Google Ads Audit

Everything that determines whether your spend produces return: conversion tracking integrity first, then spend forensics across search terms, placements, locations and schedules, then account structure, settings, bidding strategies, budget allocation, ad copy and assets, landing page effectiveness, and your competitive auction position. Each area is examined against your actual business economics rather than generic best practice, and every finding is tied to evidence from your own account history — with its cost or opportunity estimated in real terms.

For a typical single-account engagement, expect roughly one to two weeks from read-only access to the live briefing — enough time to verify tracking end to end, work through the spend history properly and synthesise findings, without stretching into a billing exercise. Larger accounts, longer analysis windows or multi-account structures extend that proportionally, and we fix the timeline during scoping so you know the delivery date before we start. Urgent situations — active budget bleeding, imminent decisions — can be prioritised.

Read-only access to Google Ads and viewer access to your analytics — that is all, and it means we structurally cannot change bids, budgets, settings or campaigns while examining them. Nothing in your account is touched; the audit observes and documents. This matters especially when auditing an account another agency currently manages: their work continues undisturbed, and the review happens without interference in either direction. Revoking our access afterwards takes you under a minute.

No, and the engagement is structured so you can hold us to that: the fee is independent of any future relationship, the roadmap is written to be executable by your team or your existing agency, and the deliverable is complete without hiring us for anything further. Some clients do ask us to implement the findings — we scope that separately when asked. But an audit that always concludes “hire the auditor” is a brochure, and writing those would destroy the only thing an audit sells: independent judgment.

Broken or double-counting conversion tracking leads the list — accounts making decisions on fictional data. Close behind: unattended broad match spending on irrelevant queries, negative keyword lists that stopped growing months ago, auto-applied Google recommendations nobody reviewed, budgets split evenly across campaigns with wildly unequal returns, brand traffic flattering Performance Max results, and location targeting leaking spend far beyond serviceable areas. Most accounts carry several simultaneously — which is why quantified prioritisation, not just detection, is the audit’s real product.

Yes — second-opinion audits on actively managed accounts are a routine and discreet part of this service. Read-only access means their operations continue completely undisturbed, and our findings distinguish defensible professional judgment from genuine neglect, because those deserve different conversations. Sometimes the audit vindicates the incumbent, and we say so plainly; confirmation that things are well run is worth having. Whether and how you share the findings with your agency remains entirely your call.

Yes, and quickly — inherited accounts are where audits earn their keep fastest, because institutional knowledge left with the person and the account is now running on momentum. The audit reconstructs what you actually own: what the structure was trying to do, which settings were deliberate versus accidental, where tracking stands, what has drifted since the handover, and what needs stopping today versus rebuilding this quarter. You end up with documentation the departed employee never wrote, plus a safe operating baseline.

Google’s recommendations are generated by the seller of the clicks — often useful, frequently spend-increasing, and never aware of your margins, lead quality or capacity. The audit is the opposite instrument: independent, grounded in your business economics, and willing to conclude that you should spend less, pause things Google suggests expanding, or reject its auto-applied changes. We do evaluate the recommendations tab as part of the review — including which auto-applications have quietly cost you — which Google’s own tooling will never do.

Then you get that verdict, documented — and it is worth more than it sounds. A clean audit certifies the foundation before scaling, gives your team or agency deserved credit, and establishes the measured baseline for judging future management. In practice, even healthy accounts yield a handful of worthwhile refinements and at least one insurance finding, like a tracking fragility waiting for the next site update. But we do not manufacture severity to justify the fee; findings match the evidence, whatever it shows.

A deep independent audit roughly annually suits most accounts, with event-driven audits at transitions: before major budget scaling, after agency or staff changes, following a website rebuild — the classic silent killer of conversion tracking — or when performance shifts without explanation. Accounts under disciplined weekly management need formal audits less urgently because auditing behaviours run continuously, but even then independent eyes periodically catch what familiarity misses. Set the follow-up cadence against how fast your account and market change.