Why most audits are theatre

The giveaway is a score. There is no meaningful way to reduce an advertising account to a number out of 100, and the only purpose the number serves is to be low enough to justify the call that follows.

The second giveaway is that everything flagged is a setting rather than an outcome. Automated tools can spot a missing sitelink or an ad group with one ad. They cannot tell you that your conversion tracking has been double-counting since March, which is the kind of thing that actually changes what you should do.

A useful test: ask what the audit found that the Google interface would not have flagged on its own. If there is no answer, you were sold a report generator.

1. Conversion tracking, before anything else

This comes first because everything downstream depends on it. Automated bidding optimises towards the conversions it can see, so if the tracking is wrong, every bid decision the system has made for months has been made on bad information.

The failures are boringly common: a conversion firing on every page load rather than on the form submission, so the count is inflated and meaningless. The same conversion counted twice, once through Google Ads and once imported from Analytics. Conversions still counting a form that was replaced six months ago. Phone calls not tracked at all, which in Portugal matters more than most markets because a lot of lead generation ends in a call rather than a form.

Also worth checking: whether the consent setup is silently dropping conversions. If Consent Mode is misconfigured, the account can look like it collapsed when in fact only the measurement did.

2. Search terms and the negative list

The second place money hides, and in most accounts the largest single recoverable sum. The question is simple: what share of spend went to searches that were never going to convert?

Look at the negative keyword list and when it last changed. A list that has not been touched in months means nobody has been reading the search terms report, whatever the monthly summary said. In accounts run from abroad this is nearly universal, for the plain reason that reading it requires Portuguese.

We went into this specific failure in running Google Ads in Portuguese when you don’t speak it.

3. Structure, but only where it matters

Structure is where lazy audits spend all their time, because it is easy to describe. It does matter, but only in so far as it affects relevance and control.

The things worth flagging: ad groups so broad that one ad has to serve twenty unrelated keywords, which guarantees weak relevance. Brand and non-brand traffic mixed in the same campaign, which hides the fact that the brand keywords are carrying the results. Budgets shared across campaigns with very different jobs. Geographic targeting inherited from a default rather than chosen.

What does not matter: the precise number of ad groups, or whether the naming convention is tidy.

4. Bidding and budget pacing

Check whether the bidding strategy matches the volume the account actually has. Value-based automated strategies need a steady flow of conversions to work with; imposed on an account with a handful a month, they produce erratic results and are often blamed for problems they did not cause.

On budget, the thing to look for is whether campaigns are capped while still producing profitable leads — that is money left on the table — or running at full budget on terms that never convert, which is the opposite problem.

5. Ads, assets and where the click lands

Are there enough ad variations per ad group for the system to have anything to test? Do the ads use the phrasing that appears in the search terms, or the phrasing of an internal brochure? Are the assets and extensions filled in, and do they point anywhere useful?

Then follow the click. Sending paid traffic to a homepage is the most expensive habit in small accounts: the visitor has to find what they searched for all over again, and a share of them will not bother. Each significant ad group should land somewhere that answers the search directly.

6. Access, ownership and reporting

Who owns the account. If it sits inside an agency umbrella rather than your own company, you have a commercial problem waiting to happen — the history that makes the account work is not portable.

Then the reporting itself. A monthly report that shows impressions and clicks going up, with no cost per lead, is a report designed to be reassuring rather than informative.

The seven questions an audit should answer

  • Is every conversion action firing once, on the right event, and counted once?
  • What share of spend last quarter went to search terms that could never convert?
  • When did the negative keyword list last change, and who changed it?
  • Is brand traffic separated from non-brand, and what do the results look like without brand?
  • Does the bidding strategy suit the conversion volume this account actually has?
  • Does each significant ad group land on a page that answers the search?
  • Is the account in my company name, with agency access rather than agency ownership?

In short

A good audit starts at measurement, moves to waste, then to structure and bidding, and ends at the landing page. It produces a list of specific things with money attached to them, not a score.

If what you get back could have been written without opening your account, it was.

We audit accounts and report in English — free, yours to keep, no obligation to work with us afterwards. Request an audit →