A serious Google Ads audit isn’t limited to looking at the ROAS shown on the dashboard. You need to check the structure, tracking, and settings that determine whether that number is even reliable.
1. Verify tracking before anything else
Before analyzing a single campaign, confirm that reported conversions correspond to real business actions (purchase, qualified lead) rather than overly broad events (page view, button click with no value). An account optimized on a bad conversion signal optimizes in the wrong direction.
2. Analyze the search terms report
This is often the most revealing part of an audit. A search terms report that’s never been cleaned generally shows budget spent on off-topic queries, for lack of a sufficiently maintained negative keyword list.
3. Check match type consistency
Excessive use of broad match modified or broad match alone, without close monitoring, often dilutes traffic relevance. That’s not necessarily a mistake — it depends on the bidding strategy — but it should be a deliberate choice, not a default setting never questioned.
4. Examine budget allocation across campaigns
An audit must identify whether the budget concentrates on campaigns that actually convert, or whether it’s spread across historical campaigns never re-evaluated. It’s not uncommon to find campaigns active for years without any recent conversion justifying it.
5. Check automated bidding strategies
Automated bidding (Maximize Conversions, Target ROAS) needs sufficient data volume to work properly. A low-volume account configured with aggressive automated bidding can underperform a simpler manual strategy, for lack of enough data for the algorithm.
6. Verify extensions and landing page elements
Missing ad extensions, slow landing pages, or pages inconsistent with the ad: these elements directly weigh on Quality Score and therefore on the final cost per click.
A full audit typically takes several hours for an active account. For an outside perspective, the directory offers verified SEA consultants who can perform this audit.