How do you audit a Google Ads account?
The short answer
A real Google Ads audit checks whether ads are actually serving before it checks structure or bidding. Google's LIMITED or APPROVED_LIMITED status can silently cap impressions, a sixth underspend reason most checklists skip. It also means never filtering an export to spend greater than zero: one account history held 249 zero-spend rows, 87 of them carrying conversions worth $7,127.
A useful Google Ads audit starts with whether the ads can serve at all, not with campaign structure. Most checklists jump straight to account settings and bidding, which assumes every ad is already eligible to show. That assumption is often wrong, and chasing a “low volume” problem that’s actually an eligibility problem is the fastest way to burn a week on the wrong fix.
The checks most checklists skip
Three checks catch real spend leaks and rarely show up in generic audit templates.
Ad serving status. Google can mark an ad LIMITED or APPROVED_LIMITED, a status that silently caps how often it’s eligible to show. It isn’t a disapproval, so it never trips the flag most quick scans look for. An account can look healthy in every setting and still be underspending because a chunk of its ads are sitting in a limited state nobody checked.
Export hygiene. Pulling an account’s history into a spreadsheet and filtering to spend greater than zero feels like basic cleanup. It can also delete real data. One account history had 249 zero-spend rows, 87 of them carrying conversions worth $7,127 in tracked value… conversions that posted after the spend did, or against a since-paused ad group. A naive filter erases the record before anyone reads it.
Signal-integrity ratios. Before touching bids or budgets, check whether the ratios upstream of the conversion are stable over time. Landing page views per click is one of the simplest: it should sit in a tight band. A sudden move is usually a tracking break, not a change in demand, and it matters because automated bidding reacts to whatever number it’s given, broken or not.
| Check | What it catches | How often it’s missed |
|---|---|---|
| Ad serving status (LIMITED / APPROVED_LIMITED) | A silent impression cap that never shows up as a pause or disapproval | Almost always, since it doesn’t trigger the alerts most dashboards watch |
| Zero-spend export rows | Conversions still tracked on rows with no cost, often after a pause or budget change | Filtered out by default in most spend-greater-than-zero pivots |
| Landing page views per click | A tracking or page-load break an automated bidder is quietly reacting to | Rarely checked outside a diagnosis, almost never checked as routine hygiene |
The standard ladder, compressed
Once the checks above come back clean, the rest of an audit is the ladder most guides already cover. It still needs doing, it just isn’t the whole job.
- Account structure. Campaign and ad group organization should match how the business actually thinks about its offers, not how a media buyer set it up years ago.
- Settings. Location targeting, ad schedule, network opt-outs like search partners and display expansion, and conversion goal selection. Small settings drift into real spend leaks over time.
- Bidding. What the strategy actually is, whether the target is realistic for current conversion volume, and whether spend is budget-constrained anywhere.
- Search terms. Query-level waste and query-level opportunity, both directions. Most audits only hunt for the first one.
- Creative. Ad strength, asset coverage, and whether the top-spending ad group has enough live variants to test anything.
- Measurement. Conversion actions counted correctly, deduplicated, and matched to what the business actually calls a sale.
Why order matters
Running the standard ladder before the checks above produces confident-sounding recommendations built on bad inputs. A bidding change layered on top of a tracking break, or a search term recommendation drawn from an export that silently dropped $7,127 of real conversions, is wrong for a reason no amount of sharp thinking fixes: the data was already broken before anyone started thinking about it.
How often to run this
Once a quarter tends to be enough for most accounts, plus a re-run after any large jump in spend, a new campaign type, or a tracking migration. Waiting for CAC to visibly break before auditing means the leak already cost real money. Running the checks on a schedule catches it before a bidding algorithm has weeks to compound the mistake.
Rise
We start every new engagement with a teardown audit: one week, $2,500, credited toward a build if you move forward. It runs the checks above first, then the standard ladder, so any recommendation that comes out of it is built on an account we’ve actually verified is telling the truth.