How to Do a Google Ads Audit in 30 Minutes

Before You Start

Make sure you have admin or at least read access to the Google Ads account, and ideally access to Google Analytics or whatever platform tracks your actual conversions (calls, form fills, purchases). If you don’t have this access, that alone is worth flagging. Set a timer if it helps you stay on pace, since it’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole on any one of these steps.

Step 1: Check Account Access and Ownership (2 minutes)

Go to Tools & Settings > Access and Security.

Look at who has admin access to the account. Specifically check:

• Do you (the business owner) personally have admin level access, not just your agency?
• Is the account linked under your own Google Ads manager account (MCC), or is it sitting under an agency’s manager account you don’t control?
• Are there old users, former employees, or former agencies still listed with access?

If you don’t have admin access to your own account, that’s a red flag worth addressing immediately, regardless of what else the audit finds. You should always own your own advertising account.

Step 2: Sanity Check Conversion Tracking (5 minutes)

Go to Tools & Settings > Conversions.

This is one of the most important checks in the entire audit, because if tracking is broken, every other metric in the account is unreliable.

• Check the status column for each conversion action. It should say “Recording conversions” for actions that should be active. “No recent conversions” or “Inactive” on something that should be firing regularly is a problem.
• Compare conversion counts against a source of truth you trust, like your CRM lead count, actual sales, or call log, for the same time period. If Google Ads says 40 conversions and your CRM shows 12 leads for the same month, something is duplicating or misfiring.
• Check whether conversion values are set up if you’re tracking revenue. A conversion action with no value attached makes ROAS calculations meaningless.
• Look for duplicate conversion actions counting the same event twice (a common issue when both a website tag and a call tracking tool fire for the same phone call).

If tracking looks broken or inconsistent with reality, everything downstream in the account (bidding strategy, budget decisions, reported performance) is built on bad data. Fix this before anything else.

Step 3: Scan the Search Terms Report for Waste (5 minutes)

Go to Campaigns > Search Terms (or Insights and Reports > Search terms), set the date range to the last 30 to 90 days, and sort by cost, highest first.

• Scan the top 20 to 30 search terms by spend. Are they actually relevant to what you sell?
• Look for obviously irrelevant terms: job searches, “free” or “DIY” terms if you sell a paid service, competitor brand names you didn’t intentionally target, or wildly unrelated topics.
• Note any high spend, zero conversion terms. These are immediate negative keyword candidates.
• Check if broad match keywords are pulling in search terms that have drifted far from the original intent.

Even five minutes here usually surfaces at least a handful of terms burning budget with no chance of converting. This is one of the fastest wins in any account.

Step 4: Check Quality Scores (3 minutes)

Go to Campaigns > Keywords, and add the Quality Score column if it’s not already showing (click the columns icon, search “Quality Score,” add it along with the sub-components: Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, Landing Page Experience).

• Sort by Quality Score, lowest first.
• Look at your top spending keywords specifically. A low Quality Score (below 5) on a high spend keyword usually means either the ad copy doesn’t match the keyword well, or the landing page experience is weak.
• Check which sub-component is dragging the score down. “Below average” landing page experience points to a page speed or relevance problem. “Below average” expected CTR points to weak ad copy or wrong match type.

Quality Score directly affects your cost per click, so a pattern of low scores on your biggest spending keywords is effectively an invisible tax you’re paying every day.

Step 5: Check the Change History for Signs of Activity (3 minutes)

Go to Tools & Settings > Change History.

This is one of the fastest ways to tell whether anyone has actually been managing the account, whether that’s you, an employee, or an agency.

• Look at the last 30, 60, and 90 days. Are there regular changes: new ad copy tests, negative keywords added, bid adjustments, budget changes?
• Or does the history show long stretches of complete silence, followed only by automated system changes?

An account with no meaningful human changes in 60+ days is essentially running on autopilot. That might be fine temporarily, but if you’re paying someone to manage it and seeing this pattern, that’s worth a direct conversation.

Step 6: Check Budget Pacing (3 minutes)

Go to Campaigns view, and check the budget and spend columns for each active campaign over the last 30 days.

• Are campaigns consistently hitting their daily budget cap? That’s often a sign of an artificially limited growth opportunity, assuming performance is solid.
• Are campaigns consistently spending well under budget? That can mean targeting is too narrow, bids are too low to compete, or ad approval or disapproval issues are limiting delivery.
• Check for any campaigns that spent heavily with no meaningful results, which might mean it’s time to pause and rework rather than keep feeding it budget.

If you’re not sure what a reasonable budget looks like for your industry and goals, our guide on what Google Ads management actually costs has realistic benchmarks.

Step 7: Check Ad Copy Variation Count (4 minutes)

Go to Ads & Assets, and look at how many active ads exist per ad group.

• Ideally each ad group should have at least 2 to 3 active responsive search ads to allow for testing and optimization.
• Check if any ad groups are running with just one ad. That means there’s no ongoing testing happening, and Google has no comparison point to optimize toward.
• Skim the actual headlines and descriptions. Are they specific to what’s being searched, or generic enough to apply to almost any business in the category? Generic copy is a strong predictor of weak CTR and Quality Score.

Step 8: Quick Structural Gut Check (5 minutes)

Look at the overall campaign list.

• Does the number of campaigns and ad groups roughly match the complexity of your business? A single service business with one location probably doesn’t need 15 campaigns, and a multi-location, multi-service business probably shouldn’t have everything jammed into one.
• Are branded search terms (your own company name) separated from generic category campaigns? If not, you may be overpaying for traffic that would have found you anyway.
• If you’re running Performance Max alongside Search campaigns, check whether they’re competing against each other for the same searches. If you’re unsure which campaign type fits your goals better, our guide on Performance Max vs. Search campaigns is worth a read.

Total time so far: roughly 30 minutes across the eight steps above.

Why This 30-Minute Version Has Limits

This checklist is designed to be fast and doable without any special tools or agency access, which means it necessarily skips some things a deeper audit would cover. It won’t catch:

• Bid strategy misalignment. Whether you’re on Maximize Conversions, Target CPA, Target ROAS, or manual bidding, and whether that choice actually fits your conversion volume and business goals, takes more than a glance to evaluate properly.
• Competitive positioning. A 30 minute audit tells you what’s happening inside your own account, not how your CPCs and ad copy compare to what competitors are running. That requires third party competitive research tools most business owners don’t have access to.
• Attribution model issues. If you’re comparing Google Ads reported conversions against a different attribution window or model than your CRM uses, you can end up chasing a discrepancy that isn’t really there, or missing one that is.
• Landing page and site-level conversion rate optimization. Quality Score gives you a signal that something’s off with the landing page experience, but actually diagnosing and fixing page speed, mobile usability, or form friction is its own project.
• Whether your account structure matches your actual sales funnel. A quick structural gut check catches obvious mismatches, but a proper review of whether campaigns are segmented by the right intent and geography takes more time than this format allows. If you want the tactical detail on this, see our guide on how to structure a Google Ads campaign.

None of that means the 30 minute version isn’t worth doing. It’s the fastest way to catch the most common and most expensive mistakes: broken tracking, obvious wasted spend, and neglect. It just won’t catch everything, and it’s not a substitute for a full review if your account is a meaningful part of your revenue.

Who Should Run This Audit Regularly

Even if you have an agency or an in-house person managing your account, it’s worth running this 30 minute checklist yourself on a quarterly basis. It’s not about second-guessing every decision your marketing team makes, it’s about making sure the fundamentals (tracking accuracy, access control, basic waste) are always solid, regardless of who’s managing day to day operations.

Business owners who never look at their own account tend to find out about problems only when performance has already dropped noticeably. Running this checklist yourself, even quickly, means you’ll catch a tracking break or a budget pacing issue within days instead of finding out a month later when the invoice and the results don’t add up.

What to Do With What You Found

If this audit surfaced tracking problems, meaningful budget waste in the search terms report, or a pattern of neglect in the change history, you now have a concrete list of fixes rather than a vague feeling that something’s off. Some of these you can fix yourself directly in the interface (adding negative keywords, adjusting budgets, writing a second ad variation).

Others, especially tracking discrepancies, Quality Score issues tied to landing pages, or a structure that no longer matches how your business actually sells, take more time and expertise to fix properly than a 30 minute self check allows.

If this quick audit raised more questions than it answered, or you want someone to go through your account at the level of detail an agency would use before taking it on, our full PPC audit service covers everything in this checklist and goes several layers deeper, including competitive benchmarking, bid strategy review, and a prioritized action plan you can actually execute.