Google ads audit

Google Ads Account Audit

Currency & scope note (last reviewed 2026-07-19): Platform mechanics referenced here (character limits, campaign-type names, feature availability, thresholds, benchmark figures, policy specifics) reflect general practice as of the review date above and are not guaranteed current — ad platforms change quickly. Verify anything mechanical against the platform's live documentation before relying on it for a real launch, real spend, or a compliance-sensitive decision. This is an independent, unofficial resource, not affiliated with or endorsed by any platform named in it, and nothing here is legal, tax, or financial advice.

Purpose

Give a complete, structured health assessment of a Google Ads account — usually needed when taking over an existing account (new client, agency handoff, or "we've been running this for a year and don't know if it's good").

Trigger Conditions

• "Audit my Google Ads account"
• "I inherited this account, is it set up well?"
• "Is this account ready to scale spend?"
• "Find waste in my Google Ads"

Required Inputs

• Account access (read-only is sufficient for the audit itself)
• Business goal(s) the account should be serving, and current budget
• How long the account has been running (affects how much data-driven judgment vs. structural judgment applies)

Core Capabilities

Structural Audit

• Campaign type mix vs. business goal fit (is Search running when the business needed brand awareness, etc.)
• Account/campaign/ad group naming and organization — indicates whether the account was built deliberately or accumulated ad hoc
• Budget allocation across campaigns relative to their actual performance/priority

Tracking Audit

• Conversion actions present, whether they're value-based where appropriate, whether they look complete for the business's actual conversion paths (route deep verification to google-ads-measurement)
• GA4 linkage status
• Presence of obviously broken tracking (e.g., a "Contact" conversion action showing zero volume on a lead-gen site with active traffic)

Waste Detection

• Search terms report scan for obviously irrelevant spend with no negative keywords in place
• Near-duplicate/overlapping keywords across ad groups competing against each other
• Campaigns/ad groups with spend but zero conversions over a meaningful window
• Ads disapproved or limited by policy, silently reducing delivery

Targeting & Bidding Audit

• Bid strategy appropriateness given conversion volume (Smart Bidding assigned to a campaign with insufficient conversion history to support it)
• Geographic/device targeting misalignment with where the business actually operates or sells
• Audience signal quality on PMax/Display campaigns (broad/default vs. deliberately built signals)

Scaling Readiness

• Whether current performance and tracking maturity justify increasing budget, or whether foundational issues (tracking gaps, waste) should be fixed first
• Impression share data: is the account budget-constrained (room to scale) or rank-constrained (scaling budget alone won't help)

Workflow

1. Confirm the business goal(s) and current budget as the baseline the account should be judged against.
2. Review structure: campaign types, naming, organization.
3. Review tracking: conversion actions, GA4 link, obvious gaps.
4. Scan search terms and keyword overlap for waste.
5. Review bid strategy fit and targeting alignment.
6. Assess scaling readiness: is this account healthy enough to scale, or does it need fixes first.
7. Deliver findings ranked by dollar impact, not by category — the biggest leak goes first regardless of which audit section it came from.

Outputs

• Findings list, ranked by estimated dollar/performance impact
• Scaling readiness verdict (ready / fix-first, with the specific blockers named)
• Routing recommendations to specialist skills for each fix (google-ads-measurement for tracking gaps, google-ads-optimization for bid/targeting fixes, google-ads-copywriting for weak ad relevance, google-ads-compliance for policy issues)

Rules

• Never issue a "this account is fine" verdict without checking tracking completeness first — a well-structured account with broken tracking is not fine.

• Rank findings by dollar impact, not audit-checklist order, so the user knows what to fix first.

• Distinguish clearly between "structural issue" (fix once) and "ongoing optimization opportunity" (needs google-ads-optimization's continuous process) so the user doesn't expect the audit alone to fix performance.

• Verification gate: before this skill's output is used to spend real money, submit a compliance-sensitive claim, or go to a client as final, verify the mechanical specifics (limits, thresholds, policy rules) against current platform documentation and get explicit human sign-off — do not treat this skill's output as launch-ready without that check.

Related Skills

google-ads-optimization (fixes for diagnosed performance issues), google-ads-measurement (tracking gap fixes), google-ads-compliance (policy issues found), google-ads-strategy (if the audit reveals the wrong channel/campaign type was chosen).