The first thing most people check in a Google Ads audit is performance metrics. That’s the wrong starting point.
If the data underlying those metrics isn’t trustworthy, every insight you draw from them is wrong. I’ve seen accounts where the CPL looked great and the business was losing money — because conversions were double-counting and the ‘leads’ included form page views, not just form submissions.
Here’s the actual order I run through when auditing an account.
Step 1: Conversion Tracking Integrity
Before any performance metric, I verify that conversions are being counted correctly.
What’s firing as a conversion? Is it a thank-you page view or a confirmed form submission? Are the same leads being counted multiple times? Is the conversion window appropriate for the sales cycle?
The most common issue: a business tracking both ‘form page view’ and ‘form submission’ as conversions. Every lead appears twice. CPL looks half as good as it actually is. The business thinks they’re getting 100 leads a month. They’re getting 50.
Fix conversion tracking first. Every other metric depends on it.
Step 2: Campaign Network Settings
Are Display Network and Search Partners enabled on Search campaigns? They almost always are, and they almost always shouldn’t be.
This is the fastest setting change you can make with immediate impact. Under Settings → Networks, uncheck Display Network on every Search campaign. Your cost per lead will typically improve within weeks as you stop paying for lower-quality display traffic.
Step 3: Search Terms Report
With data integrity confirmed and obvious setting errors fixed, the search terms report shows me where money is going that shouldn’t be.
Sort by cost. Read the actual queries. Any query that wouldn’t produce a qualified lead gets added as a negative keyword immediately.
In most accounts that haven’t been actively managed, this step identifies 20-40% of spend going to irrelevant queries.
Step 4: Keyword Match Types
What percentage of spend is on broad match? In lead gen accounts, high broad match spend is almost always correlated with poor lead quality.
I look at the distribution: how much is exact, phrase, and broad? Then I check what the broad match terms are actually triggering in the search terms report (Step 3 will have already revealed this).
Step 5: Ad Copy and Landing Page Alignment
Are the ads relevant to the keywords they’re in? Is there message match between the ad and the landing page — does the ad make a promise the landing page fulfills?
A disconnect here kills conversion rate at the landing page level. Someone clicks an ad about emergency roof repair and lands on a general roofing company homepage. They bounce. The lead is lost.
Step 6: Bidding Strategy vs. Data Available
Is the account using automated bidding (Target CPA, Target ROAS) without enough conversion history to support it? Automated bidding needs roughly 50 conversions per month to work effectively. Below that, manual or enhanced CPC often produces better results.
An account that just launched running Target CPA with 8 conversions in the last 30 days is a common problem.
What Does a Healthy Account Look Like?
Accurate conversion tracking. Display Network off on Search campaigns. Search terms report reviewed monthly with active negative keyword list. Keyword match types heavily weighted toward exact and phrase. Ad-to-landing page message match on every ad group. Bidding strategy matched to the amount of conversion data available.
That’s not a perfect account. It’s a solid account — one where optimizations will actually produce reliable improvements because the foundation is right.