A Google Ads audit is an independent, line-by-line review of the account you are already paying for. It answers whether the account measures real enquiries and sales, where the money actually goes, which settings work against you and what to change first. I carry it out myself, with read-only access, and you receive a written fix list ranked by how much money each problem is likely to be costing you.
This is a one-off piece of work for UK businesses already spending on Google Ads. If you want someone to run the account every month, that is monthly PPC management. If you are still deciding whether Google Ads suits your business at all, my overview of Google Ads services is the better starting point.
What an audit tells you
Most accounts that need an audit are not broken in an obvious way. They spend, they report conversions, and the cost per conversion on the dashboard looks acceptable. The trouble sits underneath: the conversion figure includes actions that are not enquiries, part of the budget buys searches you would never have chosen, and the automated bidding is learning from that bad data.
Afterwards you can say with confidence whether the numbers in the account can be trusted, roughly how much of the spend is doing nothing for you, and which changes come first. You can act on the list yourself, give it to your agency or ask me to do the work.
Who it suits, and who it does not
An audit is worth paying for when:
- you have run Google Ads for a few months or more and still cannot tell whether it pays;
- you plan to raise the budget and want to know the account can absorb more money without wasting it;
- you are changing agency, or have inherited an account from someone who has left, and need to know what you are taking on;
- your agency’s reports look healthy but the phone and the inbox tell a different story.
It is the wrong purchase if you have no account yet, because there is nothing to audit; my guide to setting up Google Ads for a UK business is the place to begin. If your monthly spend is small, the fee may do more good left in the budget, and working through my Google Ads checklist yourself will catch many of the same faults.
What the audit checks
I work through the account in the order that problems cost money, which means measurement first. Every later judgement about keywords, bids or budgets depends on the conversion figures being right.
Conversion tracking
I check which actions count as conversions, which are set as primary (the ones automated bidding works towards), and whether any count twice, fire on page views or record things that are not leads, such as newsletter sign-ups. With your agreement I submit test enquiries to confirm they arrive. On UK sites I also look at how the cookie banner and consent mode are set up, because a banner that blocks Google’s tags without passing consent signals can make a real share of enquiries vanish from the account. My article on testing whether conversion tracking records real enquiries shows the kind of checks involved.
Wasted spend
Your keywords are not the searches you pay for. I read the search terms report across several months to find the queries behind your clicks: job hunters, people after free advice, towns you do not cover, competitors’ names, products you do not stock. Then I check whether your existing negative keywords would have caught them, and whether any of those negatives are blocking searches you actually want.
Structure and settings
A handful of defaults quietly spend money for UK advertisers. Location targeting left on presence or interest lets a campaign meant for Leeds reach someone overseas who is merely reading about Leeds. Search campaigns that also run on the Display Network, ad schedules that ignore your opening hours and auto-applied recommendations that edit the account without anyone deciding all show up here. I also check whether the campaign structure follows how you sell, or whether unrelated services are fighting over one budget.
Keywords and Quality Score
I compare match types with the bidding strategy, look for keywords competing against each other, and treat Quality Score as a diagnosis rather than a target. A poor landing page rating on one ad group tells me far more than an account-wide average does.
Ads and assets
I read the ads as a searcher would. Do they say anything a competitor could not, do they mention price, area or availability where those matter, and are the sitelinks, callouts and call assets still accurate? Expired offers, headlines pinned for no reason and sitelinks pointing at deleted pages are all easy to miss once an account has run for a while.
Bidding and budget
Automated bidding needs accurate conversions in reasonable numbers. I check whether the strategy suits the volume the account produces, whether a target cost per acquisition or return on ad spend is realistic or is simply choking delivery, and whether your strongest campaigns run out of budget while weaker ones spend freely.
Landing pages
I compare what each ad promises with the page it sends people to, then test that page on a phone, since mobile usually accounts for a large share of clicks (your device report will show the split). Slow pages, long forms and phone numbers hidden below the fold lose enquiries you have already paid for. Where the page is the weak point, a landing page built for the campaign can do more than any bid change.
Performance Max and Shopping
For online shops I check the product feed in Google Merchant Center for disapprovals, missing attributes and prices that do not match the site, VAT included. In Performance Max campaigns I look at how much of the reported return comes from people already searching for your brand by name, because that can flatter the results considerably.
Competitors in the auction
The auction insights report shows which advertisers you meet and how often you appear above them. I use it to judge whether rising costs come from your own account or from a new competitor, since the right response is different in each case.
How the audit runs
- A short call. You tell me what you sell, what a good lead or sale is worth to you and what you suspect is wrong. That decides where I look hardest.
- Read-only access. You add my email address to the account with read-only access, plus view access to Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager if you use them. I never need your password or payment details, and I change nothing during the audit.
- The review. I work through the checks above, normally across the last few months of data, and over a longer period where your trade is seasonal.
- The written report. Each finding sets out what I found, the evidence, why it matters and what to do about it.
- A walkthrough call. We go through the report together so you, or whoever runs the account, can ask questions before changing anything.
A quick look or a full audit
A quick look at an account, whether free or paid, catches the obvious faults: no conversion tracking, one runaway search term, a setting left on its default. It is a sensible way to find out whether something is wrong. A full audit goes further. It tests the tracking rather than reading the settings, works through months of search terms rather than the top twenty, and ends with a ranked plan that whoever does the work can follow. If you are not sure which you need, ask me and I will tell you plainly whether a full audit is worth the money for an account of your size.
Problems I look for in UK accounts
- Brand searches doing the heavy lifting. People already searching for your business by name make the overall cost per lead look healthy while the non-brand campaigns lose money.
- Enquiries lost behind the cookie banner. Consent collected without consent mode, or enhanced conversions never switched on, leaves the account blind to part of what it produces and bidding on an incomplete picture.
- Phone calls nobody counts. For trades, clinics and professional firms the phone is often the main route in, yet calls go untracked or every short call is counted as a lead.
- Targeting wider than the business. A London practice advertising to the whole of the UK, or a local trade paying for clicks well outside the area it serves.
- An account run by recommendations. Suggestions applied automatically that broadened keywords or raised budgets, with nobody deciding whether they made sense.
What you receive
- a written report covering each area above, with screenshots or exports as evidence;
- a fix list ranked by likely money at stake and effort, separating quick changes from bigger pieces of work and saying who should do each;
- a plain verdict on whether the tracking is reliable enough for automated bidding, and what to repair first if it is not;
- a chance to go through the findings together and ask questions.
The report is yours to keep and use. You can make the changes in-house, pass them to your current agency or ask me to carry them out as a separate piece of work.
Next step
Send me a short note through the contact page with your website, roughly what you spend on Google Ads each month and what worries you about the account. I will reply with whether a full audit makes sense, what it would cost and when I could start. Each audit is quoted in GBP after that first conversation and agreed in writing.