If Your Last Audit Was a PDF, It Wasn't an Audit
The Google Ads audit has been reduced to a lead magnet. Free scanner tools spit out 20-page reports in 60 seconds. Agencies run the same template across every prospect and call it an audit. Google reps schedule a "performance review" and hand you a list of recommendations that happen to involve increasing your budget.
None of that is an audit. An audit is a forensic examination of where your money is going, what it's producing, and where the leaks are. It takes hours. It requires judgment. And most of the value is in the questions a checklist can't ask.
Here's the checklist we work from, at a category level, with the honest version of what each section is actually looking for.
The 10 Categories a Real Audit Covers
1. Conversion Tracking Integrity
This is where the majority of audits we inherit fall apart on contact. The question isn't whether conversions are firing. The question is whether they're firing on outcomes that correlate with revenue, whether they're being double-counted, whether the right ones are feeding Smart Bidding, and whether attribution is intact from first click through to closed deal.
The horror story version: an account we audited last year had reported a 6x ROAS for 14 months. Actual ROAS, after we reconciled the data, was 1.9x. The owner had been making budget decisions based on fiction.
2. Wasted Spend & Search Term Hygiene
There are queries in every account — sometimes representing 20% or more of total spend — that have never converted, will never convert, and should never have been clicked on in the first place. Finding them is straightforward. Understanding why they're being triggered, and fixing the root cause without collapsing the campaigns that depend on related terms, is not.
3. Self-Blocking Negative Keywords
A whole separate post exists on this one because it's the single most common defect we find. Negatives that were added for the right reason in the wrong match type, or in the wrong shared list, end up suppressing the highest-intent searches in the account. The ads simply don't show, and there's no line item in any report that tells you.
4. Quality Score as a Multiplier
Quality Score is not a vanity metric. It's a direct multiplier on CPC. A 4/10 account pays roughly double what a 7/10 account pays for the same auction position. The audit question is which levers — ad relevance, expected CTR, landing page experience — are dragging the score down, and whether the fix is a copy problem, a structure problem, or a landing page problem.
5. Bidding Strategy Fit
Most accounts are running a bidding strategy that doesn't match the goal, the data volume, or the margin structure of the business. Target ROAS on a campaign with four conversions a month is not Smart Bidding. It's guessing. The audit isn't asking "are you using Smart Bidding." It's asking whether the strategy has the data, the freedom, and the target it needs to work.
6. Structure & Segmentation
Brand terms mixed with non-brand. Shopping, Search, and PMax all fighting over the same query. Ad groups with 40 keywords on wildly different intent. Campaigns sharing budgets when they shouldn't. Structure looks like accounting work, but it determines whether every other optimization is even possible.
7. Geographic, Device, Demographic & Schedule Performance
Every account has pockets of performance that justify aggressive bid adjustments, and pockets of waste that justify hard exclusions. The audit surfaces both. It also flags the accounts where these levers are restricted (housing, credit, employment verticals) and need a different playbook entirely.
8. Audience Layering & Remarketing
First-party audience data is the single most powerful signal you can give Google, and most accounts use none of it. The audit looks at whether customer match lists exist, whether observation audiences are layered, whether RLSA is configured, and whether past purchasers are being recycled or ignored.
9. Ad Copy, Asset Strength & Extensions
Every missing extension is money being left for the competitor above or below you. Every RSA with "Average" ad strength is a throttled delivery. The audit looks at ad strength, copy-to-intent match, and whether the full real estate of the SERP is being claimed or conceded.
10. Performance Max Under the Hood
PMax is a black box, and Google likes it that way. But there is enough surfaceable data — asset group strength, search themes, brand exclusions, placement reports, signal quality — to tell whether PMax is working for you or whether it's eating brand traffic and calling it growth.
The Things a Checklist Can't Tell You
The dangerous part of the "free audit" industry is that checklist-based audits miss the judgment-heavy findings that actually move the needle:
- Whether the offer matches the market intent, or whether ad copy is promising something the landing page doesn't deliver
- Whether the conversion being optimized for is the right conversion, or whether better leads are being deprioritized because they're harder to count
- Whether the account's change history reveals a pattern of auto-applied recommendations quietly damaging performance
- Whether the competitor set you think you're in is actually the competitor set you're bidding against
- Whether the business's margin structure, sales cycle, and lifetime value support the bidding strategy being used
No software scan catches any of this. A Google rep's performance review certainly doesn't. And a 50-item checklist, run on its own, is the floor of an audit, not the ceiling.
The Honest Thing About Free Audits
Most of the free audit tools you'll find online are sales funnels. They surface a predictable set of findings, all of which conveniently map to services the tool's owner sells. Google's own account recommendations are the same mechanism with a different logo — the recommendations that get surfaced are the ones that grow Google's revenue, which is not the same as growing yours.
This doesn't mean audits are useless. It means the audit is only as good as the person running it, and the person running it needs to have no incentive to find the wrong problems.
What We Do Instead
Every engagement at Live PPC Ads starts with a full audit. Not a scan, not a template, not a 60-second report. The actual forensic exam, done by a senior strategist, covering every category above and the judgment-heavy questions the checklist can't ask.
We don't sell the audit. We sell the fix. The audit is how we prove the fix is worth doing, and how we make sure we're fixing the right things in the right order.
If you want to see what a real audit looks like on your account, apply to work with us. And if you want to see what fixing those problems actually produces, the case studies are here.
The checklist is the floor. The audit is what happens when a 15-year operator walks the account with a pen, a calculator, and no incentive to find anything other than the truth.