Most business owners who run Google Ads have a vague sense that something isn’t working right. The clicks are there. The spend is happening. But the phone isn’t ringing the way it should. If you want to know how to audit your own Google Ads account without hiring someone to do it, you don’t need a certification or a spreadsheet with 40 tabs. You need to know where to look and what you’re actually looking for when you get there.
Thirty minutes is enough time to find the problems. Not all of them, but the ones that are costing you real money right now. That’s what this is about.
Start With Conversions, Not Clicks
Almost everyone opens their Google Ads dashboard and looks at impressions or clicks first. It’s the wrong instinct. Clicks are just traffic. They’re only meaningful if they’re turning into something, and the first thing you need to confirm is whether your account is even tracking that correctly.
Go to Tools and Settings, then Measurement, then Conversions. What do you see? If the list is empty, or if every conversion source shows “No recent conversions” when you know people have been visiting your site, something is broken. Broken Google Ads conversion tracking is more common than it should be, and it’s quietly one of the most expensive problems an account can have, because every bidding decision Google’s algorithm makes depends on that data being accurate.
If your conversions look fine on the surface, check the conversion action types. Are you tracking phone calls from ads? Form submissions? Appointment bookings? If you’re only tracking one of those and not the others, you’re making decisions based on an incomplete picture. A roofing company we audited last year had solid form submission tracking but had never set up call tracking. About 70% of their actual leads were coming in by phone. Their account looked like it was underperforming when it was actually doing the heavy lifting completely blind.
The Search Terms Report Is Where the Waste Lives
This is the one place most account owners have never visited, and it’s the one place that almost always has something alarming in it. Under your campaigns, go to Keywords, then Search Terms. This shows you the actual words people typed before they clicked your ad and spent your money.
Read through it slowly. You’ll find some that make perfect sense. You’ll also find things that have no business being in there. A plumber paying for “plumbing jobs near me” (job seekers, not homeowners with leaks). An HVAC contractor showing up for “HVAC certification online.” A financial advisor paying for “what is a 401k” from someone who probably just turned 22 and opened their first account. These aren’t edge cases. They show up constantly.
Every irrelevant search term that triggered your ad is a click you paid for that had essentially zero chance of converting. WordStream’s research has found that roughly 76% of search ad clicks come from irrelevant searches for accounts without strong negative keyword management. That number might sound extreme until you actually look at your own search terms report, and then it starts to make sense.
Pull out every term that doesn’t match what you actually sell and add it as a negative keyword. Negative keywords don’t get talked about enough. They’re probably the fastest way to improve your cost per lead without touching your bids or your budget, and most accounts we look at have lists that are either empty or haven’t been updated in months.
What Your Quality Score Is Actually Saying
Quality Score gets talked about as though it’s a vanity metric. It’s not. A low Quality Score means you’re paying more per click than your competitors for the same position, and it means Google is limiting how often your ads show. You might think your budget is the constraint when it’s actually your relevance score quietly throttling your reach.
Go to your Keywords tab and add the Quality Score column if it isn’t already visible. Look for anything below a 6. Scores of 3, 4, or 5 are expensive. Scores of 1 or 2 are practically penalties. What your Quality Score is actually telling you is that something in the relationship between your keyword, your ad copy, and your landing page isn’t connecting the way Google expects it to.
The fix isn’t always obvious. Sometimes it’s that you’ve dumped 50 keywords into a single ad group and the ad copy can only speak to a few of them at once. Sometimes the landing page you’re sending traffic to doesn’t mention the keyword at all, or buries it so far down the page that Google’s crawlers don’t register the match. You might think the page is relevant. Google’s algorithm disagrees, and in PPC, Google’s opinion is the one that affects your bill.
Campaign Structure Tells You a Lot About Who Set It Up
Take a look at how your campaigns are organized. How many ad groups are in each campaign? How many keywords are in each ad group? If you see a single campaign with one ad group and 80 keywords, that account was set up quickly by someone who either didn’t know what they were doing or didn’t want to spend the time. It’s not necessarily broken, but it’s sloppy in a way that costs money over time.
Tightly themed ad groups perform better. Not because of some abstract best practice, but because they let you write ad copy that speaks directly to exactly what someone searched. If someone types “emergency furnace repair,” they should see an ad that says something about emergency furnace repair, not a generic HVAC ad. That specificity is what moves Quality Scores up, click-through rates up, and cost per conversion down. Everything is connected.
Also check your match types while you’re in there. If every keyword is broad match, your ads are showing for a much wider range of searches than you probably realize, which loops right back to that search terms problem from earlier. Broad match isn’t inherently wrong, but it requires strong negative keyword lists and conversion data to work well. Without those two things, it’s just a fast way to burn through budget on irrelevant traffic.
Ad Copy That Nobody Reads
Pull up your ads and actually read them. Not as a marketer. As a customer who has a problem and is searching for someone to solve it. Do your ads say anything specific? Do they give someone a reason to click on yours instead of the three other ads next to it?
Most ads don’t. They say something like “Trusted [Industry] Services. Licensed and Insured. Call Today.” Which is fine, technically. And also completely forgettable. The business across town is probably running something almost identical. When ads all sound the same, customers either click on the first result or they click on the cheapest-looking one, neither of which is a great outcome if you’re the one trying to stand out.
Check your click-through rates. Anything consistently below 3-4% in a competitive local market is a sign your ads aren’t compelling enough, though this varies quite a bit by industry and keyword type. Look at which headlines and descriptions Google is serving most often. It tends to favor the combinations that get more clicks, so whatever’s being shown most is at least being rewarded for engagement, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually converting well on the other side.
Writing Google Ads copy that gets clicks is a skill that takes practice, but the first step is being honest about whether what you have now is doing any real work or just taking up space.
Your Ad Extensions Might Be Half Empty
Ad extensions (now called assets in Google’s interface, though most people still say extensions) are one of those things that are free to use and genuinely improve performance, and yet a surprising number of accounts either haven’t set them up fully or have them set up with outdated information.
Go to Ads and Assets, then Assets. Check for sitelinks, callouts, call assets, location assets, and structured snippets at minimum. If you’re a local service business, your phone number should absolutely be in there as a call asset. If you have a Google Business Profile, your location should be linked. If there are specific services or offers you want to highlight, sitelinks let you point to those pages directly from the search ad.
Google has published data showing that ads with extensions see meaningfully higher click-through rates than ads without them, partly because extensions just make the ad bigger and more visible on the page. There’s also a Quality Score benefit. Ad extensions are one of the lowest-effort, highest-leverage improvements most accounts can make, and the time investment to set them up correctly is genuinely small.
Bidding Strategy and What It’s Actually Optimizing For
This one catches a lot of people off guard. Go into your campaign settings and look at your bidding strategy. Is it Maximize Clicks? Target CPA? Target ROAS? Manual CPC? Each of these is optimizing for a different thing, and if your strategy doesn’t match your actual goal, you’re pointing your budget in the wrong direction.
Maximize Clicks, for example, will do exactly what it says. It will get you as many clicks as possible within your budget. But it has no opinion about whether those clicks come from people who will ever buy anything. If conversions are your goal, and they almost always should be, a strategy like Target CPA or Maximize Conversions makes more sense, provided your conversion tracking is solid enough to give the algorithm something real to optimize toward. Which is why fixing your conversion tracking first matters so much.
Understanding Google Ads bidding strategies and how they interact with your conversion data is one of the things that separates accounts that improve over time from accounts that plateau. The algorithm genuinely gets smarter with better data. It’s not magic, it’s just math, but the math works better when you feed it accurate inputs.
Budget Pacing and When Your Ads Actually Run
Two quick things to check here. First, look at your impression share lost to budget. This metric tells you what percentage of the time your ads weren’t shown because your daily budget ran out. If that number is above 20-30%, you’re either underfunded for the competition level you’re targeting, or your budget is being eaten up earlier in the day by lower-quality clicks before the higher-intent searchers show up later.
Second, check your ad scheduling. When are your ads running? If you’re a service business that operates Monday through Friday from 8 to 5, but your ads are running 24/7 including late nights and weekends when nobody is answering the phone, you might want to either adjust the schedule or at least reduce bids during hours when you can’t actually respond to leads. Speed to lead matters enormously in service industries, and a form submission that sits unanswered for 14 hours over the weekend is barely better than a click that didn’t convert at all.
One More Thing Worth Checking
Knowing how to audit your own Google Ads account is genuinely useful, and the things covered here are the ones most likely to surface a real problem quickly. But there’s one layer that’s easy to miss during a self-audit, and that’s whether Google Ads is the right channel at all for what you’re trying to accomplish right now, or whether it’s working alongside other things the way it should.
If you haven’t looked at how Google Ads compares to SEO for your specific situation, that’s worth some time. And if you’re in a home service trade like HVAC, plumbing, or roofing, you may also want to understand what Google Local Services Ads are and how they interact with standard paid search, because the two work differently and attract different kinds of leads.
The audit process described above should take you about 30 minutes if you move through it without getting stuck. More time is fine. Less time usually means something got skipped. When you’re done, you’ll have a clearer picture of where your budget is going and whether it’s going somewhere good, which is genuinely more than most advertisers can say about their own accounts.
If you want to go deeper, understanding how much Google Ads actually costs in your market context can help you figure out whether what you’re spending makes sense relative to what’s realistic in your industry and your area.
What You Do With What You Find
Running through this kind of audit and finding three or four problems isn’t a reason to feel bad about the account. It’s actually a good sign, because it means there’s room to improve without spending more money. Most accounts we look at have at least one issue that, once fixed, meaningfully changes the cost per lead. Sometimes it’s the search terms report. Sometimes it’s conversion tracking. Sometimes it’s bid strategy running on autopilot toward the wrong goal. The specifics vary, but the opportunity is almost always there.
The harder part is usually the follow-through. Finding the problem takes 30 minutes. Fixing it correctly, monitoring the results, and continuing to refine over time is ongoing work. Which is why a lot of businesses get to the audit stage, understand what’s wrong, and then either make the fixes incorrectly or let the account drift back into the same patterns within a few months. Knowing how to audit your own Google Ads account is a real skill. Turning that into consistent account performance is a different discipline entirely.
Your customers are already searching. The question is whether they’re finding you or your competitor. Our team builds and manages Google and Bing Ads campaigns designed to bring in qualified leads, not just clicks. Contact Lost & Found Marketing and let’s make sure you’re the one they find.