How to audit a Google Ads account

Most published Google Ads audits are a 200-point checklist that nobody finishes and nobody prioritizes. Ad extensions on every campaign, sitelinks, a note about ad schedules. All correct, all in an order that guarantees you spend your first hour on the thing worth the least.

The order below is money-first. It puts measurement before optimization, because an account that cannot count is an account whose entire history of decisions is suspect, and it puts the largest spend lines before the tidy small ones. Whether you run it inside the Google Ads interface or ask an assistant connected to the account, the sequence is the same.

The audit, in the order that finds money fastest

1. Fix the scope and the window

   One account, one date window, usually the last 30 days with the previous 30 alongside for comparison. Write down which customer ID you are auditing. If the account has fewer than thirty conversions in the window, widen it before you draw any conclusion at all.

2. Verify conversion tracking before anything else

   List the conversion actions and check which ones are recording, which are counted as primary, and whether any of them double-count the same event. Confirm what is being optimized towards. An account optimizing to a conversion action that fires twice per purchase is bidding on a fiction.

   This is the pass that most often finds the real problem, and it is the one most audits leave until page four. Common findings: two conversion actions counting the same purchase, a legacy tag still firing alongside a newer one, a lead form counted as a sale, or a primary conversion that stopped recording weeks ago after a site change. Everything downstream inherits this error, so nothing else you look at means anything until it is settled.

3. Find where the money actually is

   Rank campaigns by spend over the window and note what share the top three take. Audits go wrong when equal attention is paid to a campaign spending 60% of the budget and one spending 2%. Concentration also tells you how exposed the account is to one campaign breaking.

4. Read the search terms against the keywords

   Pull the queries that actually spent money and compare them with what you intended to buy. Look for wrong intent, competitor names you did not mean to bid on, and free-information queries. Add negatives for the clear cases and note the patterns that suggest a match type problem rather than a single bad term.

   Broad match plus automated bidding is efficient right up until it decides your product is adjacent to a category you do not sell. The signal to watch is not just the individual query, it is the shape: if most of the wasted queries share a theme, the fix is a negative list or a match type change, not forty individual negatives that will be replaced by forty new ones next month.

5. Inspect the ads and assets that are serving

   Look at what is actually running, not what exists in the account. Check for ad groups running a single ad, headlines that repeat the same claim, assets rated low, and landing pages that no longer match the promise in the ad. Replace weak assets rather than rebuilding whole campaigns.

6. Check bidding strategy against the stated goal

   Confirm each campaign's bidding strategy matches what you actually want, and that any target it is chasing is achievable given historical performance. A target CPA set below anything the account has ever achieved does not push performance, it suppresses delivery.

7. Write the fix list, ranked by money at stake

   Turn findings into an ordered list with the estimated spend affected next to each one. Do the top item, wait a week, measure, then continue. A 40-item audit implemented all at once produces an account that changed and no information about which change worked.

What an audit is not

It is not a rebuild. The instinct after reading a long findings list is to restructure everything, which throws away the account's learning history along with its problems. Most accounts need four or five corrections, applied in order, not a new architecture.

It is also not a one-off. Search terms drift, landing pages change, tracking breaks quietly after a site deploy, and the competitive set moves. An audit run once a quarter and never revisited becomes a PDF nobody opens. The parts worth repeating monthly are tracking verification and the search terms pass, which are also the two that most reliably find money.

Running the audit as a conversation

Every step above is a question with a data answer, which is why this job suits an assistant with real account access rather than a checklist. Muze covers Google Ads with 41 tools, 23 of them read, including performance pulls, period comparisons, conversion action listings and ad inspection.

Ask for the passes in order, keep the window fixed, and get the ranked fix list at the end. On a paid plan the corrections can be prepared as well, with each write showing the exact change and waiting for your confirmation before it runs. The cross-platform version of the same sweep is the wasted spend guide, and the setup takes about ten minutes on Muze MCP.

The audit as a sequence of prompts

• “List my Google conversion actions and tell me which are primary, which are recording, and whether any look duplicated.”
• “Rank campaigns by spend for the last 30 days and show what share the top three take.”
• “Show the search terms that spent the most last month and flag anything with intent that does not match my product.”
• “Inspect the ads in my top three campaigns and tell me which ad groups are running only one ad.”

Frequently asked questions

How long does a Google Ads audit take?

About an hour for a single account of moderate size if you follow a fixed order, longer if conversion tracking turns out to be broken, because that finding changes how you read everything else. The recurring monthly version is much shorter once the structural issues are fixed.

What should I check first?

Conversion tracking. Every other conclusion depends on it. An account optimizing towards a duplicated or dead conversion action will produce confident, well-formatted reports that are entirely wrong.

How often should an account be audited?

A full pass quarterly, with tracking verification and a search terms review monthly. Those two find most of the recoverable money and take a fraction of the time.

Should I restructure the account if the audit finds a lot?

Usually not. Restructuring discards the account's performance history and takes weeks to stabilize. Fix the highest-value findings in order and measure between changes. Reserve rebuilds for accounts where the structure genuinely prevents the fix.

Can an AI assistant audit a Google Ads account?

It can run every read in the sequence, which is most of the labour: performance by campaign, conversion actions, search terms, ad inspection and period comparisons. Judgement about what to change is still yours, and any change it prepares previews before it runs.

Does the official Google MCP server do this?

It can do the read side, since it is read-only. That covers the diagnosis but not the corrections. Muze covers the same reads plus 18 confirm-gated write tools for applying the fixes.

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