PPC Audit Checklist: 10 Checks Marketers Can Run Before Changing Bids

A thorough PPC audit checks goals and KPIs, account structure, conversion tracking, budgets and bidding, audience targeting, keywords and negatives, ad creative, and automation settings, in that order. Before changing anything, run the Google Ads diagnostics and the enhanced conversions diagnostics report, and look at a date range long enough to cover a full learning cycle rather than a single busy week.

TL;DR:

• Use 90 days for a baseline review; assess recent changes over 14 to 30 days against the equivalent period before the change.
• Upload offline conversions daily when your CRM supports it, and keep legacy imports running for three conversion cycles, roughly four weeks, during migration.
• When a campaign captures fewer than roughly 10 clicks daily, raise its budget before adjusting bids, provided its conversion tracking is reliable.
• After launching or materially changing an automated campaign, wait at least two weeks before making structural changes so the system can complete its learning period.
• Check spend pacing and disapprovals weekly, run a full tracking and structure review monthly, and reassess goals, budgets, and account structure quarterly.

Table of Contents

• Quick checklist overview and how to use this audit
• Account and campaign structure
• Conversion tracking and enhanced conversions
• Audiences, targeting and settings
• Budgets, bidding and learning-phase considerations
• Keywords, search terms and negative keywords
• Ads, creative assets and ad strength
• Performance Max and automation-specific checks
• Reporting, KPIs and diagnostic checks
• Audit cadence, prioritised fixes and a short remedial playbook
• Aion Marketing’s approach and proof points
• How Aion Marketing can help: audit services and next step
• FAQ
• Sources

Quick checklist overview and how to use this audit

Before you touch a single bid or budget, decide how far back you need to look. A baseline review usually covers 90 days to smooth out seasonal noise, while checking the impact of a recent change calls for a tighter window, often the last 14 to 30 days, compared against the equivalent period before the change.

You will need a few things open at once: your Google Ads account with admin or standard access, Google Tag Manager or direct access to your website’s tag setup, Google Analytics or GA4, and, if you run lead generation, access to your CRM for offline conversion imports. Without these, several of the checks below cannot be completed properly.

Here is the sequence this audit follows:

1. Confirm goals, KPIs and the date range you are auditing against.
2. Review account and campaign structure for logic and duplication.
3. Verify conversion tracking and enhanced conversions.
4. Check audience, targeting and schedule settings.
5. Assess budgets, bidding strategy and learning-phase status.
6. Audit keywords, search terms and negative lists.
7. Review ad copy, assets and ad strength.
8. Check Performance Max and automation-specific settings.
9. Pull reporting and run diagnostics.
10. Set an ongoing audit cadence and prioritise fixes.

Working through these in order matters: there is little point optimising bids on top of broken conversion tracking, and no amount of creative polish fixes a structure that fragments your data across duplicate campaigns.

Account and campaign structure

Structure problems are often invisible day to day but quietly waste budget and muddy your reporting. Start at the account level and work down.

• Confirm each campaign maps to a single objective, such as lead generation, sales or remarketing, rather than mixing goals that need different bidding logic.
• Check that campaign types match intent: Search for high-intent queries, Shopping or Performance Max for product discovery, Display or video for awareness.
• Review naming conventions and labels so campaigns, ad groups and UTM parameters stay consistent and reportable across platforms, not just inside Google Ads.
• Inspect ad group themes for keyword relevance; an ad group spanning unrelated terms dilutes Quality Score and makes ad copy harder to tailor.
• Look for paused campaigns still consuming budget by accident, and duplicate campaigns competing against each other for the same auctions.

A fragmented account, where the same product or service is bid on by three overlapping campaigns, usually signals an account that grew without anyone pruning it. Consolidating overlapping campaigns often improves both reporting clarity and auction efficiency, since Google Ads is no longer competing against itself.

Conversion tracking and enhanced conversions

Nothing else in this audit matters if the data feeding it is wrong, so this is the section to be strictest about.

• Confirm a sitewide Google tag, or a correctly configured Google Tag Manager container, fires on every page that counts as a conversion, not just the obvious thank-you page.
• Verify enhanced conversions for leads are set up with browser-side hashing using SHA‑256, consistent email normalisation, and the correct match keys as laid out in Google’s enhanced conversions for leads implementation checklist.
• Check upload cadence: offline conversion imports and enhanced conversions for leads data should be uploaded daily where your CRM supports it, not in sporadic batches.
• Run the enhanced conversions diagnostics report inside Google Ads to catch missing or malformed personal data, then confirm tag firing independently with Tag Assistant or Chrome DevTools.
• If you are upgrading from an older offline conversion import to enhanced conversions for leads, keep the previous import running in parallel.

Pro Tip: Google recommends waiting three conversion cycles, or roughly four weeks, before switching off a legacy offline import, so your reporting does not drop a chunk of conversions mid-transition.

If your account has never had a proper tracking review, our guide on tracking Google Ads conversions walks through the setup in more depth than fits here.

Audiences, targeting and settings

Even a well-structured, well-tracked campaign underperforms if it is showing ads to the wrong people, in the wrong places, at the wrong times.

• Review audience lists and exclusions to confirm remarketing, customer match and custom intent signals are current and not accidentally excluding your best prospects.
• Check location targeting, language settings and advanced location options, since a campaign set to “people in” a location can quietly serve ads to people merely searching about it.
• Inspect ad scheduling for windows that are narrower than they need to be, and check whether time-based bid adjustments still reflect when conversions actually happen.
• For Performance Max and other automated campaign types, confirm audience signals are populated with real customer data rather than left as a placeholder, since these guide the algorithm’s early targeting rather than hard-restricting it.

A campaign with no audience signals is not necessarily broken, but it gives Google’s systems less to work with during the early learning period, which can slow down how quickly performance stabilises.

Budgets, bidding and learning-phase considerations

Budget and bidding checks are where many audits either save or waste months of future spend, depending on whether you let automated systems finish learning before intervening.

To estimate a realistic monthly budget, multiply your daily budget by 30.4, which Google Ads itself uses to convert daily spend into a monthly figure that accounts for the actual number of days in a month.

If a campaign is capped at 10 clicks a day or fewer, raising the budget is usually a more useful first move than adjusting bids. Where a Smart Bidding campaign has just launched or just had a major change, resist the urge to intervene for at least two weeks: Google’s own guidance on automated campaigns notes that early manual changes can restrict how well the system learns. Our budget calculator is a quick way to sanity-check your numbers against this threshold.

Keywords, search terms and negative keywords

This is where you reclaim budget that is currently funding irrelevant clicks.

1. Pull the search terms report for every campaign type, including Performance Max, and flag high-cost queries with no relevance to what you sell.
2. Review match types across your keyword list and adjust bids or restructure ad groups where broad match is pulling in traffic that converts poorly.
3. Add negatives at the account level for terms that should never trigger any campaign, and at campaign level for terms that are only wrong in that specific context.
4. Where your tools support it, test the predicted impact of a negative keyword list before applying it, since Google’s negative keyword tools for Performance Max can estimate the effect on impressions before you commit.
5. For Performance Max specifically, set account-level or campaign-level negative keywords for Search and Shopping inventory, and use excluded content keywords for the Display and video inventory that PMax can also serve into.

A negative keyword list is never finished. Treat the search terms report as a recurring task, not a one-time audit item, particularly on broad match or Performance Max campaigns where new queries surface constantly.

Ads, creative assets and ad strength

Good targeting and tracking can only carry a weak ad so far. This section checks whether your creative is actually doing its job.

• Check for disapproved ads or policy warnings across every campaign, since a single disapproved ad in an ad group can quietly throttle delivery for the whole group.
• Review Performance Max asset groups for variety: multiple image sizes, several headline and description variants, and no single asset doing all the work.
• Look at the ad strength rating Google Ads assigns and treat “poor” or “average” ratings as a prompt to add more relevant headline and description variants, not just more text.
• Confirm headlines reflect the keywords each ad group is actually bidding on, rather than generic brand messaging repeated everywhere.
• Validate that the landing page each ad points to matches the ad’s promise and loads cleanly on mobile, since a mismatch here undermines everything upstream.

Pro Tip: Pause testing new ad variants for at least a week after launch; judging ad strength or performance within the first few days usually reflects the learning phase, not the creative itself.

If your ad copy has gone stale, our e-commerce ad copy playbook has structured prompts for rebuilding headlines and descriptions from scratch.

Performance Max and automation-specific checks

Performance Max rewards a different audit approach than standard Search campaigns, mainly because so much of its targeting is invisible by design.

• Use the Performance Max search terms report to see which queries actually triggered your ads, keeping in mind this data is only available from March 2023 onward.
• Apply negative keywords for Search and Shopping inventory and excluded content keywords for Display and video inventory, since these are the two separate exclusion mechanisms PMax respects.
• Make sure asset groups are fully populated and audience signals reflect real customer data, then resist the temptation to tweak settings every few days while the campaign is still learning.
• Expect some conversions to show with little or no direct click data attached, since Performance Max draws on inventory where attribution works differently; prioritise conversion volume and value over raw clicks or impressions when judging performance.

Treat Performance Max less like a campaign you control directly and more like a system you feed with good signals and then let run.

Reporting, KPIs and diagnostic checks

The metrics you lead with shape every decision that follows, so get this hierarchy right before anything else in reporting.

• Prioritise conversions, “all conversions”, conversion value and ROAS over clicks and impressions, which tell you about traffic volume but nothing about whether it is the right traffic.
• Segment performance by conversion time, device and landing page to isolate where a problem actually sits rather than guessing at the campaign level.
• Run the enhanced conversions diagnostics report alongside the broader Google Ads account diagnostics to catch implementation issues before they distort weeks of reporting.
• Use the attribution model comparison report to test how a different model would redistribute credit before switching your account’s default model permanently.

One in roughly ten clicks is the rough threshold Google Ads itself flags for daily budget adequacy, and it is worth checking this figure against your own daily spend data whenever a campaign’s reported conversions look thin.

Audit cadence, prioritised fixes and a short remedial playbook

An audit is only useful if it leads to action, and not every fix deserves the same urgency.

Set three cadences: a daily or weekly glance at spend pacing and disapprovals, a monthly deep audit covering the sections above, and a quarterly strategic review of goals, budgets and account structure.

When you find issues, triage them:

1. Quick wins: broken tracking tags, disapproved ads, obvious budget caps. Fix these within days.
2. Medium fixes: negative keyword gaps, bidding strategy mismatches, stale ad copy. Plan these within the current audit cycle.
3. Larger projects: full account restructures, landing page overhauls, migrating tracking systems. Schedule these deliberately, with a clear before-and-after measurement plan.

For each fix, follow a simple loop: implement the change, validate it through diagnostics and early metrics, hold through the learning window before judging results, then assess against your original KPIs.

Aion Marketing’s approach and proof points

We treat conversion tracking as the first thing to fix, before any optimisation work begins, because every bidding decision downstream depends on data we can trust. Campaigns are prioritised by their effect on actual revenue and leads, not by vanity metrics or how much content an account produces.

Our strategies are built from each client’s own sales and lead data rather than generic benchmarks, and clients see transparent reporting throughout, so the numbers behind a recommendation are always visible, not just the recommendation itself.

If you want this checklist run against your own account rather than worked through manually, reach out and we will walk through what a tailored audit would cover for your specific setup.

— Joshue

How Aion Marketing can help: audit services and next step

Running this checklist properly takes real hours, and most business owners we work with would rather spend that time on their business than inside Google Ads reports. We offer a full PPC audit and ongoing Google Ads management that covers everything above, then keeps managing it.

A typical engagement includes:

• A tracking and diagnostics review, fixing conversion tagging and enhanced conversions before any bid or budget change.
• A prioritised action plan ranking fixes by expected impact, not just by what is easiest to change.
• Ongoing optimisation of bidding, budgets, keywords and creative, with transparent reporting so you see exactly what changed and why.
• Cross-channel coordination where relevant, including Meta Ads management for businesses running paid social alongside search.

If you want a second set of eyes on your account, get in touch about a Google Ads audit and we will tell you plainly what we find, including what is already working.

FAQ

What is a PPC audit?

A PPC audit is a structured review of a pay-per-click account covering goals and KPIs, conversion tracking, account structure, budgets and bidding, targeting, keywords and ad creative. It identifies what is wasting budget, what is broken in tracking, and which fixes will move performance fastest.

What are the 5 C’s of audit?

The “5 C’s” framework (client, criteria, cause, consequence, corrective action) is a general internal auditing concept rather than a PPC-specific standard, so it does not map directly onto a PPC account review. For paid search, the equivalent structure is tracking, structure, budgets, targeting and creative, which this checklist covers in sequence.

What are the 7 steps in the audit process?

There is no single universal “7 steps” standard for PPC specifically, and definitions vary by source. A practical version for paid search runs: define goals and date range, review structure, verify tracking, check budgets and bidding, audit targeting, review keywords and negatives, then assess ads and automation settings.

What is a 5S audit checklist?

5S is a workplace organisation method (sort, set in order, shine, standardise, sustain) used in manufacturing and operations, not a PPC concept. It is not applicable to a Google Ads account audit, which instead relies on the structure, tracking and performance checks covered throughout this guide.

How often should I audit my Google Ads account?

Check spend pacing and disapprovals weekly, run a full structural and tracking audit monthly, and step back for a quarterly review of goals and overall strategy. This cadence catches tracking faults quickly while still giving automated campaigns, such as Performance Max, enough time to ramp before you judge their search terms data.

Sources

• About daily budgets and how Google Ads spends your budget
• Enhanced conversions for leads implementation checklist

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Written with BabyLoveGrowth’s AI tools