How to Audit a Google Ads Account in 30 Minutes

This walkthrough is for three situations: you're taking over someone else's account, you're doing a quarterly self-review, or you're prepping for a client handoff and need a quick health read. It won't catch everything. A full audit takes hours. But 30 minutes with a clear structure will surface the issues that actually matter.

Pull up the account and start the clock.

Minutes 0–5: Account-Level Overview

What to look at:

Open the account in Google Ads and go to the Campaigns view. Set the date range to the last 90 days. Look at:

• Total spend, conversions, and cost per conversion
• Campaign count and how many are active vs. paused
• Any campaigns showing 0 conversions in the period with nonzero spend

Red flags to spot:

• Campaigns with significant spend and zero conversions are the first priority to investigate, not necessarily to pause, but to understand
• More than 10–15 active campaigns in a small account usually signals structural drift, campaigns created for reasons that no longer exist
• A conversion rate that has dropped more than 20% since the prior 90-day period warrants investigation before anything else

What to note:

Write down total spend, total conversions, and blended CPA for the period. This is your baseline for the rest of the audit.

Minutes 5–10: Conversion Tracking

What to look at:

Go to Tools → Conversions (or Measurement → Conversions in the new UI). Review each conversion action:

• Is it recording any conversions in the last 30 days?
• Is it set to Primary or Secondary?
• What's the counting method: every vs. one?

Red flags to spot:

• A conversion action that was recording last quarter but shows zero this quarter: this is either a broken tag or a tracking change that wasn't flagged
• Multiple conversions set to Primary: Smart Bidding optimizes toward all primary actions simultaneously, which causes issues if some are soft goals (pageviews, time on site) mixed with hard goals (form fills, purchases)
• GA4 import conversions running alongside Google Ads tags for the same action. This doubles the conversion count.

What to note:

Flag any conversion actions that need verification. Don't dig into the tag implementation now. Note it and move on. You're auditing, not fixing.

Minutes 10–20: Search Terms and Negative Keywords

What to look at:

Go to Keywords → Search Terms. Set date range to 90 days. Sort by cost descending. Scan the top 50–100 queries by spend.

Then pull the negative keyword lists under Shared Library → Negative Keyword Lists.

Red flags to spot:

• Queries that don't match your offer at all appearing in the top spend: bleed candidates
• Brand competitor terms showing up in non-brand campaigns
• Informational queries ("what is," "how to," "reddit") with significant spend and low or zero conversion rate
• Negative keyword lists that haven't been updated recently, or no shared negative list applied at all
• High-converting queries that are still triggering on phrase or broad match. Harvest these as exact match keywords.

What to note:

Flag the top 5–10 queries to add as negatives. Flag any high-converting queries to harvest. Don't make the changes now. You're still in discovery.

If you need to research query volume or related keyword ideas as part of this review, Keyword Planner Tools gives you free access to Google Ads keyword data without needing an active campaign.

Minutes 20–30: Campaign Structure and Bid Strategy

What to look at:

Click into each active campaign and check:

• Bid strategy type (Manual CPC, Enhanced CPC, Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, Target Impression Share)
• Ad group count per campaign
• Whether the recommendations tab shows any auto-applied changes

Also pull the campaign settings for each active campaign and check the Networks settings. Search Network campaigns should not have the Display Network checked unless that was a deliberate decision..

Red flags to spot:

• Smart Bidding active on campaigns with fewer than 30 conversions in the last 30 days: this is the most common performance problem in small accounts
• Target CPA or Target ROAS set to a number that doesn't match actual performance. If the target is $25 CPA but actual is $80, the algorithm is chasing an impossible target and capping delivery.
• Display Network enabled on Search campaigns is almost always a mistake: it commingles intent-driven traffic with passive display impressions in the same budget
• Auto-applied recommendations that were applied without review. Check the change history for the last 90 days and look for anything labeled "Recommendation applied automatically"
• Ad groups with a single keyword or 20+ keywords: both indicate structural problems

What to note:

By the end of this segment you should have a list of:

1. Broken or suspect conversion tracking items to verify
2. Negative keywords to add / search terms to harvest
3. Bid strategy mismatches to address
4. Structural issues to fix in a dedicated session

That list is your audit output. Anything on it that would take under 5 minutes to fix (add negatives, pause a dead campaign): do it immediately. Anything structural goes into a prioritized task list.

Thirty minutes isn't enough to fix a troubled account, but it's enough to understand it. If you're doing keyword research as part of a broader account review, Keyword Planner Tools is a free tool for pulling keyword volume and CPC estimates directly from Google Ads data.