Google Ads Audit: A 10-Step Checklist You Can Run Yourself in an Afternoon

A Google Ads audit is a structured review of your account to find money leaving it for no return. For a plumber, roofer or HVAC company spending a few thousand a month, that is not an abstract exercise. It is usually the difference between an account that pays for two vans and an account that pays for one.

Most audit checklists online were written for e-commerce brands or for agencies pitching for work, run to a hundred items, and assume you have a Merchant Center feed and an analyst. This one is for the person who owns the business, has access to one account, and can spare an afternoon. Ten checks, ordered so the biggest leaks surface first, and an honest note at the end about the one thing an audit cannot tell you.

Why run a Google Ads audit now

Three things changed in Google Ads over the last two months without anybody in your business clicking anything, which is the best argument for doing this now rather than next year.

From September 2026, campaigns using Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match began being automatically upgraded to AI Max, Google’s bundle of keywordless matching, text rewriting and final URL expansion. From 17 August 2026, Google changed how Target CPA and Target ROAS behave on campaigns marked “Limited by budget”. And in late September, campaign-level language targeting disappears from Search campaigns altogether.

None of those were your decisions, and all of them change which searches your ads answer, and therefore which clicks you pay for. An account that was tidy in June may be matching much wider today. The ClickGuardian guide to Google AI Max covers the upgrade, and the guide to the “Limited by budget” change covers the bidding side.

Before you start

Set aside two hours and get three things in front of you: access to the Google Ads account, the last 90 days as your date range, and a list of the enquiries you actually received last month. That last one matters more than anything in the interface, because most accounts fail an audit not on settings but because reported conversions and real booked jobs have quietly drifted apart. Open a blank document with two columns, “found” and “fix”, and resist fixing as you go.

The 10-step Google Ads audit checklist

1. Check that conversion tracking is telling the truth

Start here, because every other number in the account is built on this one. Go to Goals, then Conversions, and check each conversion action for three things: the status reads “Recording conversions”, the last 30 days roughly matches the enquiries you remember, and the action is something that makes you money.

The most common problem in small accounts is not a broken tag. It is a conversion action set to something harmless like a page view or a newsletter sign-up, counted equally alongside a booked job, so Google optimises towards the cheap thing. Google’s conversion tracking troubleshooter covers tag status if anything shows as inactive. And if reported conversions run well above the enquiries you can name, write it down: that is a measurement problem, and it will distort steps five to ten.

2. Read your search terms report properly

Go to Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms, and set the range to the last 90 days. This shows the actual phrases people typed, which is not the same as your keywords. Google’s documentation on the search terms report notes it only includes terms used by a significant number of people, so treat it as a sample.

Sort by cost, highest first, and read the top fifty lines out loud. You want to separate people who want a job doing from people who want to do it themselves or want a career (add “DIY”, “course”, “jobs”, “salary” as negatives) and from searches for a service you do not offer. Broad matching and AI Max both widen this list, so a report you last read in spring will look different now. Add the obvious negatives at account level so you only do it once. This step alone often removes a tenth of the spend in a neglected account.

3. Check where your ads actually showed

Your keywords decide what triggers an ad. The network settings decide where it appears. Those are separate, and the second is where budget disappears without a trace.

In each campaign’s settings, open Networks. If “Include Google search partners” is ticked, your ads run on hundreds of third-party sites and apps as well as Google. That can work, and it can also quietly absorb a chunk of your budget at a worse conversion rate. Segment your campaign report by network and compare cost per conversion on Search against Search partners side by side. The ClickGuardian guide to Google Search Partners explains what the network contains and how to decide. And if “Include Display Network” is ticked on a Search campaign, untick it: there is almost no case where a local service business wants that box on.

4. Check your location settings

Open Settings, then Locations, then expand “Location options”. If it says “Presence or interest”, your ads can show to anyone in the world who has shown interest in your area, including through the words they searched. For a business that drives a van to a customer’s house, that is money spent on people you cannot serve.

Switch it to “Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations”, then ask whether you would genuinely send a van to every town inside your radius. The ClickGuardian guide to Google Ads location targeting covers the country-domain quirk if overseas clicks persist after the change. Check the ad schedule while you are in there: plenty of accounts run 24 hours a day for a business that answers the phone from eight until six, and out-of-hours clicks convert far worse when nobody picks up.

5. Check budget pacing, not just budget

Look at each campaign’s status column. “Limited by budget” is not automatically a problem, but it tells you Google would spend more if you let it. The real question is what time of day your budget runs out.

Segment a campaign report by hour of day for the last 30 days. If your spend curve dies at eleven in the morning, you are invisible all afternoon, which in emergency trades is when a good share of the real calls happen. The ClickGuardian guide to a budget that runs out by lunchtime works through the ordinary causes. Since 17 August 2026, budget-limited campaigns on Target CPA or Target ROAS also optimise more consistently towards the target you stated rather than over-achieving it quietly, so targets set years ago are worth a second look.

6. Look at the invalid clicks column

Most business owners have never seen this column, because Google hides it by default. In any campaign view, click the columns icon, choose Modify columns, open Performance, and tick “Invalid clicks” and “Invalid click rate”, then save it as a view so it stays.

What you are looking at is the clicks Google identified as invalid and did not charge you for. Google’s definition of invalid clicks covers intentionally fraudulent traffic, automated clicking tools and accidental duplicate clicks. It is useful, with a hard limit: it records what Google caught, not what arrived. Treat a high number as a sign your account is on somebody’s list, and a low number as no evidence of anything. The ClickGuardian guide to Google’s invalid click protection explains why the two are not the same.

7. Compare clicks to enquiries, by campaign and by day

Now put the interface aside and use your list of real enquiries. For each campaign, work out roughly how many clicks it took to produce one enquiry you would recognise, then compare campaigns against each other. Next, segment by day of week and look for days where clicks arrive and nothing happens. Weekend and late-night spikes with no calls behind them are worth a note. So are days where clicks and click-through rate both jump while conversions stay flat, which is close to the opposite of how genuine demand behaves. The seven signs your Google Ads are under attack covers those patterns, and the technical guide to detecting click fraud covers cross-referencing Google Ads against your analytics.

If clicks look healthy and the phone is quiet everywhere, the cause is usually further down the funnel. The ClickGuardian diagnostic on Google Ads not converting runs through the seven usual suspects.

8. Check what the automation changed for you

This step did not exist in audit checklists three years ago and is now one of the most important. Go to Tools, then Change history, set the range to the last 90 days, and look for changes where the source is Google rather than a person.

You are checking for assets generated for you, headlines rewritten, final URLs expanded to pages you did not nominate, and campaign types upgraded. If your account was in the September AI Max auto-upgrade, it should be visible here. Read any new ad text as a customer would and ask whether it promises something you cannot deliver.

Take Google’s optimisation score with a pinch of salt while you are there. Google describes it as an estimate of how well your account is set to perform, and the recommendations behind it are generic by design. Applying all of them reliably broadens your matching and raises your spend.

9. Check the landing page and what happens after the click

Click your own ads, on a phone, from the town you actually serve. Time how long the page takes to appear, check the number is tappable and rings the right handset, check the form lands in an inbox someone reads, and check the page mentions the service the ad promised rather than dropping everyone on a generic homepage.

Then ask whoever answers the phone one question: how many of last month’s calls were real customers, and how many were sales calls, wrong numbers or people wanting something you do not do. Their answer is data no report will give you.

10. Score your traffic quality

The final step is the one the interface cannot do for you: judging whether the clicks you paid for came from people.

Automated traffic passed 51% of all web traffic in 2024, overtaking humans for the first time, according to the Imperva/Thales Bad Bot Report cited on the ClickGuardian statistics page. The same page notes that campaigns running without anti-fraud technology recorded a 10.9% fraud rate in 2024, fifteen times higher than protected campaigns, per the IAS Media Quality Report. Against the average Google Ads cost per click of $5.26 in 2025, a thousand paid clicks a month at a ten per cent bad rate is roughly $500 that never appears in any column.

What you can do today is look for the fingerprints: repeat visits from similar IP ranges in your analytics, sessions under five seconds, form submissions with nonsense in the name field, and traffic from outside your service area that survived a Presence setting. The ClickGuardian guide to bot traffic in Google Analytics is a step-by-step for the analytics side. One knock-on effect belongs in your “found” column too: every non-human click that converts nothing is a lesson Smart Bidding learns from, so a traffic quality problem slowly becomes a bidding problem, as the ClickGuardian guide to Smart Bidding and click fraud explains.

What a Google Ads audit cannot tell you

An audit is a review of reported data, and reported data has been filtered before you see it. That is the honest limit of every checklist in this category, including this one.

You cannot see the clicks Google filtered out, only that it filtered some. You cannot see which of the clicks you were charged for came from a competitor across town, a click farm behind a residential proxy or a script in a data centre, because Google’s reports were never built to tell you. And you cannot recover the spend afterwards beyond the limited credits Google issues, which the guide to invalid click refunds is candid about.

So the ten steps reliably find the leaks in your own settings, usually the biggest ones in a neglected account, and they point at traffic quality without measuring it. Closing that gap needs something watching each visit as it arrives.

That is the job ClickGuardian does. ClickGuardian sits between your Google Ads campaigns and your website and scores every visitor on signals no Google Ads column contains: whether the connection is a known data centre, hosting provider or VPN, whether the same device keeps returning through different addresses, and whether the session behaves like a person or a script. Visitors that fail are excluded from your campaigns automatically, with a record of who was blocked and why. To size the gap first, the ClickGuardian ROI calculator takes your spend and cost per click and estimates what share of the budget is going to clicks that were never going to become jobs.

How often should you audit your Google Ads

Quarterly is the right rhythm for most small accounts, with a shorter monthly version covering three steps: search terms, budget pacing, and clicks against real enquiries. Run the full ten whenever spend changes materially, whenever Google announces a change to matching or bidding, and always before you raise a budget.

Keep the document, because the value is in the comparison. What was “found” last quarter and never got fixed is the most honest performance report you will ever read. If you would rather not run it alone, the guide to click fraud protection for agencies covers what a good agency should be showing you, and the ClickGuardian glossary explains any term above that was new.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Google Ads audit?

A Google Ads audit is a structured review of a Google Ads account to find wasted spend, measurement errors and settings that no longer match the business. A practical audit covers conversion tracking accuracy, the search terms your ads matched, network and location settings, budget pacing, the invalid clicks column, the ratio of clicks to real enquiries, changes Google made automatically, landing page and call handling, and traffic quality. For a small business running one account it takes about two hours and needs no paid tool.

How do I audit my own Google Ads account for free?

You can audit your own Google Ads account for free using the Google Ads interface alone. Set your date range to the last 90 days, then work through conversion actions in Goals, the search terms report under Insights and reports, network and location settings in each campaign’s Settings, the invalid clicks column (added via Modify columns), hour-of-day and day-of-week segments on campaign reports, and Change history under Tools. The one thing you need from outside Google Ads is a list of the enquiries you genuinely received, so you can compare reported conversions against real jobs.

How often should a small business audit its Google Ads?

A small business should run a full audit of its Google Ads account quarterly and a short one monthly. The monthly version is three checks: read the search terms report, look at what time of day the budget runs out, and compare clicks against the enquiries you actually received. Go sooner if your spend changes significantly, if Google announces a change to how campaigns match or bid, or before you raise a budget, because increasing spend on a leaking account simply increases the leak.

Can a Google Ads audit find click fraud?

An audit of your Google Ads account can find the symptoms of click fraud but cannot measure it. The steps that point to it are the invalid clicks column, which records only what Google caught, the ratio of clicks to real enquiries by campaign and by day, short session durations in your analytics, and clicks from outside your service area that persist after location settings are tightened. Confirming and stopping fraudulent clicks needs visit-level analysis of network origin, device repetition and behaviour, which Google Ads reporting does not provide. Dedicated click fraud protection such as ClickGuardian does that scoring in real time and blocks the sources it identifies.

Is a PPC audit the same as a Google Ads audit?

A PPC audit and a Google Ads audit use the same method, but a PPC audit covers every paid channel you run, including Microsoft Advertising and Meta, while the Google Ads version covers one platform. For most home service businesses the two are the same job, because Google Ads is where nearly all the spend sits. If you also run Microsoft Advertising, repeat steps one to seven there: the reporting is closely comparable and the same settings tend to be left on their defaults.

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Last updated: September 2026. For the playbook this checklist feeds into, see how to stop click fraud on Google Ads, and if the account is underperforming across the board, start with Google Ads not working? A calm checklist. For the wider defence, read ad fraud prevention: a practical playbook and what is invalid traffic?. Local trades can start with click fraud protection for plumbers, the click fraud glossary covers the vocabulary used here, and the sourced numbers are on the click fraud statistics page. To estimate what invalid clicks are costing your own campaigns, use the ClickGuardian ROI calculator.