The 15-Minute Google Ads Audit Checklist for Small Businesses

You don't need to be a PPC expert to know whether your Google Ads account is healthy. You need 15 minutes, access to the account, and this Google Ads audit checklist.

Whether you run the account yourself or pay an agency to do it, these ten checks will tell you where money is leaking. Every item includes exactly where to click and what a red flag looks like. Grab a coffee, open ads.google.com, and work down the list.

Before You Start

Sign in to your Google Ads account. If your agency runs it, you should still have owner access — if you don't, that's finding number zero, and it's a serious one. It's your account and your money. Ask for access today.

Set the date range in the top right to the last 30 days for every check below.

The Google Ads Audit Checklist

1. Search terms report: what are you actually paying for?

Your keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what people actually typed before clicking your ad — and they're often wildly different.

Where: Campaigns → Insights and reports → Search terms.

• Scan the top 50 search terms by cost
• Flag anything with no buying intent: "free," "DIY," "how to," "jobs," "salary," "course," competitor brand names you don't want, or entirely unrelated topics
• Estimate what those junk terms cost you last month

If a meaningful slice of spend went to searches that could never become customers, your targeting is leaking. This is the fastest single check in the audit and usually the most alarming. (For what separates a buying search from a browsing one, see our guide to buying-intent keywords.)

2. Match types: are you on broad match without knowing it?

Match types control how loosely Google interprets your keywords. Broad match gives Google the most freedom — and small accounts the most junk. Phrase and exact match keep you closer to what you chose.

Where: Campaigns → Keywords. Look at the "Match type" column.

• Check what percentage of your keywords are broad match
• If broad match dominates, cross-reference with the junk you found in check 1

Broad match isn't automatically wrong, but it demands constant negative-keyword policing. A mostly-broad account with a thin negative list (next check) is a budget leak by design.

3. Negative keywords: is anything filtering out the junk?

Negative keywords tell Google which searches should never trigger your ads — "free," "jobs," "DIY," and the like. They're the drain filter of the account.

Where: Campaigns → Audiences, keywords, and content → Search keywords → Negative search keywords.

• Confirm negative keyword lists exist and are applied to every campaign
• Check when a negative was last added (a healthy account adds them regularly)

An account with no negatives, or a negative list untouched for months, means nobody is filtering your traffic. Our negative keywords guide includes a universal starter list you can add in five minutes.

4. Network settings: is spend leaking to Display and search partners?

Search campaigns can quietly opt you into the Display Network (banner ads across random websites) and Google search partners (third-party sites with search results). Both typically convert far worse than Google search itself, and both are ticked on by default.

Where: Each campaign → Settings → Networks.

• Confirm Display Network is unticked on search campaigns
• Check search partners performance; untick it if it spends without converting

For a lead-gen service business, search-only is the discipline. If you find a "search" campaign spending on Display, you've found leakage.

5. Location settings: presence, not interest

There are two very different location options buried in campaign settings. "Presence" shows ads to people physically in your area. "Presence or interest" also shows ads to anyone anywhere who's merely interested in your area — which is how a Sydney plumber ends up paying for clicks from overseas.

Where: Each campaign → Settings → Locations → Location options.

• Confirm the setting is "Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations"
• Check the user locations report for clicks from places you don't serve

"Presence or interest" is the default. For a local business, it's almost always the wrong one.

6. Auto-apply recommendations: is Google editing your account for you?

Google can automatically apply its own "recommendations" — broadening your keywords, adjusting your bids, expanding your targeting — without anyone approving them. Google's recommendations optimize for Google's revenue at least as much as yours.

Where: Recommendations → Auto-apply (via the three-dot menu).

• Confirm auto-apply is off, or limited to genuinely safe items
• Review Change history (Campaigns → Change history) for changes marked as made by auto-apply

If Google has been silently rewriting your account, this checkbox alone can explain a lot of mystery spend.

7. Message match: does the landing page mirror the ad?

Message match means the page a visitor lands on repeats the promise of the ad they clicked. Someone who searches "emergency electrician" and clicks an ad saying "24/7 Emergency Electrician" should land on a page with that exact headline — not your generic homepage.

Where: Click your own ads' final URLs (from Ads → Final URL, not by clicking live ads).

• Pick your three highest-spend keywords and open the page each ad points to
• Check: does the headline reflect the search? Is there a form or phone number above the fold?

Sending paid clicks to a homepage is one of the most common — and most fixable — conversion killers. We break down how to fix it in landing page message match.

8. Conversion tracking: are you measuring leads and revenue, or clicks?

If the account's "conversions" column counts page views, button clicks, or nothing at all, then every optimization decision in the account is being made blind.

Where: Goals → Conversions → Summary.

• Confirm conversion actions track real leads: form submissions and phone calls
• Check that conversions have recorded recently (a tracking tag that broke months ago is common)
• Ideally, check whether leads carry revenue back to keywords — that's what lets you see ROAS (return on ad spend: revenue ÷ ad spend) instead of just activity

If this check fails, fix it first. Nothing else in the account can be judged honestly without it. Here's why ROAS is the only metric worth watching.

9. Ad group structure: one theme per ad group

Open a few ad groups and look at the keywords inside each one.

Where: Campaigns → Ad groups → click into a few.

• Check whether each ad group contains one tight keyword theme, or a grab-bag of unrelated terms
• Check whether the ads in each group actually mention the keywords in that group

When one ad group holds "emergency plumber," "hot water repair," and "bathroom renovation," a single generic ad has to serve all three — and matches none well. Tight structure (at the extreme, a SKAG — single-keyword ad group, one keyword per ad group) is what lets the search, ad, and landing page all say the same thing. More on that in our SKAG guide.

10. Change history: is anyone actually working on this account?

The most damning check is the simplest. Google logs every change made to the account: bids, keywords, negatives, ads, settings.

Where: Campaigns → Change history. Set the range to the last 90 days.

• Count meaningful changes in the last 30 days
• Check who (or what) made them — a person, or only automated systems

If you're paying an agency a monthly retainer and the change history shows a handful of automated tweaks and nothing else, you're paying for "set and forget." Ninety days of silence in a live ad account isn't stability. It's neglect.

Scoring Your Audit

Count your failed checks:

• 0–1 failed: The account is in decent hands. Re-run this quarterly.
• 2–4 failed: Real money is leaking. Fix conversion tracking and search-term junk first — they compound everything else.
• 5+ failed: The account needs a rebuild, and if someone is being paid to manage it, you should be asking hard questions about what the retainer buys.

An Audit Tells You Once. Adswn Checks Every Week.

Here's the limitation of any checklist, including this one: it's a snapshot. You fix the leaks today, Google's defaults and yesterday's search terms start eroding things again tomorrow, and the account drifts until the next time you remember to look.

Adswn doesn't rely on you remembering. It's the AI that runs your Google Ads for you — and every week it audits your account, scores it 0–100, and lists prioritized fixes, most of which it then applies itself: negatives added, junk terms cut, structure kept tight, tracking watched. The same discipline as this checklist, running whether or not you have 15 minutes.

Plans start at $49/month, and connecting your Google Ads account takes minutes.

Get your weekly scored audit with Adswn