How often should I audit?

A quick review of search terms weekly, a full audit quarterly, and always after a significant change in results. An unexplained drop is a reason to audit immediately rather than to wait.

Can I audit my own account?

Yes, and this checklist covers most of it. The part that benefits from outside eyes is judging what is normal for your market, since an account can look fine in isolation and still underperform badly against what is achievable.

What is a good cost per conversion?

Whatever leaves you profitable, which depends entirely on your margin and close rate. Published industry benchmarks are almost useless because they average across wildly different business models.

Should I pause everything and start over?

Rarely. Rebuilding discards conversion history that automated bidding depends on. Fixing the specific problems usually beats starting from zero, and anyone proposing a full rebuild should explain why yours is an exception.

Google Ads Audit: What to Check First

Google Ads audit: what to check, in order.

Published on 30 August 2026

Direct answer

Check in this order: whether your conversions represent real business outcomes, where search terms waste budget, whether campaign structure lets you see what works, whether bidding matches your data volume, and whether landing pages deliver what the ads promised. The first item alone accounts for most wasted spend we find.

The audit order, by money at stake: conversions, search terms, structure, bidding and landing pages.

Start with what you are counting.

Open the conversions view and read each one. If any counts a page view, a click on a phone number that may never have been dialled, or a form load rather than a submission, your optimisation has been aimed at the wrong target.

This matters more than any other item because automated bidding learns from it. A badly defined conversion teaches Google to buy the wrong thing efficiently, which is worse than not using automation at all.

Then read the search terms report.

Not the keywords, the search terms: what people actually typed. Sort by cost and read the top hundred. In accounts running broad match without maintained negatives, the waste is usually obvious within two minutes.

Add negatives for terms with no commercial intent, and keep doing it weekly. This is the highest-return routine task in Google Ads and the one most commonly skipped. See Google Ads management.

Check whether the structure hides anything.

Brand searches mixed into the same campaign as everything else make performance look better than it is, because people searching your name were always going to find you. Separating brand is the fastest way to see the truth.

The same applies to Performance Max running alongside search without exclusions. It will claim conversions that search would have captured anyway, and the reporting will not make that obvious.

Then bidding, then landing pages.

Automated bidding needs conversion volume to learn from. On an account with a handful of conversions a month, automation is guessing, and manual control often performs better until volume builds.

Finally, click your own ads and look at where they land. If the ad promises one specific service and the page is a general home page, you are paying full price for a conversion rate you deliberately lowered. See landing page design.

On this subject.