What Is a Google Ads Audit? What It Checks, Costs and Finds (2026)

Most businesses order a Google Ads audit when results stall or costs climb and nobody can explain why. An audit replaces guesswork with evidence.

The most common triggers:

• Cost per lead is rising. Spend holds steady, but each enquiry costs more than it did six months ago.
• Leads are flat or poor quality. Forms come in, but few turn into clients.
• You inherited the account. A new marketing manager or a new agency needs to know what they are working with.
• You plan to scale. Before adding budget, you need to know the account can use it well.
• Google changed the rules. AI Max upgrades, the move from Display to Demand Gen and new conversion upload rules all arrived in 2026.
• You do not trust the numbers. If tracking looks wrong, every decision built on it is wrong too.

A Google Ads audit checks eight areas, from tracking to landing pages. Tracking comes first, because every other finding depends on it.

Area	What it checks	Common finding
Conversion tracking	Forms, calls, offline imports	Forms counted twice
Account structure	Brand vs non brand, one campaign per service	Every service in one campaign
Budget and bidding	Budget split, bid strategy	Best campaign limited by budget
Keywords	Match types, negatives, search terms	Broad match without negatives
Ads and assets	Headlines, assets, AI Max	Generated text never checked
Wasted spend	Networks, locations, non converting spend	Clicks from outside your area
Landing pages	Relevance, speed, forms	Ads sending traffic to the homepage
2026 changes	AI Max, Demand Gen, conversion uploads	New Google settings never reviewed

Sources: MagnifyLab audit findings. Google’s 2026 changes: AI Max, Demand Gen and conversion uploads.

Our PPC audit checklist breaks each area into individual checks you can work through.

What should a Google Ads audit report include?

A useful audit report gives you decisions, not just observations. It should include:

• Findings ranked by value. The fix that saves the most money comes first.
• Evidence for each finding. Screenshots, search terms or figures from your account, not general advice.
• Specific fixes. Which keywords to pause, which settings to change, which pages to rebuild.
• A baseline. Spend, leads and cost per lead before any changes, so you can measure the effect.

A score on its own is not an audit. If there is no ranked fix list with evidence behind it, you have a sales pitch.

Optimisation score is Google’s own rating of your account. Google describes it as “an estimate of how well your Google Ads account is set to perform”, scored from 0 to 100% (Google Ads Help).

It is a useful prompt, but it is not an audit. The score leans heavily on Google’s own recommendations, and those recommendations do not know what a client is worth to you. A Google Ads audit judges the account against your goals: cost per qualified enquiry, cost per client and return on spend.

Google also lets you dismiss recommendations that do not fit your campaigns. An audit tells you which ones to dismiss and why.

Most Google Ads audits find money leaking in three places: tracking, search terms and settings left on by default. The leaks look small week to week and add up fast.

Take a legal account. Across the legal campaigns we manage, the highest average CPC is £98.67, for work accident claims. Ten irrelevant clicks a week at that price is £986.70. Over a year, that is £51,308 spent on searches that were never going to become clients.

Other findings that come up again and again:

• Bidding on the wrong conversion. Smart Bidding chasing form fills when half are spam.
• Calls not tracked. Phone leads go unmeasured, so the best campaigns look weak.
• No offline import. Google cannot tell a signed client from a time waster.
• Defaults left on. Search partners, Display expansion and broad match running because they came switched on.
• Location set to interest. Ads showing to people who are interested in your area, not in it.

A Google Ads audit can cost nothing or run to £1,500 or more, depending on who runs it and how deep it goes.

Audit type	Typical cost	What you get
Free agency audit	£0	A review of your account, usually as the start of a conversation about management
Fixed price audit	From around £550	A written report and roadmap
Hourly audit	£100 to £200 an hour	A full review priced on time
DIY audit	Your time	The checklist, applied by your own team

Sources: Mind the Shop, 2026 (£550 marketing audit and 90 day roadmap) and TLC Ads, 2026 (£100 to £200 an hour for project work).

At £100 to £200 an hour, a one day audit of 7.5 hours costs £750 to £1,500. Our free Google Ads audit costs nothing and covers 15 checkpoints, using 90 days of account data.

A paid audit can still pay for itself quickly. One wasted spend finding like the £986.70 a week above would cover a £1,500 audit within two weeks.

Is a free Google Ads audit worth it?

A free Google Ads audit is worth it if it is specific. It should name the keywords, settings and pages to change, with evidence from your own account.

Be wary of free audits that stop at a score or a list of generic tips. A free audit is often the start of a sales process. That is fine, as long as the findings stand on their own whether you hire the agency or not.

If the audit leads to a management quote, our guide to Google Ads management costs shows what a fair fee looks like.

A first full Google Ads audit of an SME account takes a day or more of work by hand. Larger accounts with many campaigns, or accounts with broken tracking, take longer. Turnaround is a different number: our free audit report arrives within five working days of read only access.

Later audits are quicker. Once tracking is sound and a baseline exists, a quarterly review focuses on what has changed.

An auditor needs read only access to your Google Ads account, plus sight of your GA4 property and your lead records. Read only access lets someone view campaigns and run reports, but not edit campaigns or billing (Google Ads Help).

Never hand over your login details. Add the auditor as a user with read only access, and remove them when the audit ends. You keep full ownership of the account throughout.

If you work with an agency, check the account sits under your own ownership, not theirs. An audit is the right moment to confirm you own your data and your conversion history.

You can, with the right checklist and an honest eye. A DIY audit costs only time, and our checklist gives you the structure.

The risk is blind spots. The person who built the account is the least likely to spot its problems, and an in house team rarely sees how other accounts in the same sector perform.

• DIY suits you if someone manages Google Ads every week, you trust your tracking, and you can set aside a day for the review.
• An independent audit suits you if results have stalled, you inherited the account, or you are about to add budget.

Either way, write the findings down against a baseline, so you can measure what each fix changes.

Run a full Google Ads audit once a quarter, with lighter checks in between:

• Weekly. Search terms, budget caps, disapproved ads, spend pacing.
• Monthly. Cost per qualified lead against target, wasted spend, ad performance.
• Quarterly. The full audit, including a fresh test of tracking.

Also run a full audit when you change agency, launch a new service or see a sudden jump in cost per lead.