How to Audit Your Google Ads Account (Even If You're Not an Expert)

Learn how to audit your Google Ads account to find wasted spend, missed opportunities, and performance issues—no expertise required.

You don't need to be a Google Ads expert to spot major problems in your account. This guide will show you the key things to check—red flags that indicate wasted budget, poor structure, or lazy management. Use this to audit your own account or hold your agency accountable.

Root Causes

No One is Actively Managing the Account

Campaigns are set up once and left to run for months without optimization. No new keywords are added, no negative keywords are added, no bid adjustments are made. The account is on autopilot, which means it's slowly getting worse.

Poor Campaign Structure

Everything is lumped into one campaign with one ad group. Or there are dozens of campaigns with confusing names and no clear strategy. Poor structure makes it impossible to optimize effectively.

Wasted Spend on Irrelevant Searches

Your search terms report shows you're paying for clicks on searches that have nothing to do with your business. This happens when you use broad match keywords without negative keywords, or when you don't review search terms regularly.

What to Fix First

Check Your Search Terms Report

Go to 'Insights and Reports' > 'Search Terms'. Look at what actual searches triggered your ads in the last 30 days. If you see irrelevant searches, add them as negative keywords immediately. This is the fastest way to stop wasting money.

Review Your Quality Scores

Go to 'Keywords' and add the 'Quality Score' column. If most of your keywords have Quality Scores below 5, you're overpaying for clicks. Low Quality Score means poor ad relevance, low expected CTR, or bad landing page experience.

Look at Your Campaign Structure

Do you have tightly-themed ad groups (5-15 keywords per ad group, all closely related)? Or do you have one giant ad group with 100+ random keywords? Good structure = better performance and lower costs.

Check Your Conversion Tracking

Go to 'Tools' > 'Conversions'. Do you have conversion actions set up? Are they recording conversions? If you're not tracking conversions, you're flying blind and can't optimize for results.

Review Your Ad Copy

When was the last time your ads were updated? If they're more than 6 months old, they're probably stale. Fresh ad copy with current offers and messaging typically improves CTR by 20-40%.

Analyze Your Wasted Spend

Go to 'Campaigns' and sort by 'Cost'. Look at your highest-spending campaigns. Now sort by 'Conversions'. Are your highest-spending campaigns also your highest-converting campaigns? If not, you're wasting money.

Why Traditional Agencies & Tools Fail

Many agencies do a basic setup and then put accounts on autopilot. They don't do regular audits, don't review search terms, and don't proactively optimize. They're collecting a management fee for minimal work.

Common Patterns We See

  • The average Google Ads account wastes 20-30% of its budget on irrelevant searches that could be eliminated with proper negative keyword management.
  • Accounts with Quality Scores averaging 7+ pay 30-50% less per click than accounts with Quality Scores averaging 4-5.
  • Simply updating ad copy every 3-6 months can improve CTR by 15-30%, which lowers CPC and improves overall performance.

How Marko Helps

We perform monthly account audits and share the findings with you. You can see in your portal exactly what issues we found and what we did to fix them. We're proactive about optimization, not reactive.

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