How to Audit Your Google Ads Account in 30 Minutes

Minutes 1-5: Conversion Tracking Check

Start here because everything else depends on it. If your conversion tracking is broken, every other metric in the account is misleading. You could be making decisions based on numbers that are completely wrong.

Go to Tools > Conversions in Google Ads. Look at your conversion actions and check three things:

• Status column: Every active conversion should show "Recording conversions" with a recent timestamp. If it says "No recent conversions" or "Inactive," something is broken.
• Duplicate actions: Do you have multiple purchase or lead conversion actions marked as "Primary"? This is surprisingly common. Two primary purchase conversions means every sale gets counted twice, and your reported CPA is half what it actually is.
• Counting method: For purchases, it should be "Every." For leads (form fills, calls), it should probably be "One" per click. Getting this wrong inflates or deflates your numbers.

This single check takes 3-4 minutes and is probably the highest-value thing you can do in this entire audit. We've seen accounts run for months with double-counted conversions, and nobody noticed because the CPA numbers "looked fine."

Minutes 5-10: Campaign Structure Review

Pull up your campaign list and sort by spend (highest first). You're looking for structural problems that leak budget.

The biggest one: branded and non-branded keywords living in the same campaign. When Google's algorithm sees high-performing branded terms alongside competitive non-branded terms, it funnels budget toward the easy wins (branded). Your non-branded campaigns starve, and your branded campaigns get credit for conversions that would have happened anyway.

Check for these patterns:

• One giant campaign with everything in it. This is the "I set it and forgot it" structure. It almost always underperforms compared to segmented campaigns.
• Too many campaigns with tiny budgets. The opposite problem. If you have 15 campaigns each spending $10/day, none of them has enough data for the algorithm to learn anything useful.
• Campaign types fighting each other. A Search campaign and a Performance Max campaign targeting the same keywords will compete against each other in the auction. PMax usually wins, which means your carefully targeted Search campaigns get sidelined.

You're not going to fix all of this in 30 minutes. But knowing the problem exists is the first step. For a deeper look at structure issues, our Google Ads audit service maps out exactly how campaigns are overlapping and what to consolidate.

Minutes 10-15: Search Terms Audit

This is where you'll probably find the most obvious waste. Go to any Search campaign, click "Search terms" in the left menu, and sort by cost (highest first). Look at the last 30 days.

You're scanning for three types of bad search terms:

• Completely irrelevant queries. If you sell accounting software and you're paying for clicks on "accounting degree programs," that's money gone. Add it as a negative keyword immediately.
• Informational queries that never convert. "What is CRM" and "CRM definition" are people doing research, not buying. These rarely convert for most B2B advertisers.
• Competitor brand names. Unless you have a deliberate competitor conquest strategy, paying for clicks on your competitor's brand name usually results in high CPCs and low conversion rates.

Sort by cost descending and review at least the top 50 search terms. In most accounts, you'll find 15-25% of spend going to terms that should have been excluded. That's money you can redirect to terms that actually work.

Add every bad term as a negative keyword. If you find patterns (like lots of "free" queries or "jobs" queries), create account-level negative keyword lists so these terms are blocked across all campaigns.

Minutes 15-18: Bid Strategy Sanity Check

Go back to the campaign list and look at the "Bid strategy" column. For each campaign, ask: does this strategy match the data this campaign has?

Here's the rough guide:

• Target ROAS or Target CPA: Needs at least 30-50 conversions in the last 30 days to work well. If a campaign has 8 conversions this month and it's running Target CPA, the algorithm is basically guessing.
• Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value: Better for campaigns with fewer conversions. These strategies still need data, but they're less demanding than target-based ones.
• Manual CPC: Not necessarily wrong, but it means nobody is adjusting bids based on real-time signals. If you're using Manual CPC and not actively managing bids daily, you're probably leaving performance on the table.

Also check if your target CPA or ROAS is realistic. If your actual CPA over the last 90 days is $45 and your target is set to $20, the algorithm is going to dramatically reduce spend because it can't hit that target. Set targets at or slightly below your actual performance, then gradually tighten.

Minutes 18-22: Ad Copy and Extensions

Click into your top 3 campaigns by spend. In each one, check the ads. You're looking for two things: ad strength and extension coverage.

Ad strength: Google rates Responsive Search Ads from "Poor" to "Excellent." This metric isn't gospel, but if your top campaigns have "Poor" ad strength, you're probably missing headlines or descriptions. Each RSA should have 10+ headlines and 4 descriptions minimum.

Extensions (now called assets): Look at your campaign-level and account-level extensions. At minimum, you want:

• Sitelink extensions (at least 4)
• Callout extensions (at least 4)
• Structured snippets
• Call extensions (if phone leads matter)

Missing extensions means smaller ads, which means lower click-through rates, which means higher CPCs. Adding extensions is free and takes 10 minutes. It's one of the easiest wins in any account.

One thing worth flagging: check when your ad copy was last updated. If the same ads have been running for 6+ months, there's a decent chance the messaging is stale. Audiences change, competitors change, and what worked 6 months ago might not be the best option now.

Minutes 22-26: Audience Targeting

This step is more about what you're missing than what you're doing wrong. Go to Tools > Audience Manager and check what audiences you've built.

At minimum, you should have:

• Website visitors (all): 30-day, 90-day, and 180-day lists
• Converters: People who already bought or submitted a lead form
• Cart abandoners (ecommerce): Added to cart but didn't purchase

If you don't have these audiences built, you're missing out on remarketing (which typically has the lowest CPA of any campaign type) and you're not feeding audience signals to Performance Max campaigns.

Also check your audience exclusions. In most cases, you want to exclude existing customers from acquisition campaigns. Otherwise, you're paying to acquire people who already bought from you. For ecommerce, excluding buyers from the last 30 days is a reasonable starting point.

Minutes 26-30: Budget Allocation

Last step. Look at your campaigns by spend and ROAS (or CPA). You're asking one question: is the budget going where the results are?

Common issues:

• High-performing campaigns hitting budget limits. If a campaign has a 5x ROAS and it's "Limited by budget," you're leaving money on the table. Shift budget from worse-performing campaigns to this one.
• Underperforming campaigns eating a big share of spend. If a campaign has a 1.2x ROAS and it's your second-largest spend bucket, ask why. Either fix it, reduce its budget, or pause it.
• Shared budgets masking individual campaign performance. Shared budgets make budget management easier but they also let one bad campaign drain budget from good ones. If you're using shared budgets, check whether individual campaigns within the shared budget are pulling their weight.

This budget rebalancing step is where the audit pays for itself. Most accounts have at least one campaign that deserves more budget and one that deserves less. The reallocation alone can shift overall ROAS by 10-20% without spending an extra dollar.

For a more detailed look at where your budget is going and which campaigns need restructuring, check out our guide on how to identify wasted ad spend.

What To Do With Your Findings

You've just spent 30 minutes and you probably have a list of 5-15 issues. Don't try to fix everything at once. Prioritize by estimated impact.

Usually, the priority order looks like this:

1. Fix conversion tracking first. Nothing else matters if your data is wrong.
2. Add negative keywords. Quick win that stops bleeding immediately.
3. Reallocate budget. Shift money from underperformers to winners.
4. Add missing extensions. Free improvement, takes 10 minutes.
5. Fix bid strategies. Match the strategy to the data volume.
6. Restructure campaigns. Bigger project, but high long-term impact.

Make one change at a time and wait at least a week before making the next one. If you change five things at once, you'll never know which change drove the improvement (or made things worse).

And if this 30-minute audit surfaced enough issues that you're wondering what a deeper review might find, that's probably a signal. A professional Google Ads audit covers areas this quick version can't, like Quality Score analysis, competitor benchmarking, and attribution modeling.

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