The Google Ads account audit checklist: a top-to-bottom order

An audit done out of order wastes its own effort. Judge budgets before confirming conversions are tracked correctly, and you might raise spend on a campaign that only looks profitable because half its conversions are not being counted. Fix search terms before checking structure, and you might tighten negatives around a campaign that should have been split in two first. Order decides whether each step's findings are still true by the time you reach the next one.

Why does the order of an audit matter?

Each layer changes what the next layer's numbers mean. Settings decide what counts as a conversion at all, so they come first. Structure decides how spend and competition are organized, which shapes what a healthy search terms report even looks like. Search terms and budgets both depend on that structure being sound. Conversions come last as a dedicated, deep pass, separate from the quick sanity check settings already covered, because by then you know what the account is actually trying to do and can judge whether the numbers describing it are trustworthy.

What is the full audit checklist, in order?

1. Confirm access and linked accounts are current. Billing, user access, and any linked Google Analytics, Search Console, or Merchant Center account. A stale link quietly breaks conversion import or feed data with no obvious error.
2. Check which actions count as conversions. Confirm the primary conversion actions, the attribution model, and the currency all match how the business actually counts a sale.
3. Map structure against what the business sells. Campaigns and ad groups should mirror real product lines or margins. Structure that does not turns every later budget decision into a guess.
4. Look for internal keyword competition. Ad groups or campaigns bidding on the same or near-duplicate keywords split signal and inflate cost against each other.
5. Confirm each ad group holds one clear theme. A loose ad group weakens relevance and sends automated bidding a mixed signal about what a good click looks like.
6. Pull the search terms report for a fair window. Sort by spend among zero-conversion terms and add clear negatives at the right level.
7. Check branded queries specifically. Flag any brand term served mostly by a paid ad where the organic listing already ranks well, as its own diagnosis rather than assumed spend.
8. Review match type distribution. Confirm any broad match keyword carrying real spend has a working negative list underneath it, not just an assumption that bidding will sort it out.
9. Calculate pacing for every active campaign. Compare spend pace to the days elapsed in the billing month, not just the total spent so far.
10. Flag every campaign marked limited by budget. Rank the flagged list by return, not by spend, so a profitable capped campaign gets funded before a merely busy one.
11. Re-verify conversion actions fire correctly. Test an actual conversion end to end, independent of the quick settings check in step two.
12. Confirm conversion values and attribution match reality. A placeholder or default value poisons any value-based bidding strategy, and an attribution window mismatched to the real sales cycle either overcredits or undercredits the campaigns driving it.

What do you do with what the audit finds?

Turn each flagged item into a prioritized fix rather than a running list of concerns. Order fixes by dollars at stake, not by the sequence you happened to find them in, so a small daily leak in search terms can outrank a single dramatic-looking structural issue touching only one campaign. The search terms step deserves its own habit beyond the quarterly pass; see the weekly negative keywords workflow for keeping it clean between audits. A campaign flagged off pace in step nine deserves the same treatment; see the pacing math and fix before changing a budget number on instinct.

How often should a full audit run?

A complete top-to-bottom pass belongs on a quarterly calendar, or right after a significant account change: a new product line, a rebuilt site, a change in who owns conversion tracking. Between full passes, narrower habits carry the load, with search terms and pacing checked far more often than the rest.

If step seven turns up a branded query behaving strangely, organic ranking well while paid volume keeps climbing anyway, treat that as its own diagnosis rather than a line item to wave through; see testing branded search cannibalization for how to resolve it properly. Programmatic CMO's Google Ads agent runs a version of this checklist continuously rather than quarterly, so most items never drift far enough to need a dedicated audit at all.