The Google Ads Audit I Run Before I Touch a Single Bid

By Brennan Lunin, Founder at BL AdWorks

Every account I open is leaking money somewhere. The leak is almost never the bid strategy, which is where most people start. It is usually the account showing ads to people who were never going to buy, and nobody has read the search terms report in six months.

Here is the order I go in. It is deliberate: each step depends on the one above it being true.

1. Is the conversion tracking even correct?

Nothing below this matters if this is wrong. If the conversion tag is misfiring, every decision you make afterward is made on bad numbers, and you will confidently optimize toward nothing.

Check four things:

• The conversion tag fires on the confirmation page, and only on the confirmation page
• Conversion values are real values, not all set to $1 and not left blank
• The same purchase is not being counted twice
• GA4 and Google Ads are at least in the same neighborhood. They will never match exactly (different attribution models), but if one says 40 conversions and the other says 4, stop and fix that first

I have opened accounts where the tag fired on every page load. The client thought they had a 60% conversion rate. They had a broken tag.

2. Read the search terms report

Your keywords are what you bid on. The search terms report is what people actually typed. These are different documents and only one of them is the truth.

Export the last 30 days and look for three things: queries that are obviously irrelevant, queries with clicks and zero conversions, and queries converting well that are not in your keyword list yet.

Then add the irrelevant ones as negatives. This is the single highest-value hour in the whole audit and it requires no expertise, just attention.

3. Build the negative keyword list

Most accounts I see have almost no negatives. The categories that catch the most waste:

• Job seekers: jobs, careers, hiring, salary, resume
• Free and DIY: free, template, tutorial, how to, DIY
• Researchers: review, comparison, vs, reddit, forum
• Price-shoppers you do not want: cheap, discount, free trial

Build it as a shared list and apply it across campaigns, so you are not maintaining five copies of the same thing.

4. Match types

Broad match with smart bidding and a lot of conversion data works. Broad match without conversion data is a donation to Google.

If you are not sure which camp you are in, phrase match is the safe default. Exact match is for the handful of keywords you know are worth real money.

5. Assets (the things formerly called extensions)

Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call and location assets. They take up more of the results page and they cost nothing extra. This is free real estate and most accounts leave half of it empty.

6. Where the click lands

Every ad should land on a page that keeps the promise the ad made. Sending all your traffic to the homepage and hoping is the most common expensive mistake in the whole account.

Ask: does the landing page headline echo the ad headline? Is the call to action visible without scrolling? Does it load fast on a phone, tested on an actual phone?

7. Bidding

Smart bidding needs conversion volume to work. Google publishes its own current minimums for each strategy, and those thresholds move. Go read Google’s documentation rather than trusting a number you found in a blog post, including this one.

The principle is the part that does not change: if you do not have the volume, smart bidding has nothing to learn from, and you are better off with manual control until you do.

8, 9, 10. Devices, schedule, quality score

Check conversion rate by device. If mobile converts at half the rate of desktop and you are paying the same for both clicks, adjust.

Check conversions by hour and day. If nothing converts overnight, stop paying for overnight.

Check Quality Score. It moves your cost per click directly, and the way to improve it is to make the ad, the keyword, and the landing page actually be about the same thing.

What I did not put in this post

You will see audit checklists that open with “most accounts waste 20 to 40 percent of their budget.” I do not know that number and neither does the person who wrote it. The waste in your account is whatever your search terms report says it is, and that report is free to read.

If you want me to run it

I do this audit for free before any engagement, because it is also how I find out whether I can actually help you. If the account is clean, I will tell you that and you have lost nothing.