PPC Audit
Find the Waste. Find the Wins.
Most paid search accounts contain significant budget inefficiency, and most of it is invisible until someone looks carefully. Our PPC Audit is a structured, expert review of your entire paid search program that surfaces what's costing you money, what's holding back performance, and what opportunities your current setup is leaving uncaptured.
Paid Search Accounts Degrade Without Active Management
Account structures that made sense when they were built drift out of alignment as markets shift, match types change, automation takes over, and keyword lists grow untended. What worked eighteen months ago may now be a source of significant waste, and the account's own reporting often makes it hard to see clearly.
Identify Budget Waste Before It Compounds
Wasted spend on irrelevant search terms, duplicate keywords, and poor-Quality Score ad groups quietly erodes ROAS. An audit finds every leak so you can redirect spend toward what actually converts.
Uncover Performance You're Leaving Behind
Missed negative keywords, undertapped audience segments, weak ad copy, and mismatched landing pages all represent upside. An audit reveals what's structurally capping your performance.
Verify Your Data Is Trustworthy
Conversion tracking errors are surprisingly common, double-counting, broken tags, misattributed conversions. If the data feeding your bid strategy is wrong, every automated optimization decision is wrong too.
A Thorough Review of Every Account Layer
We examine every dimension of your paid search account, from structural architecture to individual keyword performance to conversion tracking integrity.
Account Structure Review
We assess your campaign and ad group organization, evaluating logical grouping, keyword-to-ad relevance, Quality Score implications, inter-campaign cannibalization, and whether the current structure supports or undermines algorithmic optimization.
Quality Score Analysis
We break down Quality Scores by ad group and keyword, identifying where expected CTR, ad relevance, or landing page experience are dragging scores down and driving up your effective CPCs.
Keyword Performance & Negative Gaps
We analyze keyword-level performance to identify underperformers, overspenders, and cannibalization, and we conduct a full search term report review to surface the negative keyword gaps costing you the most.
Ad Copy Effectiveness
We review your responsive search ad assets, pinning strategy, extension usage, and historical test results, assessing message clarity, CTR performance, and whether your ads are doing the job of qualifying the right clicks.
Bidding Strategy Assessment
We evaluate whether your current bid strategies, manual, tCPA, tROAS, maximize conversions, are appropriate for your data volume, campaign maturity, and business goals. We identify where automation is helping and where it's working against you.
Landing Page Conversion Assessment
We review the post-click experience for your key campaigns, message match between ad and page, page speed, form design, trust signals, mobile experience, and conversion friction, identifying where clicks are leaking before they convert.
Audience Targeting Gaps
We review your current audience usage, remarketing lists, customer match, in-market segments, demographic layering, and identify the audience opportunities your account is currently ignoring.
Conversion Tracking Verification
We audit every conversion action in your account, verifying tag firing accuracy, attribution settings, conversion values, and consistency with your actual business goals. Flawed tracking is a root cause of many performance problems and is frequently overlooked.
Budget Efficiency Analysis
We review how spend is distributed across campaigns, devices, dayparts, and geographies, identifying whether the current allocation reflects actual performance data or inherited assumptions from when the account was first set up.
A Scored Report and a Prioritized Action Plan
You'll receive more than a list of observations. Our audit report grades your account across every dimension and tells you, in plain terms, what to fix, in what order, and what the upside looks like.
- Executive summary with scored grades by audit category
- Account structure analysis with specific restructuring recommendations
- Quality Score breakdown and improvement opportunities
- Keyword performance report with underperformer and waste identification
- Negative keyword gap analysis with recommended additions
- Ad copy assessment and testing recommendations
- Bidding strategy evaluation and recommendations
- Landing page conversion audit with CRO recommendations
- Audience gap analysis
- Conversion tracking verification report
- Budget efficiency analysis
- Prioritized action plan with impact and effort ratings
- Findings walkthrough with your team
Common Questions
What access do you need to perform the audit?
We need read-only access to your Google Ads and/or Microsoft Ads accounts, and ideally to Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. We'll send a clear access checklist at the start of the engagement, we never need admin or billing access.
How is this different from Google's own recommendations?
Google's in-platform recommendations are designed to increase spend and automation, which is not always aligned with your business objectives. Our audit is independent, platform-agnostic in its judgment, and focused solely on your ROAS and business outcomes, not platform revenue.
We have an agency managing our account. Can you still audit it?
Yes, and it's one of the most common reasons clients come to us. A second-opinion audit from a new set of expert eyes frequently surfaces issues and missed opportunities that aren't visible from inside the day-to-day management relationship. The findings are entirely confidential.
Do you implement the recommendations, or only provide the report?
The audit is a diagnostic. Implementation is a separate engagement. The action plan we deliver is detailed enough for a competent PPC manager to execute independently, or we can scope follow-on management to implement it ourselves.
What if the account is small or relatively new?
Smaller or newer accounts benefit from audits too, and often the findings are more impactful because structural issues get locked in early. We'll calibrate the audit scope to the size and maturity of the account and price accordingly.
How often should a PPC account be audited?
For actively managed accounts, a full independent audit annually is a good practice. After a major campaign restructure, a platform change, or a sustained period of declining performance, an audit should happen sooner. Ongoing management retainers include quarterly reviews that serve as lighter-weight audit cycles.