Free audit

Google Ads Audit

We audited a single Google Ads account covering nine years and $32,277,473 of spend across 507 campaigns. Two thirds of one campaign's conversions turned out to be the client's own brand name. We will run the same audit on your account, free, and show you what your dashboard is averaging away.

Request your free audit Read the $32M audit

What a $32M audit actually found

In August 2026 we were handed a Google Ads account that had been running since 2017. Blended cost per lead had drifted to $300–400 and the brief was to get it to $150. We pulled the whole ledger through the Google Ads API rather than reading the dashboard.

Lifetime spend	$32,277,473
Campaigns ever built	507
Campaigns still running	16
Clicks bought	7.62M
Conversions recorded	251,780

A campaign named Competitor (Exact) was reporting 286 conversions at $144 each. Respectable, on the overview. The search terms told a different story: 67% of those conversions came from queries containing the client's own brand name, converting at $64, while the genuine competitor traffic the campaign existed to capture ran at $336. Nobody was making decisions about a $144 campaign. They were making decisions about two campaigns and calling the average a strategy.

That is one finding of sixteen. The rest are published in full, with the numbers, in the $32M audit series.

Sixteen checks, every one of which found something

Brand leakage in non-brand campaigns

Close variants pull brand queries into competitor and generic campaigns, where they convert cheaply and flatter the blended figure. We split every campaign's search terms into brand and non-brand and recalculate cost per lead on both halves.

Conversion double-counting

We check whether a single lead is registering against more than one conversion action. In the audited account one form submission counted three times, and Target CPA was optimising toward the inflated number.

Conversion actions firing on pages anyone can reach

If your thank-you page returns 200 to a bot, your conversion count includes bots. It is a thirty-second test and it fails more often than it should.

Match type economics

Close-variant traffic cost 45% more per lead than queries that actually contained the keyword. We measure the premium you are paying rather than assuming phrase match behaves the way the documentation says.

Bid strategy against conversion volume

Target CPA needs roughly 30 conversions per campaign per month to work. Single-keyword ad groups give it two to eight. We check whether your structure and your bidding are compatible at all.

Experiments that never started

Five of seven experiments in the audited account sat in INITIATED for weeks. The failure is invisible in the interface and only surfaces through an API call.

Device and hour performance under smart bidding

Device bid adjustments are ignored under Target CPA. Mobile took 69% of budget at a 2.6% conversion rate while tablet converted at 5.0% on a twentieth of the spend.

The paused archive

507 campaigns built, 16 running. Three hundred proven exact-match keywords at $175 per lead were sitting paused while their replacements ran at $442 to $689.

Four steps, ten working days

STEP 01

Read-only API access

You grant read-only access to your Google Ads account. We never need edit rights to audit, and we never move campaigns into an agency account.

STEP 02

We pull the full ledger

Not a date-range export. Every campaign, ad group, keyword and search term back to the account's first dollar, straight from the API, so nothing is smoothed by the interface's default attribution window.

STEP 03

Findings with the numbers attached

Each finding names the campaign, the figure, and what it costs per month. No severity scores, no traffic lights.

STEP 04

A conversation about what to do

Some findings are a negative keyword list. Some are a restructure. We tell you which is which, including the ones not worth fixing.

What we will tell you that others won't

Most audits are sales documents. They find problems in proportion to how much the auditor wants the retainer. Ours is built on a series we published in full, including the findings that argue against our own commercial interest.

We will tell you when Performance Max is outperforming your Search campaigns, because in the audited account it produced leads at $114 against Search at $126 on 8% of the budget. We will tell you when your Google Ads management does not need changing. And we will tell you when a test you are planning cannot detect the effect you are hoping for: at a typical conversion rate and 420 clicks a day, proving a 25% improvement takes 66 days.

Where the account genuinely needs work, that is what our PPC management does next — but the audit stands on its own and you keep it either way.

Google Ads audit questions

What does the audit cost?

Nothing, for accounts spending $10,000 a month or more. Below that threshold the findings tend to be the same three things and you do not need us to tell you what they are — the sixteen posts in our published audit series cover them, free, in more detail than most paid audits.

Why the $10k minimum?

Because below it there is rarely enough conversion volume for the analysis to say anything statistically meaningful. We would be reading noise and charging you attention for it. The threshold is about whether the audit can produce a real answer, not about your budget.

Do you need access to my account?

Read-only access is enough. We never require edit rights to audit, and we never ask you to move your account into an agency MCC. If an agency asks for that before showing you anything, that is worth questioning.

How long does it take?

Ten working days from access being granted. Most of that is the analysis itself — pulling nine years of an account through the API and reconciling it takes longer than reading a dashboard, which is the point.

What if you find nothing?

Then we tell you that, and you have a documented second opinion on an account you were unsure about. It happens. It is a better outcome than a manufactured list of problems.

Is this just a sales pitch for management?

The audit is the deliverable and you keep it whether or not we work together. We publish our findings openly — the sixteen-part series on the $32M account includes the conclusions that cost us work, like Performance Max beating Search and most A/B tests being too small to run.

Get Started

Get your free Google Ads audit.

For accounts spending $10,000 a month or more. Read-only access, ten working days, findings with the numbers attached. No obligation and you keep the audit either way.

Built on the audit of a $32M Google Ads account

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