Your Google Ads account is spending money every day and you have no way to tell whether it is being run well. Reports show impressions and clicks going up, which proves nothing, and the agency running it is also the one grading it. An audit answers the question independently, and most of the checks are ones you can run yourself before paying anyone.
What an audit costs and what you get
A one-off Google Ads audit costs £500 to £1,500 in Manchester, takes a week or two, and produces a written assessment you keep whoever you hire afterwards.
That makes it the cheapest useful thing to buy in paid search, and the only practical way to compare agencies on something other than a pitch meeting. It is also a fraction of what ongoing management costs. Several firms on our shortlist of the best Google Ads agencies in Manchester sell one as a defined product rather than as a free sales call, and the distinction matters. A free audit is a sales document. A paid one is a deliverable with the auditor's name on it.
Ask to see the last anonymised example before you buy. Quality varies enormously, and a good audit reads like an argument about your business rather than a checklist exported from a tool.
The eleven checks
1. Are conversions actually being tracked correctly
Everything downstream is built on this, and it is wrong more often than any other single thing.
Open Tools, then Conversions. Look at what is listed as a primary conversion action. If page views, add-to-carts, form starts or "engaged sessions" are in there, every number in every report is inflated and the bidding is optimising towards the wrong event.
You want one or two genuine business outcomes marked primary. Everything else should be secondary and observational.
2. Are conversion values real
An account optimising to conversion count treats a £12 order and a £900 order as the same event. Smart Bidding will duly go and buy more £12 orders, because they are cheaper and it was told to maximise the count.
Check whether values are passing through, and whether they reflect revenue or margin. Margin is better. A high-revenue, low-margin product line can consume a budget profitably on paper and unprofitably in reality.
3. Is brand traffic separated
Search on your own company name. If those clicks sit in the same campaigns as everything else, the blended return on ad spend looks excellent and tells you nothing, because people searching your brand were going to find you anyway.
Ask to see performance with brand excluded. If the agency cannot produce that view within a day, it has not been looking at the account the way you need it to be looked at.
4. What is the search terms report actually showing
Reports, then Search terms. This is the single most revealing screen in Google Ads and the one clients look at least.
You are reading for irrelevant queries you are paying for. A plumber paying for "plumbing courses" and "plumber salary" is common and entirely avoidable. Look at the spend column, not the impressions.
5. Are there negative keywords at all
Directly downstream of the last check. An account with a handful of negatives after a year of spend has not been actively managed. A well-run account accumulates them continuously, usually in shared lists applied across campaigns.
6. Is Performance Max eating the brand budget
Performance Max hands targeting and placement to Google in exchange for conversion data. Run without brand exclusions, it finds the cheapest conversions available, and the cheapest conversions available are people searching your company name.
Check for brand exclusions on Performance Max campaigns and a separate brand search campaign running alongside. If the account is entirely Performance Max with no search campaign, that is a finding on its own.
7. What state is the product feed in
For any retail account, the feed decides more than the bidding does. Titles, product types, GTINs, image quality, availability accuracy and the custom labels used for segmentation.
Open Merchant Center and read the diagnostics. Disapproved and expiring products are lost revenue that no bid adjustment recovers. Google's own Merchant Center product data specification is the reference for what the fields should contain.
8. Do the ads match the landing pages
Take three ads at random and click them. If the ad promises next-day delivery and the page does not mention it, or the ad names a product and the page is a category listing, you are paying full price for a click and then losing it.
This is the cheapest fix in most accounts and the one most often left to the client. If your landing pages are the constraint rather than the ads, that is a web design problem wearing a paid media costume.
9. Is the account structure legible
You should be able to look at the campaign list and understand the business from it. Campaigns split by what actually differs: product line, margin, location, intent.
Structures organised around nothing in particular, with everything in one campaign or 60 campaigns of two keywords each, both make budget control impossible.
10. Are ad extensions in use
Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call and location assets. They are free, they increase the space your ad occupies, and Google factors asset quality into Ad Rank. An account without them is leaving click-through rate on the table for no reason.
11. What does the change history show
Tools, then Change history. Set it to the last 90 days.
This is the honesty check. It shows you exactly how much work has happened in the account and when. Long silences broken by a burst of activity three days before a reporting call is a pattern you can see for yourself, and no report will tell you about it.
If conversion tracking is wrong, every other finding is unreliable, because every optimisation decision for the whole period was made against bad data. Start there. It is also the finding most likely to explain why performance never matched the reports.
What a good audit adds that you cannot
The eleven checks above are the mechanical layer, and a competent owner can work through them in an afternoon. What you are paying an auditor for is the part that requires judgement:
Benchmarks. Whether a 4% conversion rate is good depends entirely on your sector, and someone who has seen forty accounts in it knows.
Wasted spend, quantified. Not "there is some waste" but "£1,840 of the last quarter went on queries that cannot convert, here they are."
A sequenced plan. Fifteen problems is not useful. Three problems in priority order with an estimated impact on each is.
An opinion on the agency. An auditor who has read the change history and the account structure can tell you whether the incumbent is competent, lazy or out of their depth. That is frequently the real question behind the purchase.
When not to bother
If your account spends under about £1,000 a month, an audit will find real problems and fixing them will not move enough money to justify the fee. Read through the eleven checks yourself and fix the obvious ones. At that budget, hiring a freelancer rather than an agency is usually the better next step too.
If you already know you are changing agency, most of the PPC agencies in Manchester will audit the account as part of pitching. Take the free version, and treat it as a sales document rather than an assessment.
And if the actual problem is that nobody knows what a customer is worth, no audit helps. That number is upstream of every decision in the account, and it is the one thing an auditor cannot work out for you.
We research the Google Ads agencies working in Manchester and rank the ones worth paying. Independently researched, re-checked quarterly, free to read.
See the ranked list
Key takeaways
- A paid Google Ads audit costs £500 to £1,500 and is the cheapest way to compare agencies on real work.
- Check conversion tracking first. If it is wrong, every other finding and every past decision rests on bad data.
- Brand traffic must be separated before any return on ad spend figure means anything.
- The search terms report and the change history are the two screens that reveal most, and clients look at them least.
- Performance Max without brand exclusions will spend your budget on people already searching for you.
- For retail, the product feed decides more than the bidding does.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a Google Ads audit take?
One to two weeks for a thorough one. Anything delivered within a day is a tool export with a cover page. The analysis that makes an audit worth paying for, reading the search terms, checking the feed, reconstructing what happened from change history, takes a person several hours at minimum.
Should I use a free audit?
Take it, but understand what it is. A free audit is a sales document produced by someone who wants the account, so it is structured to find problems the incumbent caused and that the auditor can fix. It is still useful, particularly if you get two of them and compare where they agree.
Can I audit my own account?
The mechanical checks, yes, and the eleven above will take an afternoon. What you cannot do yourself is benchmark your numbers against a sector, or judge whether the account structure is unusual for a business like yours. That is what the fee buys.
What is the most common problem auditors find?
Conversion tracking that counts the wrong thing, usually by a wide margin. Add-to-carts marked as primary conversions, form views counted as submissions, or the same conversion firing twice. It is common because it is invisible from the reports, which continue to look fine.
Will the audit tell me if my agency is any good?
A good one will, indirectly. The change history shows how much work has actually been done and when. The account structure shows whether anyone has thought about the business. Whether negatives have accumulated shows whether the search terms report is being read. Those three together answer the question.
How often should an account be audited?
Annually for a stable account, or whenever performance changes without an obvious cause. Also before renewing a retainer, and always before changing agency, because it gives you an independent baseline of the account's condition on the day it changed hands.
Does an audit include implementing the fixes?
Usually not, and you should check. An audit is a diagnostic. Implementation is a separate engagement, and some auditors deliberately do not offer it so the findings cannot be accused of being a sales pitch for their own services.
What should the audit document actually contain?
A summary of account health, quantified wasted spend with the queries listed, findings ranked by impact, specific recommendations with an owner and an estimated effort against each, and the raw data behind the conclusions. If it is mostly screenshots of tool outputs, ask for the analysis.
Is Performance Max always a problem?
No, but it needs the right inputs. It works when conversion tracking is accurate, values reflect real margin, the feed is clean and brand is excluded. Run on top of a broken account it will confidently find the cheapest conversions available, which is usually your existing customers.
What if the audit says the account is fine?
That is a useful answer and worth the fee. It means the problem is somewhere else, most often the offer, the margin, the landing page or the market, and you have ruled out the most expensive place to keep looking.
