What a real PPC account audit actually checks (a working checklist)

A lot of PPC audits stop at "here are some keywords wasting your budget," which is real but usually a small part of what's actually holding an account back. The checklist we run on every new client account we inherit goes considerably further, and the biggest opportunities are frequently in account structure and tracking, not keyword-level waste.

Before evaluating any performance number in the account, we verify the conversion tracking itself is accurate: is it firing once per genuine conversion, not duplicating on page refresh; is it tracking the actual business-relevant action, not just a page view; and does it match what the client's own CRM or sales data shows for the same period. We've inherited more than one account that had been "optimized" for months against tracking that was quietly counting the same conversion two or three times.

Broad and phrase match keywords can trigger ads for search terms only loosely related to the actual keyword, and a search terms report that hasn't been reviewed in months routinely reveals a meaningful share of spend going to genuinely irrelevant queries. This is usually the fastest, most obvious win on an inherited account: negative keywords added from an unreviewed search terms report, sometimes recovering 15 to 20 percent of wasted spend within the first week.

Ad groups with too many loosely related keywords produce lower Quality Scores across the board, since ad relevance to each individual keyword suffers. We check ad group organization against actual keyword themes and frequently find accounts where a single ad group is serving one generic ad against thirty or forty only loosely related keywords, a structural problem no amount of bid adjustment alone will fix.

Every ad group should point to a landing page genuinely relevant to that specific keyword theme, not a single generic homepage or contact page serving every campaign. Landing page relevance is a real Quality Score input and, more importantly, a real conversion rate driver: a visitor who searched for a specific service and lands on a generic homepage has to do extra work to find what they were looking for, and a meaningful share simply leave instead.

Automated bid strategies like Target CPA or Maximize Conversions need a minimum volume of conversions to optimize effectively, and we frequently find low-volume accounts stuck on an automated strategy that never has enough data to actually learn well, quietly underperforming a simpler manual or enhanced CPC approach that would work better at that specific volume.

Conversion tracking accuracy, then negative keywords from the search terms report, then landing page alignment, then account restructuring, then bid strategy. This order reflects both how much each fix typically moves performance and how quickly, since tracking and negative keywords are same-week fixes while restructuring a poorly organized account is genuinely bigger work worth sequencing after the faster wins are captured.

Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and other ad assets take up more real estate on the results page, improve expected click-through rate, and cost nothing extra to run, yet we routinely inherit accounts running with only the bare minimum of assets configured, sometimes none beyond what the platform auto-generates. We check asset coverage against what's actually available for the account's business type and industry, and building out a fuller, more relevant asset set is often a quick win that improves both visibility and Quality Score with very little ongoing effort required.

An account that's regularly running out of daily budget before the day ends is losing impression share to budget constraints, not to competition, which is a meaningfully different problem with a different fix. We check the lost impression share (budget) metric specifically, separate from lost impression share (rank), since the former usually means the account is simply underfunded relative to its own demand, a straightforward, low-risk case for a budget increase, while the latter points to a genuine competitiveness or Quality Score problem that a bigger budget alone won't solve.

Aggregate account performance can hide meaningful splits by device or time of day, a campaign performing well overall might be quietly losing money on mobile while overperforming on desktop, or converting well during business hours and poorly overnight. We break out performance by device and by day-part on every audit, since bid adjustments targeted at these splits are a low-effort, low-risk way to improve blended performance without touching keywords or account structure at all.

We present audit findings in the same priority order we fix them, tracking first, then negative keywords, then landing pages, then structure, then bid strategy, specifically because leading with the smaller structural items before the client has seen the bigger, faster wins tends to bury the most actionable findings under less urgent detail. A client who sees the fast wins first stays engaged through the rest of the findings, while one handed a long undifferentiated list upfront often loses the thread before reaching the parts that matter most.

This ordering also sets realistic expectations about timeline: the client understands from the outset that some fixes show results within days while others, particularly a full account restructuring, are weeks of work that pay off on a longer horizon, rather than expecting every finding in the audit to move performance equally fast.

We run this same checklist whether the account is one we're inheriting from another agency or one we've managed ourselves for years, on the theory that familiarity with an account is exactly what makes it easy to stop questioning assumptions that were correct eighteen months ago and quietly stopped being correct sometime since. A fresh audit against a fixed checklist catches drift that day-to-day management, focused on this week's performance, tends to miss.