The 30-Minute Google Ads Audit I Run Before Any Engagement

Most underperforming accounts are not badly optimized so much as quietly leaking budget in a few predictable places. I check the same five things before proposing any changes.

Search terms first. If the report is full of irrelevant queries, the money problem is upstream of bidding and no amount of bid tuning will fix it.

Then conversion tracking. A surprising share of accounts optimize toward events that fire incorrectly, which means the algorithm has been chasing the wrong goal the whole time.

Finally, structure, negatives, and asset coverage. These are unglamorous, but fixing them usually beats any clever bidding experiment in the first month.