How to audit a Google Ads account in 60 minutes
By Tom Goodwin, Founder of GAMEPLAN.
You audit a Google Ads account in 60 minutes by working in priority order: conversion tracking first, then wasted spend, then structure, then bidding, then the search terms report. The single biggest mistake is starting with the budget. If the conversion tracking is wrong, every number you are about to judge is fiction, and every change you make will be wrong in a confident-looking way. So the first 10 minutes go entirely to measurement. Get that right and the rest of the hour is fast.
I have audited hundreds of accounts across £20m+ of managed media, including the work that earned my team Google Premier Partner status in February 2024. The pattern is consistent: most underperforming accounts are not badly optimised, they are badly measured. Here is the exact 60-minute pass I run.
What do you check in the first 10 minutes?
Conversion tracking, and nothing else. Open the conversions section and verify five things:
- One primary conversion action that maps to actual business value, not three overlapping ones inflating the count.
- Conversions deduplicated. If you fire both a “purchase” and a “lead” tag on the same event, your ROAS is doubled and meaningless.
- Sensible attribution. Data-driven attribution is fine; last-click on a long sales cycle is misleading.
- Enhanced conversions on, where the business can supply first-party data. With cookie loss this is now the difference between modelled and measured.
- Conversion lag understood. A 14-day lag business judged on yesterday’s data will always look like it is failing.
If tracking is broken, I stop. There is no point auditing bids on numbers nobody can trust. Fixing measurement is the audit.
How do you find wasted spend quickly?
Go to the search terms report, set the date range to 90 days, and sort by cost descending. Within two minutes you will see the leaks:
| What you see | What it means | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| High-cost terms, zero conversions | Money burning with no return | Negative keyword or pause |
| Irrelevant queries from broad keywords | Match types running unmanaged | Tighten negatives, not match type |
| Competitor brand terms converting poorly | Expensive prospecting dressed as intent | Separate campaign, separate target |
| Your own brand counted as performance | Inflated ROAS hiding weak prospecting | Split brand into its own campaign |
Then check auto-applied recommendations. Google will happily switch these on by default, and I regularly find accounts spending against changes the owner never approved. Turn off the auto-apply you did not choose.
How do you assess account structure in 10 minutes?
Structure should reflect how you make decisions, not how the account was built three agencies ago. I look for:
- Brand separated from non-brand. Mixing them hides the truth about whether your prospecting actually works.
- A sensible number of campaigns. Hundreds of single-keyword campaigns is legacy sprawl that starves Smart Bidding of data. A handful of well-fed campaigns beats it.
- Budgets that are not capped on your best performers. A campaign limited by budget is a campaign telling you to give it more money.
- Geographic and device settings that match reality, not defaults nobody reviewed.
The goal of structure in 2026 is to feed the algorithm enough conversion data per campaign to bid well. Over-segmentation is the most common structural fault I find.
What does good bidding look like now?
The default architecture that works in 2026 is broad match feeding Smart Bidding, governed by clean conversion data and a target that reflects margin. In the audit I check three things. First, is the bid strategy aligned to the business goal: target CPA or target ROAS set against real economics, not a number someone typed in 2022. Second, is each campaign getting enough conversions to bid on, ideally 30+ a month, or is it starved and guessing. Third, are tROAS and tCPA targets being changed too often, which resets learning and creates the volatility owners then blame on the platform.
If a campaign has too few conversions for Smart Bidding to work, the answer is usually consolidation, not abandoning automated bidding.
How do you read the search terms report properly?
The search terms report is the most honest screen in Google Ads. The platform shows you the actual queries people typed, before any dashboard has smoothed them. I read it three ways:
- By cost, to find waste (covered above).
- By conversions, to find winners hiding in broad match that deserve their own treatment.
- By intent mismatch, to judge whether the account is buying the right demand. An account full of informational queries converting at low rates is prospecting too early in the journey.
Twenty minutes here tells you more about an account’s true health than any auto-generated optimisation score, which I largely ignore. Optimisation score rewards adopting Google’s suggestions, not running a profitable account.
What does a 60-minute audit actually conclude?
By the end of the hour I can tell you which of three states the account is in:
| State | Symptoms | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| Broken | Tracking wrong, decisions built on bad data | Fix measurement before spending another pound |
| Leaking | Tracking fine, but waste in search terms and structure | Plug leaks, consolidate, retarget budgets |
| Healthy | Clean data, fed campaigns, margin-based bidding | Scale carefully, test incrementally |
Most accounts are leaking. A few are broken. Very few are healthy, and the healthy ones got there by fixing measurement first, exactly the order this audit follows.
What comes after the 60-minute pass?
The hour gives you a verdict and a top-five list. The full audit turns that into a prioritised, costed plan: what to fix this week, what to restructure this month, and what the realistic upside is once the leaks are closed. When I ran a team to Premier Partner level, the accounts that grew, including one that delivered 60% year-on-year growth, all started with this same diagnostic discipline. The growth came from removing waste and trusting clean data, not from a clever trick.
If your account feels like it should be performing better than it is, it almost always comes down to measurement and waste, in that order. I run fixed-fee Google Ads audits that go beyond the 60-minute pass into a documented, prioritised plan you can hand to any team. Send me access and the number you are trying to hit, and I will tell you which of the three states your account is in. Start here: /work-with-me/paid-media-strategy/google-ads-audit.