PPC Audit: What to Look for in Your Campaigns

Most Google Ads accounts are quietly losing money. Not because the campaigns are badly built, but because nobody has looked closely at them in a while. Budgets shift, competitors change, search behaviour evolves, and what worked six months ago may now be quietly draining your spend with very little return.

A PPC audit is the process of systematically reviewing your paid search campaigns to find where performance has slipped, where budget is being wasted, and where there are genuine opportunities to improve results. It is not a one-time task. Done properly, it is something that should happen at regular intervals as a core part of any serious PPC management strategy.

This guide walks through exactly what to look for when you carry out a PPC audit in 2026, covering account structure, keyword performance, bidding, ad copy, landing pages, and conversion tracking.

Why a PPC Audit Should Be a Regular Priority

Google Ads does not stay optimised by itself. The platform actively encourages broader reach through default settings like broad match keywords, Smart Bidding, and automated recommendations that are not always aligned with your actual goals. Without regular review, campaigns can drift significantly from where they need to be.

The value of a structured audit is that it gives you a clear picture of what is actually happening across your account rather than relying on the top-line numbers in your dashboard. Click volume and impressions can look healthy while your cost per conversion quietly rises. An audit surfaces those gaps before they compound into serious budget problems.

For businesses running Google Ads for lead generation, an audit is often where the biggest efficiency wins are found, particularly in accounts that have been running for more than a few months without structured maintenance.

Account Structure and Campaign Organisation

The first thing to assess in any PPC audit is the overall structure of the account. Poor structure is one of the most common causes of wasted spend because it limits your ability to control budgets, bids, and targeting with any precision.

What to Check

• Are campaigns organised by product, service, or audience intent rather than lumped together?
• Do ad groups contain tightly themed keyword sets or a large mixed collection of loosely related terms?
• Is the account using a sensible naming convention that makes performance data easy to read and compare?
• Are Search and Display campaigns kept separate to avoid misreading performance data?

Overlapping keywords across ad groups or campaigns are a particular problem to watch for. When multiple ad groups are competing for the same search queries, you are effectively bidding against yourself and driving up your own costs.

Keyword Performance and Search Term Coverage

Keywords sit at the heart of any PPC audit. You need to look at both the keywords you are bidding on and the actual search terms that triggered your ads, which can be very different things, particularly if you are running broad or phrase match keywords.

Keyword Review Checklist

• Which keywords are consuming budget without generating conversions?
• Are there high-volume search terms in your search term report that you are not bidding on directly?
• Do you have a robust negative keyword list in place to prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant queries?
• Are any keywords flagged as having low search volume or below first page bid estimates?
• Are duplicate keywords appearing across multiple ad groups or campaigns?

Pay close attention to the search term report during your audit. This is where you will find the gap between what you think you are targeting and what Google is actually matching your ads against. Broad match in particular can trigger ads for searches that are only loosely connected to your intended audience.

Wasted spend on irrelevant search terms is often the single largest budget leak in an account. Identifying it is one of the highest-priority tasks in any audit.

Bidding Strategy and Budget Allocation

Bid strategy decisions have a significant effect on where your budget goes and how efficiently it generates results. During your PPC audit, review whether the bidding approach in use is actually suited to where each campaign is in its lifecycle.

Smart Bidding strategies like Target CPA and Target ROAS require sufficient conversion data to function well. Campaigns with fewer than 30 to 50 conversions per month are often better managed with manual CPC or Enhanced CPC while data accumulates. Using an automated strategy too early can lead to erratic performance and wasted spend while the algorithm learns.

Budget Questions to Ask

• Are your highest-performing campaigns limited by budget while lower-priority campaigns spend freely?
• Is your daily budget consistently being reached, and if so, are you losing impressions during peak hours?
• Are your Target CPA or Target ROAS goals realistic based on actual historical performance?
• Are you using bid adjustments for device, location, or time of day to improve efficiency?

Ad Copy and Ad Strength

Ad copy is one of the most visible parts of any paid search campaign, yet it is often one of the least regularly reviewed. During your audit, look at whether your ads are genuinely relevant, competitive, and designed to attract the right clicks rather than simply the most clicks.

In Responsive Search Ads, Google uses an Ad Strength rating to signal how well your copy is set up. Poor or average rated ads leave performance on the table. Look for ad groups where every RSA has a low strength rating or where only one or two ads are running with no variation for testing.

Ad Copy Audit Points

• Are your headlines specific to the search intent, or are they generic descriptions of your business?
• Do your ads include a clear call to action rather than simply describing a product or service?
• Are ad extensions in use, including sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and call extensions where relevant?
• Are there ad groups running with only a single ad, removing any opportunity for copy testing?
• Are there disapproved ads running that you may not have noticed?

Landing Page Relevance and User Experience

Clicks that arrive at the wrong landing page, or a landing page that loads slowly or does not match the intent of the ad, are conversions you will never get back. Landing page quality directly affects your Quality Score, your cost per click, and ultimately your return on ad spend.

Check that each ad group is sending traffic to a landing page that directly relates to the keywords being targeted. Sending all traffic to a homepage is one of the most common and most costly mistakes in PPC campaign management.

Page load speed is worth checking independently for any page receiving significant PPC traffic. Google’s own data consistently shows that conversion rates drop sharply as load times increase, particularly on mobile.

Conversion Tracking Accuracy

Nothing else in a PPC audit matters as much as this. If your conversion tracking is broken, duplicated, or measuring the wrong actions, every decision you make based on that data is flawed.

Start by verifying that conversion actions are set up correctly in Google Ads and that they are actually firing on the right events. Common issues include tracking page views as conversions, double-counting conversions through both Google Ads tags and imported Google Analytics goals, or missing conversions entirely because a tag stopped firing after a website update.

Conversion Tracking Checks

• Are all conversion actions verified as recording accurately in the last 30 days?
• Are phone call conversions being tracked with a minimum call duration set to filter out short accidental calls?
• Are there any conversion actions marked as primary that should be set to secondary, or vice versa?
• Is the account using data-driven attribution or last-click? Is the model appropriate for the conversion cycle of the business?

Where to Start with Your PPC Audit

A PPC audit does not have to be complicated, but it does need to be systematic. Working through account structure, keywords, bidding, ad copy, landing pages, and conversion tracking in a logical order gives you a clear picture of where your campaigns stand and where the real opportunities for improvement are.

If your campaigns have been running for a while without a structured review, or if you have noticed performance starting to plateau, now is a good time to carry one out. The findings from a thorough audit are often the starting point for a significantly more efficient and profitable account.

If you would prefer an expert to carry out the review, our PPC audit service covers every area of your Google Ads account and delivers a clear action plan with prioritised recommendations.