Your Google Ads account says it’s working. Conversions are up, cost per conversion looks fine, and the optimization score sits in the 90s.
Then you open your CRM, and the leads aren’t there.
That gap is what a PPC audit is for. Not a 200-item list of settings to click through. A short set of checks, in the right order, that tells you whether your budget is buying customers or buying numbers that look like customers.
This checklist runs in the order we use when we take over an account. Tracking comes first, because every other number in the account depends on it. Then where the clicks come from, who gets credit for your brand, what the ads say, where they land, and where the budget goes.
Key Takeaways
Audit the tracking before anything else. Google only bids toward your primary conversion actions, so one wrong setting there makes every other metric in the account wrong.
Your CRM decides whether it worked. If Google Ads reports more conversions than you got real leads or sales, fix that before you touch a bid or a keyword.
Benchmarks can't tell you if you're converting. WordStream's 2026 benchmark puts the median Google Ads conversion rate at 8.18% across 13,474 campaigns, but every one of those advertisers decides for itself what counts as a conversion.
Performance Max and Search overlap almost everywhere. Optmyzr found the two campaign types competing for the same searches in 91% of 503 accounts, which is why brand exclusions belong on every audit.
Ad Strength is a suggestion, not a score. Google says it doesn't affect whether your ad can serve, and Optmyzr's study of more than 1 million ads found "Average" ads had the best cost per conversion and conversion rate.
Check who owns the account. If your agency or freelancer is the only admin, you don't control your own ad history.
What A PPC Audit Is (And When You Need One)
PPC is pay-per-click advertising: ads where you pay each time someone clicks. A PPC audit is a structured review of an ad account to find where money is being wasted, where the tracking is wrong, and what’s holding results back.
This checklist covers Google Ads, where most businesses spend most of their search budget. The same logic works in Microsoft Advertising. A good audit answers three questions:
- Is the account counting the right things? If it isn’t, Google’s automation is optimizing toward the wrong goal.
- Is the money going to the right searches, places and pages?
- Who is changing the account, and does the business control it?
Run one when:
- You’re taking over an account from another agency, a freelancer or an employee who left
- Your Google Ads campaigns are spending but not converting, or leads dropped and nobody knows why
- You’re about to raise the budget
- Google changed something big. Since September 2026, Google has been moving many Search campaigns into AI Max automatically (more on that in check 5)
- It’s been a quarter since anyone looked past the dashboard
Before You Start: Pull Three Numbers
Pick a date range with enough data to judge, usually the last 90 days, and compare it with the 90 days before. You’ll need admin access to the Google Ads account and access to wherever your real leads or sales live: a CRM, a booking system, a call log or your sales team’s spreadsheet.
Then write down three numbers before you open a single campaign.
Write these down first: what you spent, how many conversions Google Ads reports, and how many real leads or sales your CRM shows for the same 90 days. If the last two don't match, you already know where the audit starts.
- Spend
- Google's conversions
- Real leads or sales
Step 1: Check The Tracking
Smart Bidding, Google’s automated bidding, doesn’t know what a customer is. It knows what a conversion is, and a conversion is whatever your tracking says it is. Get this part wrong and the automation gets very efficient at buying the wrong thing. Our post on AI PPC management goes deeper on why.
Check 1: Are The Right Actions Marked Primary?
In Google Ads, go to Goals, then Conversions, and look at every conversion action in the list. Each one is either primary or secondary.
Google’s Help Center is clear about the difference. Primary actions are reported in the Conversions column and used for bidding. Secondary actions are “for observation only” unless they’re part of a custom goal.
So ask one question about every primary action: would you pay for this? Watch for these:
- Page views or time on site counted as leads
- Clicks on an email address or a map link
- PDF downloads or newsletter signups sitting next to real quote requests
- Website clicks on a phone number counted the same as calls that actually connected
- Old actions from a previous website that still fire, or no longer fire at all
Anything you wouldn’t pay for gets moved to secondary. You can still watch it. Google just stops bidding for it.
Check 2: Is Anything Counted Twice?
Two settings cause most double counting.
The first is the count setting on each action. Google offers “Every” and “One.” Its own guidance says Every fits sales, because each sale adds value, and One fits leads, because usually only one lead per ad click adds value. Every is the default for website conversions. So a quote form left on the default counts the same person three times if they submit it three times.
The second is the same action tracked two ways. A common version is a form tracked by the Google Ads tag and also imported from Google Analytics as a key event, with both set to primary. One lead, two conversions, and Smart Bidding thinks your form converts twice as well as it does.
Check the status column for each action too. An action marked inactive or with no recent conversions usually means a tag broke during a site update.
Check 3: Does Google's Number Match Your CRM?
Now compare the conversions Google reports with the real leads or sales from your CRM for the same dates. Some gap is normal. People call without clicking an ad, and Google can’t see every conversion. A big gap in either direction means something is wrong.
Don’t swap this check for an industry benchmark. WordStream’s 2026 Google Ads benchmark, built from 13,474 US search campaigns run between April 2025 and March 2026, puts the median conversion rate at 8.18%. Every advertiser in that sample decides for itself what counts as a conversion, so a rate above the benchmark can still mean your tracking counts junk. The comparison that tells you something is Google’s number against your own sales.
If you sell on the phone or close deals offline, the strongest fix is to send your CRM data back into Google Ads, so bidding learns from sales instead of form fills. Google calls its current version of this enhanced conversions for leads, which it describes as “an upgraded version of offline conversion import” that matches leads using data like an email address. Google says it’s combining enhanced conversions for web and for leads into a single setting.
If you find a stretch where tracking was broken, tell Smart Bidding. Google’s data exclusions tool lets you mark those dates so bidding ignores the bad data. Google says to exclude at least 90% of the clicks tied to the problem, and warns the tool isn’t meant to be used often or for long periods.
Step 2: Check Where Your Clicks Come From
Check 4: Read The Search Terms Report
Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what people actually typed. They’re often not the same thing.
Go to Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms. Sort by cost and read the top 100. Turn on the Keyword column, which Google hides by default, so you can see which of your keywords matched each search. Google also leaves out low-volume terms for privacy, so the report never shows every search you paid for.
Look for clicks you’d never pay for on purpose:
- Job seekers (“jobs”, “hiring”, “salary”)
- Do-it-yourselfers (“how to”, “DIY”, “free”)
- Services you don’t offer, or towns you don’t serve
- Competitor names you didn’t choose to target
- Research searches with no buying intent
Add each one as a negative keyword, and put the ones that apply to every campaign in a shared negative keyword list so you only maintain them once. If you run a trade business, our Google Ads for home services guide has a starter negative keyword list.
Check 5: Check Match Types And AI Max
Broad match lets Google show your ad on searches it decides are related to your keyword. Google’s own keyword guidance says “It’s critical to use Smart Bidding with broad match.” Broad match on manual bids, or broad match feeding on bad conversion data from Step 1, is where search terms drift fastest.
Then check whether AI Max is on. AI Max for Search is a set of Google features that reaches past your keywords, rewrites your headlines and can send people to a different page on your site. Google says Search campaigns that use automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match are being upgraded to AI Max automatically starting in September 2026, with search term matching turned on by default. If a campaign’s search terms changed this fall and nobody on your side touched it, start here.
While you’re in the keywords, glance at Quality Score, but don’t chase it. Google calls Quality Score “a diagnostic tool” and says it “is not an input in the ad auction.” A low score points you at the real problem: the ad doesn’t match the search, or the landing page doesn’t.
Check 6: Check Location And Network Settings
Two settings in each campaign quietly decide who sees your ads.
Location options. Google can show ads to people physically in your target area, people who’ve shown interest in it, or both, and the default is both. For a business that only serves people in its area, that default can put ads in front of someone two states away who searched your city once. Switching to people in or regularly in your locations (“Presence”) is often the right call for local businesses.
Networks. Check whether your Search campaigns also run on Google’s search partners and the Display Network. Then segment the campaign report by network to compare search partners with Google Search before deciding whether to keep them.
One newer placement you can’t separate out: Google says existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are automatically eligible to show ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode, results are included in your normal reports, and you can’t opt out of those placements separately from Search. Our post on AI Overview ads covers what that means for your budget. ChatGPT ads are a separate platform with their own setup and tracking, covered in our post on ChatGPT ads.
Step 3: Check Brand Exclusions And Performance Max
Check 7: Separate Brand From Non-Brand
People who search your company name were probably going to find you anyway. If those searches sit in the same campaigns as everything else, your blended numbers look better than the account really performs.
Pull brand and non-brand performance apart, either with separate campaigns or by filtering search terms for your company name. Then look at who’s getting credit for brand searches.
This is where Performance Max (PMax), Google’s all-in-one campaign type, comes in. Optmyzr looked at February 2025 data across 503 accounts and found PMax and Search campaigns overlapping on the same searches in 91% of them, including searches that matched exact match keywords. The same study found no meaningful difference in conversion rate in about 75% of those overlaps, and it didn’t separate out brand searches. So the overlap is nearly universal, and whether it’s costing you is something to test in your own account.
Brand exclusions are how you run that test. A few things to know about how they work right now:
- For Performance Max, Google says brand exclusions apply only to Search, Shopping and YouTube search inventory.
- For Search campaigns, Google moved brand settings into AI Max in 2025. To create a new brand list on a Search campaign, you have to turn on AI Max.
- Negative keywords and brand exclusions also control when your ads show in AI Overviews, since those placements follow your Search settings.
Exclude your brand from PMax, run brand in its own Search campaign, and judge the change on total leads or sales, not on what PMax reports.
Check 8: Look Inside Performance Max
For years, PMax was hard to audit because you couldn’t see what it bought. That has changed. Google now offers:
- Search terms reporting for all Performance Max campaigns
- Campaign-level negative keywords and shared negative keyword lists, which apply to Search and Shopping inventory
- A channel performance report under Insights and reports, showing results across Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Maps, Gmail and search partners for any date after June 6, 2025
- Asset reporting with conversions and cost for each asset, plus a list of pages added through final URL expansion that you can remove
Read the PMax search terms the same way you read them in check 4. Then open the channel report and see where the conversions actually come from. If most of the spend goes to placements that rarely convert, you know where to dig.
Step 4: Check The Ads And Landing Pages
Check 9: Read Every Ad The Way A Customer Would
Open each responsive search ad and read the headlines out loud. Do they match the searches in that ad group? Do they say something a competitor’s ad doesn’t? Are the offers, prices and claims still true? If AI Max text customization is on, Google writes some of your headlines from your website, and you’re still responsible for what they say.
Don’t let Ad Strength run this check for you. Google says improving Ad Strength from Poor to Excellent brings 15% more conversions on average, based on its internal data from five days in August 2025. It also says Ad Strength “doesn’t directly influence your ad’s serving eligibility.” Optmyzr’s 2024 study of more than 1 million ads across 22,000 accounts found responsive search ads rated “Average” had the best cost per conversion, conversion rate and return on ad spend (ROAS). Those findings point in different directions, so write for the buyer and test against real results.
Then check your assets, Google’s name for ad extensions: sitelinks to your best pages, callouts, a call asset with tracked calls, and a location asset if people visit you.
Check 10: Check Where Each Ad Lands
A good ad that lands on the wrong page still wastes the click. Click through every final URL in the account and ask whether the page answers the search that triggered the ad. Someone who searched “emergency AC repair” and lands on your homepage has to go looking for what they wanted. Many won’t.
Check each page on a phone: is the phone number tappable, is the form short, does the page load fast enough to see before they hit back? Landing page experience is one of the three parts of Quality Score, so a weak page costs you in the auction as well as in conversions. Our guide to PPC landing pages walks through what a page built for ad traffic needs.
Step 5: Check Budget, Bids And Who's Making Changes
Check 11: Check Bid Strategy, Budget And Impression Share
Start with the bid strategy. It should match the goal: Target CPA (cost per acquisition) or Maximize Conversions for leads, Target ROAS or Maximize Conversion Value for sales. Smart Bidding needs working conversion tracking to run at all, which is one more reason Step 1 comes first. If the targets were set a year ago, check them against what a customer is worth to you now.
Then add two columns to your campaign view. Google defines Search lost IS (budget) as the share of time your ads weren’t shown because the budget ran out, and Search lost IS (rank) as the share of time they weren’t shown because of poor Ad Rank. Those two numbers tell you different things. A campaign losing impressions to budget needs more money or tighter targeting. A campaign losing to rank needs better ads, better landing pages or higher bids, and more budget won’t fix it.
Finally, check where the money is split. We saw why this matters early in our work with Ascend Wellness Holdings, a multi-state cannabis retailer. In early 2023, clicks in New Jersey cost about $5 each, while clicks in its southern Illinois markets cost about $0.50. We cut New Jersey to $20 a day and moved the budget to the Illinois markets, where each dollar bought about ten times as many clicks. Nothing about the ads changed. Where the money went did. For how much to spend in the first place, and what management should cost on top of it, see how much Google Ads costs.
"Thank you for being a strong partner and for helping us trailblaze the SEO/SEM journey in cannabis."
Check 12: Check Auto-Applied Changes And Account Ownership
Google Ads has a setting that applies its recommendations for you. When it’s on, Google says eligible recommendations apply on a regular schedule, and the eligible list includes “Add broad match keywords” and “Set a target ROAS.” Those aren’t cosmetic. They change what you buy and how you bid. Look in Recommendations for the auto-apply settings, then read the History tab and Change history to see what’s been changed and by whom.
While you’re there, remember what the optimization score is. Google calls it “an estimate of how well your Google Ads account is set to perform.” The score is tied to Google’s own recommendations, so applying them raises it. It doesn’t measure leads or sales.
Last, check who owns the account. Go to Admin, then Access and security. Google’s Admin access level is the only one that can give access, change access levels, link Google Analytics for conversion imports and unlink a manager account. Your business should hold Admin access on an account billed to your business, no matter who runs it day to day. If you can’t get that, the audit has found its biggest problem.
Ask for these before your next monthly report
Hi, before our next report, could you send me three things?
1. Admin access to our Google Ads account for my email, if I don't already have it.
2. A list of the conversion actions set to primary, and how each one is counted (One or Every).
3. Whether auto-apply recommendations is on, and a summary of what changed in the account over the last 90 days.
Thanks.
Anyone running your account well can answer all three in a day. A slow or vague answer to any of them tells you where to look first.
Google Ads Not Converting? Match The Symptom To The Check
If you came here because something’s already wrong, start with the check that matches what you’re seeing.
| What you're seeing | Likely cause | Start with |
|---|---|---|
| Google reports plenty of conversions, but your team sees few real leads | Wrong or duplicate primary conversion actions | Checks 1 to 3 |
| Lots of clicks, almost no conversions | Irrelevant search terms, wrong locations or a weak landing page | Checks 4, 6 and 10 |
| Spend or CPC jumped and nobody changed anything | Auto-applied recommendations, the AI Max upgrade or broad match drift | Checks 5 and 12 |
| Performance Max looks great, but total sales are flat | PMax getting credit for brand searches | Checks 7 and 8 |
| Ads stop showing partway through the day | Budget-limited campaigns | Check 11 |
| Low impression share and high cost per click | Weak Ad Rank from ad relevance, landing pages or bids | Checks 9, 10 and 11 |
| Conversions dropped to zero overnight | A tag broke during a website change | Checks 2 and 3, then add a data exclusion |
One more possibility: the ads may be working and the problem is the mix. If paid search is carrying all of your lead flow, our post on how SEO and PPC work together covers how the two split the load.
Fix What Google Is Learning From First
Most accounts that aren’t converting aren’t short on clever ideas. They’re short on clean data. Fix the tracking and Smart Bidding starts chasing real customers. Read the search terms and the waste becomes obvious. Separate your brand and you finally see what the rest of the account is doing.
Run these 12 checks in order and you’ll know whether your account needs a tune-up or a rebuild. If you’d rather have someone who does this every week look at it with you, that’s what our PPC services are for, and you can start with a conversation about your account.
Frequently Asked Questions
A PPC audit is a structured review of a pay-per-click ad account, usually Google Ads, to find wasted spend, broken or inflated conversion tracking, and settings that hold results back. A useful one checks tracking first, then search terms, brand traffic, ads, landing pages, budget and who controls the account.
Do a full audit when you take over an account, before a big budget increase, and after any major Google change, like the AI Max upgrades that started in September 2026. In between, a quarterly review of tracking, search terms and change history catches most problems before they get expensive.
The most common causes are tracking that counts the wrong actions, clicks from search terms you’d never choose, location settings that show ads outside your area, and landing pages that don’t match the search. Start with the symptom table above and work through the matching checks.
Yes. Every check in this list can be done with admin access to your Google Ads account and your own lead or sales records. The part that takes experience is deciding what to do about what you find, especially on bidding and Performance Max.
It depends on the account. A small account with a few Search campaigns can be checked against this list in an afternoon. An account with dozens of campaigns, Performance Max and offline conversion imports takes longer, mostly because tracking has to be checked against real sales data.
No. Google describes optimization score as an estimate of how well your account is set to perform, and it rises as you accept Google’s recommendations. Some of those recommendations add broad match keywords or change bid targets. An audit judges the account on leads and revenue, which the score doesn’t measure.
Find Out Where Your Ad Budget Is Actually Going
- Whether your conversion tracking counts real customers or noise
- Which search terms, settings and campaigns are spending without paying back
- A ranked list of fixes you can run with or without us
