GOOGLE ADS AUDIT CHECKLIST: THE TEMPLATE I USE

A google ads audit checklist is only as good as the thinking behind each row, and most of the ones floating around are just a long column of tick boxes that make you feel thorough without making you smarter. I built my own because the downloadable ones kept failing the same way: they treat "check location targeting" and "check the conversion tag fires once" as equal-weight tasks, when one is hygiene and the other decides whether every number below it is real. The checklist I use, and hand out to clients, is not a longer list. It is a shorter one, ordered so the sections that actually move money get filled in first and read against each other.

What I want to do here is walk you through that template the way I use it: not "forty things to look at" but the handful of sections that count, the sequence I fill them in on a brand-new account, and how I get through it quickly without turning it into a two-day project. I will also be honest about the gap between a real audit and the free-facade version, because it is bigger than most advertisers realise and it is why I stopped trusting one-click tools.

Underneath every row sits the same discipline: an audit is a diagnosis, not a treatment, and it has to be data-driven or it is just opinion in a spreadsheet. I do not tick a box because something "looks tidy"; I tick it because I can point to a figure that backs the finding. That is what the free tools cannot do, no matter how slick the PDF they email you.

The sections that actually count in a google ads audit checklist

My template has five sections, deliberately in dependency order, because each inherits its trustworthiness from the one above it. Fill them out of order and you validate things built on a foundation you never checked. The five: account settings and hygiene, tracking, campaign settings and structure, search terms and query waste, and finally ads and landing pages. Notice the ads, the part everyone wants to talk about, sit dead last. That placement is the single most important design choice in the whole checklist.

The reasoning is simple. A brilliant headline on a campaign optimising toward a double-counted conversion is a rounding error. A clean account feeding honest signals into the auction is where the money is won or lost. So the sections that count are the boring ones at the bottom, and my template forces my attention there before I get to enjoy rewriting ad copy. If you take one thing from this piece, take the order: settings, tracking, structure, search terms, ads.

Within each section the rows are questions, not tasks. Under tracking I do not write "check conversions"; I write "which conversion actions are Primary, and does that match the business objective?" Under structure, "is the account living only on brand-exact terms, and what demand is it missing?" Phrasing every row as a question keeps the checklist an act of inference rather than box-ticking, and it is the difference between finding problems and finding opportunities. The full logic behind this order is something I unpack in my broader piece on how I run a google ads audit, but the checklist is where that thinking gets operational.

The empty rows matter too. When a section has nothing to flag, that is a finding, not a blank: a genuinely clean tracking section is rare enough that it tells me the previous manager knew what they were doing, and it changes how sceptically I read everything below. The template is as much about what is absent as what is broken.

How I fill the whole template fast on a new account

Speed in an audit does not come from skipping sections; it comes from knowing which three or four cells decide everything and hitting them first. On a new account I fill the entire template in under an hour, and almost all of it is spent in two places: tracking and the search terms report. The rest is fast because those sections are downstream of these two.

The first three cells: conversion goals, double-counting, source of truth

The very first thing I fill in is the tracking section, and within it three cells in a fixed order. First, I list every conversion action and note which are set as Primary, because those are the ones Smart Bidding is actually chasing. The classic finding is a lead-gen account with downloads and outbound clicks flagged Primary alongside the real lead, so the campaigns were optimising toward the cheap actions while the conversion count looked healthy. Second, I check for a conversion firing twice on the thank-you page, one real lead recorded as two, which flatters cost per lead and makes a weak account look strong. Third, I cross-check the platform's conversions against the CRM or back end. When those three cells are filled, I know whether anything below them is trustworthy, and that is the fastest hour of value in the whole process. If you want the deeper method behind these cells, my walkthrough of setting up conversion tracking properly covers the failure modes in detail.

The number that fills half the checklist by itself

After tracking, I pull the search terms report over a long window, often a year, and quantify how much spend went to queries with no commercial intent. On accounts with weak match-type control and thin negatives this number is routinely large, and it fills half the checklist by itself: the structure finding, the negative-keyword finding, and the wasted-budget finding in one defensible figure. It doubles as an expansion list too, since the same report surfaces the high-intent queries the account is not yet targeting. One careful read, and most of the middle of the template is done.

The rest goes quickly because it is downstream. Budget spent outside the target geography, Display expansion silently on inside Search, sprawling ad groups depressing quality score, average ad strength: real rows, but minutes each once the two heavy sections are done, because I already know where the money leaks and I am just confirming the mechanism. Filling the template fast is not rushing; it is front-loading the cells that make the rest trivial. Taking over an account from another manager, this exact sequence opens my handover audit for inherited accounts, because the previous manager's reported numbers mean nothing until those first three cells are verified.

A free facade audit vs a real one

I want to be blunt here, because advertisers get burned. The free, instant audit tools that ask for read access and email you a scored PDF a minute later are not audits. They are lead magnets. They scan for what a script can see: missing sitelinks, ad strength below "Good", keywords without enough characters, campaigns without a bid strategy label. All real, all surface-level, none of it touching the questions that decide whether the account is healthy.

The tell is that a facade audit cannot check what matters most, because those checks need judgement and a second source of truth. A script cannot know your Primary conversion is double-counting, because two conversions look like two conversions. It cannot know Maximize Clicks is wrong for your lead-gen goal, because the setting is valid, only wrong in context. It cannot read your search terms against your business and tell you a third of spend is junk, because "junk" is defined by intent, not by any flag in the interface. Everything a facade audit catches lives in the top layer of my template, the layer I fill last precisely because it matters least.

A real audit is a data-driven exercise run by someone who cross-checks the platform against reality and reads each finding as evidence of how the account was managed. It ends in a ranked list of things worth doing, each backed by a figure, not a colour-coded score out of a hundred. That is why I give my template away freely: the checklist is not the valuable part. The judgement you apply to each row is, and no free tool hands you that. If a "free audit" ends with a sales call before it shows you a single number tied to your own CRM, you already know which kind it was.

The google ads audit template, section by section

Here is the actual google ads audit template, laid out the way I keep it. Each section is a short set of question-rows, with room for the finding and the number behind it. Treat it as a spine to adapt, not a script to follow blindly, and fill it bottom-up.

Section 1 Account settings & hygiene

Time zone and currency correct; auto-tagging on; account-level negative keywords present and sane; unnecessary automations and auto-applied recommendations reviewed; account genuinely linked to Analytics. These are quick, but a wrong one here quietly distorts everything downstream, so the section leads even though it is the fastest to fill.

Section 2 Tracking

Which conversion actions are Primary, and do they match the business objective; is anything double-counting on the thank-you page; do platform conversions reconcile with the CRM or back end; is the click through rate on low-intent campaigns suspiciously high in a way that hints at a measurement or matching problem. This is the section that decides whether the rest of the audit is fiction, so it carries the highest-priority findings by default. For the definitive list of settings Google expects here, the official Google Ads account audit guide maps almost exactly onto this order, moving from settings to tracking to campaigns to ads.

Section 3 Campaign settings & structure

Does each bid strategy match the objective; is Display expansion switched on inside Search; is budget being spent inside the target geography; are ad groups tight or sprawling; is the account living only on brand-exact terms and therefore missing generic and competitor demand; is free visibility, like Merchant Center listings on an ecommerce account, being left on the table. Read the structure as evidence, not a checklist: a poor quality score next to bloated ad groups is one finding, cause and symptom, not two.

Section 4 Search terms & query waste

What share of spend over the last year went to queries with no commercial intent; which high-intent queries is the account not yet targeting; is impression share being lost to budget or to rank. This is the section that turns a vague concern into a euro figure, which is exactly what lets you rank it later.

Section 5 Ads & landing pages

Read ad and page as a pair: does the message carry from click to page; does the page ask for the action the campaign optimises toward; does it load and convert; is ad strength weak. Noted, but kept in perspective, because on most accounts this layer matters far less than the two beneath it.

Then the step the free tools never reach: rank every finding on two axes, how much money it moves and how hard it is to fix, then run each through one filter, "if I fix this, does cost per conversion or ROAS actually move?" If the honest answer is "not much", it drops down the list however wrong it looks. What you hand over is not forty equal ticks but a short ordered list: fix today, build next, revisit later. From there it becomes the opening agenda for my weekly optimization routine, so the audit turns into action instead of a document that gets admired once and filed.