A PPC audit is a structured review of where a paid search account is losing money. Not a health check that concludes everything looks fine, and not a sales document dressed as analysis. A ranked list of what is wrong, what it costs, and what to do about it.
What does a PPC audit actually look at?
Five things, in this order: what your budget actually bought, whether your conversions measure anything real, how the account is structured, where the traffic lands, and what the automated systems have been optimising towards. The order matters. Reviewing bidding strategy before checking whether conversion tracking is correct is analysing the output of a broken instrument.Why start with the search terms report?
Because it shows what people actually typed, as opposed to the keywords you chose, and on most inherited accounts nobody has opened it. Since broad match was rebuilt around intent signals, one keyword can pull in queries with almost no commercial overlap. You are paying for every one of them. This is consistently the largest single leak we find, and it is also the cheapest to fix, because negative keyword lists cost nothing but attention. Work backwards from spend rather than alphabetically. The terms that consumed the most budget with no conversions are your answer, and there are usually fewer than twenty of them.How do you check whether conversions are real?
Open each conversion action and ask what physical event in the world causes it to fire. If the answer is a page view, a newsletter signup, or every form on the site including recruitment enquiries, the number in your reports is not measuring sales. This matters more than any bidding decision, because automated bidding optimises towards whatever you told it to count. Feed it the wrong event and it will pursue that event with great efficiency while the quality of what arrives declines every month. The tell is a reported cost per conversion that improves steadily while your sales team says the leads got worse. If those two things disagree, believe the sales team.What structural problems show up most often?
Budget still allocated to a discontinued product, a region you stopped serving, or a landing page replaced in the last website rebuild. Campaigns are built once and inherited forever, and nothing about them breaks loudly enough to get noticed. Then duplicated keywords competing against each other across campaigns, and ad groups so broad that one advert has to serve five different intents. Both quietly raise costs by lowering relevance.Where does Performance Max hide the problems?
Inside a reporting layer that is deliberately coarse. Budget moves between asset groups on its own, and brand searches you would have won anyway can be absorbed and reported as new demand. The audit questions are whether brand terms are excluded, whether the product feed is clean, and whether your best margin products are separated rather than averaged in with everything else. If the answer to all three is no, the reported return is flattering.What should the audit produce?
A ranked list, not a catalogue. Each finding with the evidence, the affected campaigns, the fix, and an honest estimate of what it is worth in money. Findings that are technically true and commercially irrelevant should be labelled as such. An audit padded with those is easy to produce and wastes the reader's time, which is why so many of them arrive as forty slides.Can you run one yourself?
Yes, and it is worth doing before paying anyone. Open the search terms report for the last ninety days sorted by cost. Open each conversion action and write down what actually triggers it. Click three of your own adverts and see where they land. That takes an hour and will usually surface something. What an experienced auditor adds is knowing which of the things you found actually matters and in what order, which is a different skill from finding them.How often is worth repeating
Quarterly for an account under active management, or whenever something changes materially: a website rebuild, a new product line, a change of agency, or a platform update that alters how campaign types behave. The accounts that drift furthest are the ones where nothing appeared to be wrong for a year. Nothing appearing to be wrong is not evidence, it is the absence of anyone looking.Audit first, restructure second
The temptation with an underperforming account is to rebuild it. That discards quality score history and conversion data, and frequently recreates the same structural mistakes with fresh campaign names.Landing pages are half the account
An audit that stops at the campaign is only half done. The advert is a promise and the landing page either keeps it or does not, and the cost of breaking it shows up as a worse quality score and a higher cost per click. Click three of your own adverts. Check the page loads quickly on a phone, that the headline echoes the advert rather than the company name, and that the next action is obvious without scrolling. A generic homepage receiving traffic from a specific service advert is the single most common landing page finding, and fixing it usually improves cost per acquisition more than any bidding change would.What the audit should tell you about budget allocation
Whether money is distributed by commercial priority or by historical accident. Most inherited accounts are the latter, with budgets frozen at whatever seemed sensible when the campaigns were created. Compare spend by campaign against margin by service, which is the first thing our PPC services review looks at. The mismatch is usually obvious once written side by side, and it is rarely visible from inside the ads interface, where every campaign looks equally important. This is also where seasonality gets missed. A campaign that earns its budget in spring and burns it in autumn should not carry the same daily cap all year, and very few do anything else.Why does bidding strategy come last?
Automated bidding is not the problem in most underperforming accounts. It is the last link in a chain, and it faithfully pursues whatever it was pointed at. Once the search terms are controlled, conversions measure real outcomes and structure reflects your priorities, bidding usually needs less intervention than expected. Changing it first, which is the common instinct, means changing the one part of the system that was working correctly. Where our Google Ads specialists do change it, the reason is stated in the audit with the expected effect, so you can check afterwards whether it happened. Our PPC services team audits before touching anything, and hands over the written findings whether or not you go on to work with us. Where an account turns out to be in reasonable shape, we say so rather than inventing a project. If the audit does justify a rebuild, it will say so with evidence attached. That is a very different conversation from an agency proposing a rebuild before it has looked at the search terms report, which is the more common sequence and the reason so many accounts get rebuilt twice. One caution about audits generally. An audit is a diagnosis, not a treatment, and it is worth agreeing before it starts who implements the findings and on what basis. An audit that arrives with no route to the work being done tends to sit in a folder, which is a waste of the money and, more importantly, of the findings. If the same firm audits and implements, ask how the audit would look if the honest answer were that little needs doing. A firm that has an answer to that has thought about the conflict. One that has not is worth watching, though it does not automatically make them wrong.FAQ
Frequently asked questions
- For a single account of ordinary size, usually a few days of work spread across a week, since some checks need historical data pulled and compared. Very large accounts with Shopping feeds and multiple markets take longer. Anyone offering a same-day audit is running an automated scan, which is a different product.
