasting part of that budget on content that isn’t applicable to your target audience.

5 Strategic Steps to Conduct a Google Ads Audit

There are various layers to Google Ads, and each one affects the outcome of your strategy. Use the following five steps to locate areas to expand, remove, optimize, or improve.

1. Set benchmarks to compare your performance

Before jumping into your accounts, begin by defining and setting benchmarks to measure performance against.

You need to establish your vision of what will resemble success before you get started.

These benchmarks are essential to the process, showing you what you want your audit to accomplish.

2. Optimize time and budget spends

Review your account structure to determine better ways to optimize your time and budget spends. Look for ways to organize better and more efficiently.

When accounts are structured insufficiently, performance can be limited. Review how you are currently managing even the smallest details, including budget, bid, and ads.

Include the following:

Analyze how your budget is being spent currently across your different campaigns.
Devise more ways to adjust your strategy, budget-wise, to receive higher benefits.
Look for choke points, such as a landing page that is poorly optimized.
Identify the lowest performers, how much you are spending on these, and decide whether to remove them or not.

Make note of all your optimization efforts to review on your next audit.

Sometimes you’ll find something that just doesn’t add up—maybe you’re burning through budget on a campaign you barely remember launching. It happens more often than people admit. If you notice an odd spike or dip in spend, take a few minutes to check for automation errors or old rules that have been left running. These smaller bits of housekeeping can quietly eat into your budgets and, honestly, are easy to overlook during the daily grind.

One thing that often flies under the radar: seasonality. There’s usually a push from advertisers around certain holidays or sales periods, and it’s easy to let those higher spends roll on long after the moment has passed. If you’re noticing costs creeping up without equivalent results, double-check your calendar alignment and pause anything meant only for specific windows. A short look back over the last twelve months (yes, even 2025 so far if you have enough data) might surprise you with where your ad dollars are actually going versus where you think they should be.

3. Define keywords

When it comes to keyword usage in your Google Ads, you need a strategy for reviewing their performance.

List out what keywords you are currently using in your ads. Conduct separate keyword research and use both to define the optimal keywords you need to be using in your Google Ads account.

Here are some tips.

Focus on user-intent keywords, that is, keywords audiences are entering in search queries.
Add branded keywords (keywords that mention your particular brand) to at least one ad campaign.
Identify low-quality keywords by reviewing the performance of each one across your ad campaigns.
Compile a negative keywords list. Plan to remove any that are not relevant to your campaign or business goals and which can lower your quality scores. You can find these by asking: Which keywords do not serve the particular subject matter or your conversion goals? Which, if any, keywords result in zero conversions, even if they receive clicks?
Stay open to new keywords to include (often found in search term reports).

Focus on keywords in each campaign.

These are essential to the success of your ads, so spend dedicated time to defining then revising your keyword strategy.

4. Test

An ad campaign shouldn’t be a “set it and forget it” tool to reach audiences.

As you audit, determine where A/B testing can be implemented for most effect.

Ensure your ad groups contain two separate versions that rotate, so the testing occurs automatically.

No need to have your content crew come up with all new ad copy, although you may want to consider that for your action plan that follows the audit.

Keep the differences small. Test out modifications to different elements of your ads, such as different headings only.

5. Define how to engage users

Engaging users is the goal behind each Google Ad.

Because of this, you want to find the best ways to entice users to take some sort of action and increase conversion rates.

Before your ad takes the user to a landing page containing an informative heading and a call-to-action (CTA), you first need to capture their attention.

The Google Ad, then, needs to reach the right audience and cause the right people to click over to your landing page. This makes ad copy of utmost importance.

Without that good ad copy, you won’t be able to attract the highest potential customers or subscribers to take any action.

During the audit, identify what is currently working in your ads and what needs a new strategy and ad copy.

As you proceed through the strategic steps of your audit, take descriptive notes, capture those important screenshots, and use all you learn to prepare an audit report you can then act upon.

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Wrap Up

An audit can provide you with valuable insights into what you’re doing right and what needs adjusting.

It can also show you new opportunities to expand into to improve your ads while also maximizing your potential ROI.

Set yourself up for success by first establishing benchmarks for your audit, then review the account structure to identify ways to optimize your time and budget spends.

Next, focus on keywords, test ad versions, and make sure to find the best ways to engage with your audience through clear and enticing ad copy and CTAs.