If you run a mid-size company, you have probably been offered a "free Google Ads audit" more than once. Some are worth an hour of your time. Many are a sales deck with your account name pasted in. This guide shows you how to tell them apart, what a useful audit actually covers, and the questions to ask before you act on any of it.
Why audits vary so much
An audit is only as good as the access and the time behind it. A quick audit built from an automated tool will flag the same things for every account: missing assets, low optimization score, "add broad match." A real audit needs someone senior to spend a few hours in your account, look at at least several months of data, and understand what a good lead is worth to your business.
So the first thing to judge is not the findings. It is whether the person who wrote it understood your business model. If the audit never mentions your sales cycle, your average deal size or which leads turn into revenue, treat the rest with caution.
Check 1: did they question your conversion tracking first?
Every other finding depends on this. If your account counts page views, PDF downloads or duplicate form fills as conversions, Google's automated bidding is learning from the wrong signal, and every cost-per-lead figure in the audit is wrong too.
A useful audit will tell you:
- Which conversion actions are set as primary and actually used for bidding.
- Whether any conversions are firing twice, or firing on actions that are not leads.
- Whether leads are tied back to sales in your CRM. Google's offline conversion import uses the click ID (GCLID) stored with each lead to report which clicks became customers, and enhanced conversions for leads adds hashed email or phone data to improve that match.
For B2B companies with a sales team, this is usually the single biggest fix. An agency that skips straight to keyword advice has skipped the foundation.
Check 2: did they show you real search terms?
The search terms report shows what people actually typed before clicking your ad. It is where most wasted spend hides: students, job seekers, competitors' customers looking for support, and people searching for a cheaper or consumer version of what you sell.
A good audit includes actual examples from your account, with the spend attached, and a proposed negative keyword list. A weak one says "review your search terms" and moves on.
This applies to Performance Max too. Google now offers search terms reporting for all Performance Max campaigns, plus campaign-level negative keywords and negative keyword lists. If you run Performance Max and the audit says "we can't see what it does," that was true a couple of years ago. It is not an excuse now.
Check 3: did they look at the settings that quietly leak budget?
Some of the most expensive problems are single checkboxes. A thorough audit looks at each of these and says what your account is set to and why it should or should not change:
- Location options. Google's default, "Presence or interest", can show ads to people who have shown interest in your target area but are not in it. For a US company that only sells domestically, that may not be what you want.
- Search partners and Display expansion. These extend Search campaigns beyond Google's own results. Google added site-level impression reporting for search partners in 2025, but it does not show conversions by site, so the audit should compare partner traffic against Google Search on your own lead data.
- Auto-applied recommendations. Google can apply some recommendations automatically, including adding keywords, adding broad match and changing bid strategies. The audit should check whether these are on and what they changed, using the History tab and change history.
- AI Max for Search. If it is switched on, AI Max can broaden which searches match your ads, rewrite ad text and send people to a different landing page on your site. That can work, but someone needs to check where it is sending traffic and what those visitors do.
Check 4: are fixes ranked by money, not by count?
A 40-point checklist looks thorough but is hard to act on. The audits worth reading rank findings by likely impact: "these five things are costing you the most, fix them first." Each finding should say what was found, the evidence from your account, what to change and what result to look for afterward.
If every item has the same weight, you will spend your team's time on ad asset tweaks while a broken conversion tag keeps steering the budget.
Red flags in a weak audit
- It leans on optimization score. Google describes the score as an estimate of how well an account is set to perform. It is not a measure of leads or revenue, and a high score does not mean a healthy account.
- Everything is wrong. Your previous agency or in-house team almost certainly did some things well. An audit that finds no strengths is selling, not diagnosing.
- No data from your account. If it contains no screenshots, numbers or search terms from your own campaigns, it could have been written for anyone.
- Vague promises. "We can double your leads" without a baseline, a timeframe or a method is not a finding.
- It asks for admin access before any conversation. Read-only access is enough to audit. You should never need to hand over ownership.
Questions to ask the agency
- Who did the audit, and will that person work on our account?
- How many months of data did you look at?
- Which of our conversion actions do you trust, and which would you remove?
- What are the three changes you would make in week one, and what would they cost us in time or budget?
- How will we know in 60 to 90 days whether your changes worked?
- What did our current setup get right?
The answers tell you more about the agency than the audit document does. A team that answers clearly and specifically is a team that can run the account.
What to do with the audit
Even if you never hire the agency, a good audit is useful. Hand the top five findings to whoever manages the account now and ask for a short response on each. If several findings are confirmed, you have learned something. If the current team can explain each one away with evidence, that is reassuring too.
If you are comparing agencies, ask each one to audit the same account and compare how they rank the problems. Then compare pricing on a like-for-like scope, which our guide to PPC management pricing covers, and check the basics in our offshore PPC checklist if any of them are outside your country.