Free Google Ads audit checklist

Brand searches convert at a much higher rate and a much lower cost than non-brand searches. When the two share a campaign, the cheap brand conversions flatter the averages and hide how the non-brand side is really performing. Smart bidding also reads the blended data and bids less efficiently.

What to do:

Pull brand terms into their own campaign so you can set a separate budget and bid target, judge non-brand on its own numbers, and decide deliberately how much to spend defending the brand.

When one ad group holds keywords with different intent, no single ad can speak to all of them, so relevance and Quality Score drop and click-through suffers. Tightly themed ad groups let the ad and landing page match what the searcher actually typed.

What to do:

Group keywords by the job the searcher is trying to do, not by loose topic. Aim for a handful of closely related keywords per ad group, each served by an ad that reflects that exact intent.

Search campaigns offer an option to also show on the Display Network. It is easy to leave on at setup, and it quietly sends a slice of the search budget to low-intent display placements that convert far worse than search.

What to do:

Run Search and Display as separate campaigns with their own budgets and creative. Turn off Display expansion on any campaign whose goal is search intent.

Campaign and ad group names are how you read the account at a glance and how you filter reports later. Inconsistent names slow every future review and make automated rules and scripts harder to target.

What to do:

Adopt a simple pattern that encodes the things you filter by, such as market, match type, and theme. Apply it to new campaigns and tidy the existing ones when you next touch them.

Bidding is only as good as the goal it optimises towards. If the tracked conversions are soft signals like page views or button clicks, smart bidding chases volume that does not turn into revenue. Everything downstream inherits that mistake.

What to do:

Track the actions that map to money, such as purchases, qualified leads, or booked calls. Retire or downgrade vanity actions so the account optimises towards outcomes you would actually pay for.

Only conversions marked primary feed the bidding algorithm. Secondary conversions are recorded for insight but do not drive bids. Accounts often have several actions all set to primary, so the algorithm optimises towards a muddle of strong and weak signals.

What to do:

Mark the one or two actions that represent real value as primary. Move everything else to secondary so you keep the visibility without skewing how the account bids.

Counting conversions treats a small sale and a large one as equal. For any account where order values vary, value-based bidding needs the actual revenue passed back so it can chase profit rather than raw volume.

What to do:

Pass a real value with each conversion, dynamically for ecommerce or as a sensible average for lead generation. Once values are flowing, value-based strategies like target ROAS become available.

Browser tracking loses conversions to consent choices, cross-device journeys, and privacy changes. Enhanced conversions send hashed first-party data so more conversions are matched and attributed, which gives bidding a fuller picture.

What to do:

Turn on enhanced conversions for leads or for web, depending on your setup, and confirm the data is being received and matched in the diagnostics.

Importing goals from analytics while also firing a native tag can record the same action twice. Inflated conversion numbers make the account look more efficient than it is and push bidding to overspend.

What to do:

Pick one source of truth for each action. Check that an imported analytics goal and a native conversion tag are not both counting the same event.

Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what people actually typed. The gap between the two is where money leaks, especially with broad match. A campaign can look healthy at the keyword level while paying for irrelevant queries underneath.

What to do:

Review the search terms report on a regular cadence. Promote strong queries to their own keywords and add the irrelevant ones as negatives.

Without negatives, ads show for queries that will never convert, such as job seekers, free-intent searchers, and unrelated meanings of a term. Each irrelevant click is paid for and drags down the conversion rate.

What to do:

Build shared negative keyword lists for the obvious waste and apply them across campaigns. Keep topping them up from the search terms report so the same waste does not recur.

Broad, phrase, and exact match behave very differently now that smart bidding interprets intent. Broad match without tight negatives and good conversion data can spray spend across loose queries, while exact-only can starve the account of useful volume.

What to do:

Decide match type per campaign based on how much trustworthy conversion data you have. Broad match earns its place when smart bidding and negatives are doing their job, not before.

The same keyword in more than one ad group makes the campaigns bid against themselves and splits the data that bidding relies on. It also muddies reporting and makes it harder to see what is really working.

What to do:

Find duplicate keywords and keep the single best-placed version. Consolidate the history into one location so bidding learns from a fuller dataset.

Smart bidding needs a steady flow of conversions to learn from. A target CPA or ROAS strategy on a campaign with only a handful of conversions a month will behave erratically. The right strategy depends on both the objective and how much data the campaign actually generates.

What to do:

Match the strategy to the goal and the volume. Low-data campaigns often do better on maximise conversions without a hard target until they earn enough history to support one.

When a profitable campaign is limited by budget, it stops showing for searches you would happily pay for. The lost impression share due to budget metric shows exactly how much demand is going unanswered.

What to do:

Check impression share lost to budget. Shift spend towards campaigns that are limited and performing, and away from those spending freely without returning.

A target CPA or ROAS plucked from a wish rather than the account's own history forces the algorithm to either throttle delivery to hit an unrealistic target or chase volume at the wrong price. Either way performance suffers.

What to do:

Set targets from the account's recent observed cost per acquisition or return, then move them gradually. Change targets in small steps so the strategy is not thrown back into learning.

Smart bidding reacts to demand shifts, but it lags sudden ones. A flash sale or a known seasonal spike can be over by the time bidding catches up, leaving conversions on the table or budget overspent.

What to do:

Use seasonality adjustments for short, sharp events you can predict, and plan budget changes around known peaks rather than reacting once the period has started.

An ad with few headlines or repetitive messaging gives the system little to work with and limits how often the ad can show in larger, more prominent formats. Ad strength is a rough proxy for how much variety the ad offers.

What to do:

Give each ad a full set of distinct headlines and descriptions that cover different angles, such as benefit, offer, and proof. Use pinning sparingly so the system can still optimise combinations.

Sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets make the ad larger, give more reasons to click, and tend to lift click-through at no extra cost per click. Missing assets leave free real estate on the table and cede space to competitors.

What to do:

Add the core assets to every campaign, with sitelinks pointing to genuinely useful destinations. Review them for relevance rather than setting once and forgetting.

A strong ad that sends traffic to a slow, generic, or mismatched page wastes the click and drags down Quality Score and conversion rate. The landing experience is part of the ad, not a separate concern.

What to do:

Send each ad to the most specific relevant page, match the message the ad made, and make sure the page is fast and clear about the next step.

Image assets and other newer formats can extend search ads into more visual placements and improve presence. Many accounts simply never add them, so the campaigns miss eligible inventory.

What to do:

Add image assets where the account is eligible and the imagery is genuinely relevant. Keep them on-brand and refresh tired creative periodically.

The default location setting can include people merely showing interest in your area, not only those physically there. For a local business this is one of the most common and expensive leaks, paying for clicks from outside the area you actually serve.

What to do:

Set location options to people in or regularly in your targeted locations. Review the locations report to see where clicks are really coming from.

Performance Max and broad-match search lean on audience signals to start in roughly the right place. Without them the system explores more widely and more expensively before it finds the right people.

What to do:

Add audience signals built from your customer data, website visitors, and relevant in-market segments so automation has a useful starting point.

Spending on age groups, locations, or placements that never convert is quiet, steady waste. Automated campaigns in particular can drift into placements that have nothing to do with the offer.

What to do:

Review performance by demographic and placement and exclude the segments that consistently cost without returning. Revisit as the data builds.

Conversion rates and costs vary by time of day, day of week, and device. Smart bidding accounts for much of this automatically, but it is still worth checking that no segment is quietly losing money or being throttled unnecessarily.

What to do:

Review performance by time and device. Where smart bidding is in use, treat this as a sanity check rather than a reason to layer on manual adjustments that fight the algorithm.

Search Partners and any display expansion extend reach beyond Google search itself. The quality varies a lot by account, and the extra reach is sometimes worth far less than the same spend on core search.

What to do:

Segment performance by network and judge Search Partners on its own conversion data. Keep it on only where it earns its place, and turn off display expansion on search-intent campaigns.

Broad match can perform well, but only with smart bidding reading good conversion data and a solid layer of negatives underneath. Broad match on manual bids or thin data is one of the fastest ways to burn budget on loose queries.

What to do:

Only run broad match where smart bidding and reliable conversion tracking are in place, and keep the search terms report and negatives current to contain it.

Left unchecked, Performance Max can absorb cheap brand search traffic and take credit for conversions that would have happened anyway. That inflates its reported return and pulls budget away from genuine prospecting.

What to do:

Apply brand exclusions to Performance Max where appropriate and compare its incremental contribution against your dedicated brand campaign rather than reading its headline ROAS at face value.

Across a long enough window, some keywords, ad groups, or placements spend steadily and return nothing. Individually small, together they are often a meaningful share of the budget that could fund what is working.

What to do:

Over a window with enough data, isolate the entities that have spent a fair amount with no conversions and decide deliberately whether to fix, pause, or reallocate them.

Impression share shows how much of the available demand you are capturing and why you are missing the rest, whether to budget or rank. Auction insights show how that is shifting against competitors. Together they tell you where the room to grow is.

What to do:

Track impression share and the lost-to-budget and lost-to-rank splits over time, and watch auction insights for competitive moves worth responding to.

Auto-apply can quietly change match types, budgets, and targeting on your behalf. Some recommendations help, but applied blindly they can undo deliberate decisions and shift spend in ways you did not intend.

What to do:

Review the auto-apply settings and turn off the categories you would rather decide yourself. Read recommendations as input, and apply the ones that fit the strategy.

The attribution model decides which touchpoints get credit, which in turn shapes what bidding optimises towards. A model that no one chose deliberately can flatter or undersell whole campaign types and steer budget the wrong way.

What to do:

Know which model the account uses and why, keep it consistent across comparable campaigns, and account for it when reading conversion credit.

Flipping a bid strategy or restructuring live and hoping for the best mixes the effect of the change with everything else moving in the account. Experiments isolate the change so you learn whether it actually helped.

What to do:

Use experiments for significant strategy or structure changes so you have a clean read on the impact before rolling it out to the whole campaign.