A Google Ads account that loses money rarely says so. The monthly spend holds steady and nothing in the dashboard turns red. The leads stay flat, and nobody can point to the reason.
The usual advice at that point runs in two directions: raise the budget, or hire somebody to run the account. Both answers skip a cheaper step.
A Google Ads audit reads the account you already pay for and hands back a repair list. It names the search terms that buy nothing and the settings that spend outside the campaign you built. Stone Path runs that check before any conversation about budget. The house policy is one line: do not answer a performance question with more money. When a campaign underperforms, the answer is a better ad.
What a Google Ads audit covers
An audit reads the account and changes nothing while it reads. Pull 90 days of data and answer one question in each area: where did the money go, and what did it buy?
Six areas hold almost all of the waste, and the rest of this post walks them in order:
- The search terms report, where you find out what people actually typed.
- Conversion tracking, because every number downstream inherits its errors.
- Match types, which set how far Google may travel from the keyword you wrote.
- Network settings, and the locations and devices your ads are allowed to reach.
- Performance Max, plus the changes Google applies to the account on its own.
- The landing page, where a click either becomes a customer or leaves.
The check: open the account and write down last month's spend for each campaign. Beside it, write the number of qualified leads that campaign produced. If you cannot fill in the second column, the audit has already found its first defect.
The search terms report, and the money it exposes
The search terms report lists the queries that actually triggered your ads. Google shows the keywords you bid on in one place and the queries people typed in another. Most people read the first list and assume it describes the second.
It rarely does. A plumbing account bidding on "emergency plumber" pays for "plumber salary" and "how to fix a leaking tap" at the same cost per click as the good traffic. Nobody typing those words is going to call.
Every irrelevant query you find is a negative keyword you have not added yet. The fix costs nothing and takes an afternoon.
The report also holds something back. Google withholds queries it counts as low volume, so the waste you can read is only part of the total.
The check: open Campaigns, then Insights and reports. Open the Search terms view. Set the date range to the last 90 days and sort by cost, descending. Read the top 50 rows and mark every query you would refuse to pay for. Add the total. That number is the monthly bleed, and it stops the day you upload the negatives.
Conversion tracking: prove the numbers before you trust them
Every optimization decision in a paid account runs on conversion data. Smart bidding aims at whatever you told it to count. When the tracking is wrong, the algorithm optimizes hard toward the wrong thing and the reports look healthy the entire time.
The same failures show up in account after account. A page view counts as a conversion, so every visitor to the thank-you page inflates the total. One lead fires twice and the account books two. A form submit records in Google Analytics and never imports into Google Ads. A phone call from the ad goes uncounted because nobody installed call tracking.
A report built on broken tracking still prints charts that point upward. How to read a marketing report covers the numbers worth checking before you accept one.
The check: open Tools, then Conversions. Read the column that marks each action Primary or Secondary. Then read the last-conversion date on every action. An action with no conversion in 30 days has broken, or it points at something nobody does. Repair that before you read another report.
Broad match: where the budget goes without you asking
Match type decides how far Google may travel from the keyword you wrote. Broad match gives it the most room, and the room widens every year. You bid on "office cleaning" and Google reads intent. Your ad shows on "how to clean an office desk" and on "cleaning jobs hiring."
Broad match works when two conditions hold. Your conversion tracking has to be accurate, and the account has to feed smart bidding enough conversion history to steer on. Without both, broad match spends your budget on a guess about intent.
The check: filter the keyword list to broad match and compare its cost per conversion against phrase and exact. Then count the conversions the account recorded in the last 30 days. Below 30, smart bidding lacks the volume to steer broad match, and the traffic runs on the guess.
The campaign settings that spend where you did not aim
Two checkboxes in a Search campaign send your money somewhere you never planned for. Google switches both on by default in the guided campaign builder.
Search Partners places your ads on other search sites inside Google's network. Display expansion places them on websites and apps outside Google Search. A Search campaign with Display expansion running can push half its budget into placements that convert at a fraction of the search rate.
The mobile app placement deserves its own line. A game with a banner across the bottom delivers clicks that no human intended, and the charge clears anyway.
Location targeting leaks in a different way. Google's default option reaches anyone who shows interest in the places you picked, so a campaign aimed at Little Rock also pays for a reader in Ohio who searched about Little Rock. The presence option limits the ads to people physically in your area.
Devices split the same offer in two. Phones and desktops rarely convert at the same rate, and the account keeps that gap buried until you segment for it.
The check: open the campaign Settings and read the Networks line. If a Search campaign has Display selected, switch Display off. Watch cost per conversion for the next two weeks. Then segment the campaign report by Network and compare Search against Search Partners. If Partners costs more per conversion, exclude it. In the same panel, open Locations and set the target option to presence. Then segment the campaign by Device and compare cost per conversion on phones against computers.
Performance Max and the changes Google makes for you
A modern account spends part of its budget with no keyword behind the click. Google turns that machinery on by default, and a dashboard reporting one blended number will never point it out.
Performance Max runs across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, and Gmail from a single budget. It reports the total and hides most of the split. The campaign can look acceptable on blended cost per conversion while the search share carries the whole result and the other inventory spends beside it.
Your own brand name is the next problem. Performance Max will buy clicks from people typing your company name. It counts conversions those people were going to make anyway, and it prints a cost per conversion no other campaign can match.
Auto-applied recommendations sit somewhere else and do a different kind of damage. Google switches most of them on for new accounts. The setting lets Google add keywords and widen match types on its own. It can rewrite your ad text too. An account drifts for months this way while you assume nothing has changed.
The check: open Recommendations, then Auto-apply, and read which boxes are checked. Switch off anything that edits your keywords or your ad text. Then open your Performance Max campaign and add a brand exclusion list so it stops buying your own name. Ask for the channel breakdown before you judge the campaign, and compare its search cost per conversion against your standard Search campaign.
The landing page your ads pay to reach
Every click you buy lands somewhere. The audit follows it. Half the accounts that look like an ads problem turn out to be a landing page problem.
Start with what the page owes the visitor. It has to answer the query they typed. It has to load fast on a phone. The offer and the form belong on the first screen they see. And the form has to fire a conversion tag on submit.
A generic homepage fails the first test on almost every keyword. Someone who searched for one service and arrives at a page listing eleven of them has to hunt, and most of them leave.
The check: click your own ad from a phone. Time how long the page takes to show its first content. Read the headline and ask whether it repeats the words you searched for. Then submit the form and confirm the conversion lands in Google Ads within the hour.
What an ad spend audit costs, and what a free one is worth
Demand for this work is steady. Ahrefs records 800 US searches a month for "ppc audit" at a keyword difficulty of 2. The term "google ads audit" draws 600 a month at the same difficulty, with a $13.00 cost per click.
Paid audits run from a few hundred dollars for a checklist export up to several thousand for a full account review. Price tracks depth. A $299 audit usually means a tool ran a report and somebody attached a cover page.
Most firms selling paid ads management offer the audit free as the door into a retainer. That free audit has a predictable ending. It finds problems only that firm can fix, and the recommended budget goes up. Read any audit with the incentive in view. The useful test is whether the document names the specific search terms and settings it wants changed, with a dollar figure on each line.
Choosing who runs the account afterward is a separate decision. Stone Path's guide to hiring a Google Ads consultant covers the pricing models and the questions to ask.
Stone Path does not charge for consultations or referrals. Hold its review to that same test.
When a bigger budget is the honest answer
One condition makes a bigger budget the right answer. Your campaign loses impression share to budget while every other check in this post comes back clean.
Google reports that number directly. The column reads Search lost IS (budget), and it shows the share of eligible auctions your ad skipped because the daily budget ran out. Clean means the six earlier checks all passed. The search terms are relevant and the conversion tracking is accurate. The match types are contained and the settings send the budget where you aimed it. Performance Max is not buying your own brand name, and the landing page converts. An account in that state has demand it cannot afford to serve. More money buys more of something that already works.
Every other case on the list is a repair.
The check: add the Search lost IS (budget) column to your campaign table. Under 10 percent, the budget is holding nothing back, and the repair list above is where your money is. Google Ads vs SEO covers how the next dollar splits across channels once the account runs clean.
The first 30 days after the audit
An audit that produces a document and no change costs you the reading time. The repair list has an order, and the order matters because each fix changes the data the next one runs on.
Fix conversion tracking in week one. Every decision after it reads the numbers this step produces.
Week two belongs to subtraction. Upload the negative keywords from the search terms report and correct the network settings. Switch off the recommendations Google applies on its own. All of that shows up in the spend within days.
Week three is the rebuild. Reset the match type mix and add a brand exclusion to Performance Max. Then repoint the ads at pages that answer the query.
Read the numbers in week four. Give the account a full 30 days of clean data before you judge any of it. Smart bidding needs that window to relearn an account after a structural change, and a verdict written in week two describes a system still in motion.
Then compare the new cost per qualified lead against the number you wrote down in the first check.
Get your account reviewed
Stone Path Consulting manages paid accounts for eight clients and reports on every one of them in a monthly PDF. Ty Woods runs those accounts directly. The person reading your search terms report is the person you talk to.
The firm holds its own spend to the same rule. Stone Path switched off its own Meta ads on July 3 because they produced no conversions against the spend.
Stone Path works with businesses across Arkansas and nationally, and it charges nothing for the review or for a referral. Use the contact page and say what you spend each month and what you need the account to produce. The review comes back as a repair list in priority order, with a dollar figure on each line.