A Google Ads Audit That Shows You Where the Money Goes.
Last month we opened a client account, and Google reported it was 99.7% optimised. Nearly perfect. So we dismissed one recommendation, changed nothing else, and it went to 100%.
No ad was rewritten. No keyword was added. No budget moved. The number went up because the list of suggestions went empty.
That is the trouble with judging an account by the scores Google shows you. A proper Google Ads audit ignores the scores and goes looking for the money.
Devil in the details
What a Google Ads Audit Actually Finds.
Every account is different, but five problems turn up so often that we check for them first.
The spend you are not allowed to see.
Google hides low-volume search terms in a bucket called Other search terms. In that same client account, £173 of last month's £444 sat in that bucket. Roughly 40% of spend hidden is normal across the industry, so this is your account too, not just theirs. You cannot add a negative keyword to a search you are not allowed to read. What you can do is build the account so that less of your budget ends up in there, and that is what we look at.
Recommendations that would quietly wreck your strategy.
The same account had 150 recommendations to remove "redundant" keywords. Read the list properly and every row said the same thing: keep the phrase match, delete the exact match. On a campaign where exact match is the control, that is not tidying up. That is removing the steering. One Apply All button, 150 changes, and the numbers would have looked fine for a fortnight.
Scores that move without anyone touching the ads.
Ad Strength on that account went from Poor to Excellent after a bid strategy change. Same headlines. Same descriptions. Not one word of the ad was edited. So if your Ad Strength says Poor this morning, do not rewrite perfectly good ads until you know that is actually the problem.
A search terms report nobody has read since the account launched.
This is the dullest job in Google Ads and the one that pays. On that account, going through the search terms daily and excluding what did not belong reduced cost per conversion from £27.36 to £15.69 and increased the conversion rate from 5.23% to 9.70%. Same budget. Same ads. Just somebody reading it.
Budget caps, which most audits get backwards.
If a campaign is limited by budget, cutting out wasted spend does not save you money. Google spends the cap either way. What changes is what you buy with it. That distinction matters, because an audit that promises to save you money on a capped campaign is selling you something that cannot happen.
Outputs
What You Get From Our Google Ads Audit Service.
Not a 90-page PDF with a green bar on the front that nobody reads past page three.
A prioritised fix list, in plain English, with money attached to each item.
Screenshots of everything we claim, so you can go and check it yourself.
What to fix this week, what can wait a month, and what to leave alone.
A straight answer on whether you need an agency at all. Sometimes the account is fine and the problem is the landing page, or the offer, or the follow-up.
The audit
How Our Google Ads Account Audit Works.
You give us read-only access. We change nothing without asking you first, and read-only means we could not, even if we wanted to.
We go through structure, settings and bidding. Most of the damage lies in settings that nobody remembers switching on.
We read twelve months of search terms and work out how much of your budget went somewhere useful.
We test your conversion tracking end-to-end. A surprising number of accounts optimise for a conversion that fires on page load.
We look at what happens after the click, because a perfect campaign pointed at a bad page is still a bad campaign.
We walk you through the findings on a call, in English, and you keep the document either way.
It usually takes us a few days, depending on how big the account is.
the cost
Is the First Look a Free Google Ads Audit?
Yes. The first look costs you nothing, and we tell you what we find before you pay us for anything. We are not going to pretend that is charity. If the account needs work and you like how we think, you might hire us. If it does not, you have lost nothing but the time it took to read our email.
What you will not get is a free audit that is really a sales pitch with a chart stapled to it.
Frequently Asked Questions.
Can I audit Google Ads myself?
Yes, and here is the quick version. Open your search terms report and find the Other search terms row. Work out what share of your spend is sitting in it. Then open your Recommendations tab and read every single one instead of clicking Apply All. That alone puts you ahead of most accounts we see.
Will you change anything in my account?
No. Read-only access, always. If we think something needs to be turned off urgently, we will tell you, and you can do it in thirty seconds.
What happens if my account turns out to be fine?
We tell you it is fine and you get your afternoon back. It does happen. Rarely, but it happens.
Do I have to sign up for management afterwards?
No. No contract, no lock-in, no follow-up sequence chasing you for six weeks. You own the findings whatever you decide to do with them.
How is this different from the free audit tools?
Tools read the same numbers Google shows you and score how closely you agree with them. They cannot see why your account is built the way it is, because "we run both match types on purpose" is not a field anyone can fill in. That is the bit a human does.
Do you only audit B2B accounts?
Most of our clients are B2B, with long sales cycles and a handful of leads a month that are each worth a great deal. That is where we are strongest. If you are ecommerce, we will say so and point you somewhere better.