Google Ads account audit
Find what the headline ROAS hides.
A strong blended result can coexist with weak acquisition, unreliable tracking, or whole categories of demand left uncaptured. We inspect the evidence, document the structural gaps, and turn them into a prioritized rebuild plan.
What the audit resolves
Turn reporting into decisions.
An audit is not a scorecard for the platform. It is a review of whether the account tells the truth about acquisition and gives the operator enough control to act.
Can the conversion data be trusted?
We compare the conversions and values used for bidding with the business outcome they are meant to represent. Duplicate events, stale goals, missing values, or an over-weighted proxy can make an efficient campaign look better than it is.
Are brand results masking acquisition?
Blended CPA and ROAS can be useful summaries, but they can also hide the cost of acquiring someone who was not already searching for the brand. The audit separates the questions the account needs to answer instead of letting one blended number answer all of them.
Does the structure expose missed demand?
We review Search coverage, query handling, Shopping and feed structure, Performance Max asset groups, budget constraints, and campaign overlap. The goal is not to create more campaigns. It is to reveal where demand is being captured, missed, or measured ambiguously.
The standard is practical: every finding should lead to a decision, and every recommended change should have a reason, an order, and a metric that can verify it.
Core review
Four connected layers.
Measurement and economics
Check which actions are primary, how values enter the account, whether revenue reconciles, and which CAC or return target the business can actually support.
Campaign and bidding structure
Review brand and non-brand separation, budget allocation, bid strategies, search terms, match types, overlap, and settings that transfer control back to the platform.
Shopping and Performance Max
Inspect feed and product coverage, asset-group design, campaign roles, impression-share constraints, and the relationship between PMAX, standard Shopping, and Search.
Prioritized rebuild plan
Translate the evidence into a sequence: what to stop, what to repair, what to test, and what to monitor after changes begin.
A documented audit
An account that was already working.
An agency brought us an athletic-apparel Google Ads account that was meeting its headline ROAS benchmarks and generating conversions. The audit found that branded demand was supporting the blended result while the structure obscured weaker non-brand acquisition.
The findings included a $33 blended CPA, 72% branded impression share, a strong PMAX campaign limited to 32% impression share, another PMAX campaign at a $185 CPA, single asset groups across PMAX, no standard Search, Dynamic Search Ads, or Shopping, and auto-applied recommendations enabled.
We documented six structural findings and proposed a seven-step rebuild. The engagement evidence covers the audit and plan only; it does not report implementation or post-change performance.
Read the full athletic-apparel audit and its evidence limits ↗
When to use it
Audit before you add more spend.
Is an audit only for a broken account?
No. The most useful audits often begin when the dashboard looks acceptable but the team cannot explain which demand is incremental, where the next dollar should go, or why apparently similar campaigns perform differently.
Does the audit automatically change the account?
The core audit is diagnostic: findings and a proposed sequence of work. Any implementation scope should be agreed separately. That separation keeps recommendations legible and prevents activity from outrunning the evidence.
Can an agency commission the audit for a client?
Yes. Our documented athletic-apparel audit was an agency engagement. We can focus the work on the account and preserve the agency’s ownership of the client relationship.
Can our team run a first-pass audit internally?
Yes. Use our quarterly paid media audit checklist to test the data, economics, structure, creative, and conversion path before deciding whether an outside review is warranted.