These 8 questions are the ones that actually determine whether an audit is useful. If your audit report answers all of them, it's thorough. If it skips most of them, you're getting a surface-level checkup.
Question 1: Is My Conversion Data Accurate?
This is the foundation question. If the answer is "we didn't check" or "it looks fine," that's not good enough. A proper audit should verify conversion tracking by comparing Google Ads data against at least one other source (GA4, CRM, or backend data).
The specific things to check: Are there duplicate conversion actions? Is the counting method correct? Does the attribution window match the business's sales cycle? Are Google Ads and GA4 within 20% of each other?
Question 2: How Much Am I Spending on Irrelevant Traffic?
A good audit quantifies waste. Not "you have some irrelevant search terms" but "you spent $3,200 last month on search terms with zero conversions." The search terms report should be reviewed and the waste calculated as a specific dollar amount and percentage of spend.
This question applies to placements too. If you're running Display or PMax campaigns, the audit should identify which placements are wasting money.
Question 3: Does My Campaign Structure Make Sense?
An audit should evaluate whether your campaign structure matches your business goals. Are branded and non-branded keywords separated? Is budget flowing where the results are? Are campaigns competing with each other?
The answer shouldn't be generic ("restructure your campaigns"). It should explain specifically what's wrong and what the alternative structure would look like.
Question 4: Are My Bid Strategies Matched to My Data?
This question gets at whether each campaign has enough conversion data for its bid strategy to work. A campaign with 8 conversions/month on Target CPA is probably underperforming. The audit should identify bid strategy mismatches and recommend alternatives based on actual data volume.
Question 5: What's My Quality Score Distribution?
A Quality Score analysis should show what percentage of your keywords are below average, average, and above average. More importantly, it should identify which high-spend keywords have low Quality Scores, because those are the ones where improvement will save the most money.
Question 6: Am I Missing Easy Wins?
Every account has low-hanging fruit. Missing ad extensions. High-performing campaigns that are budget-limited. Ad groups with only one ad (no testing). Audiences that should exist but don't. A good audit identifies these quick wins explicitly and estimates their impact.
Question 7: How Do I Compare to Competitors?
Auction Insights data shows how your impression share, overlap rate, and outranking share compare to specific competitors. A thorough audit uses this to contextualize your performance. High CPCs in a market where everyone has high CPCs is different from high CPCs where competitors pay less.
Question 8: What Should I Fix First?
This is maybe the most important question. A report with 30 findings and no prioritization isn't helpful. The audit should rank findings by estimated impact and give a clear sequence: fix this first, then this, then this.
The typical priority order is: (1) tracking issues, (2) budget waste (negative keywords, placements), (3) budget allocation, (4) bid strategies, (5) ad copy and extensions, (6) structural changes.
If you want to start checking these questions yourself, our 30-minute audit covers most of them. For a fully automated check, our free audit tool generates a scored report across 54 data points.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ask for clarification. A reputable auditor should be able to address all 8 of these. If the audit only covers surface-level metrics like CTR benchmarks and ad strength, you're getting a basic grader report, not a real audit.
Free tools can partially answer questions 1, 2, 5, and 6. They struggle with questions 3, 4, 7, and 8 because those require business context and cross-system analysis that automated tools can't do.
Look for specificity. "Your CPCs are high" is useless. "Your CPCs on these 15 keywords are 40% above market rate because of Quality Score issues, and here is how to fix each one" is valuable. The more specific and actionable the findings, the better the audit.
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