Google Ads Audit Checklist: Where the Budget Leaks

I have managed about USD 4 million in Google Ads spend, cumulatively, on the HungerStation and LINE Live projects. The leaks were rarely exotic. They sit in the same few places, and most can be checked in an afternoon. This is the order I check them in.

Where does a Google Ads account usually leak budget?

In eight places: conversion tracking, search terms, match types, Performance Max, location and language settings, the brand and non-brand split, landing pages, and the bidding strategy. The first one decides whether the other seven can be judged at all.

What should count as a conversion?

Only an action that a salesperson or the bank account would recognize: a purchase, a submitted lead form, a qualified call. Google Ads separates conversion actions into primary and secondary. Primary actions are reported in the "Conversions" column and used for bidding. Secondary actions appear in "All conversions" and are not used for bidding, unless they are placed in a custom goal.

That distinction is where the damage starts. If a page view, a scroll or a click on the WhatsApp icon is set as primary, automated bidding will go and find more of it, cheaply, and the report will show a falling cost per conversion while the sales team sees no change.

Which searches am I actually paying for?

The search terms report answers this, and it is the fastest place to find waste. A keyword is what you chose to target. A search term is what the person typed.

Match types set the size of the gap between them. Exact match shows ads on searches with the same meaning or intent as the keyword. Phrase match shows them on searches that include the keyword's meaning. Broad match, the default, can reach related searches that do not contain the keyword's direct meaning. Broad match is not wrong in itself; broad match with weak conversion data and no negative keywords is. Sort the report by cost, read the top 100 terms, and add the irrelevant ones as negatives: job seekers, free downloads, competitors' support lines, cities you do not serve.

Can I see what Performance Max is doing?

More than you could before, and many accounts have not used it yet. Performance Max now has its own search terms report, showing the searches that triggered its ads, and a channel performance report that splits results across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, Maps and search partners. Negative keywords can be applied to a Performance Max campaign for its Search and Shopping inventory.

Two things to look for: how much of the campaign's volume comes from searches for your own brand name, and whether one channel takes most of the spend while another brings most of the conversions.

Are my location and language settings wasting money?

They can, quietly. The default location option in Google Ads is "Presence or interest," which reaches people in the target area and also people elsewhere who have shown interest in it. "Presence" limits the ads to people who are in the area or regularly there. A clinic in Riyadh or a training center in Amman that can only serve people on the ground should make that choice deliberately instead of inheriting the default.

On language, check that the campaign's language targeting, the ad text and the landing page match. In Jordan and Saudi Arabia the same customer may search in Arabic one day and English the next, so running in one language only should be a decision, not an accident.

Why split brand from non-brand?

Because they are two different kinds of demand, and blending them flatters the account. Someone who searches for your company name was already coming to you. Someone who searches for the service is the new demand you are paying to win. When both sit in one campaign, the cheap brand conversions pull the average cost down and hide what a new customer really costs. Separate them and judge the account mainly on non-brand.

What about landing pages and bidding?

Check the landing page on a phone, on mobile data, from the ad itself. Does the page repeat what the ad promised? Does the form work? Does the WhatsApp button open with the right number?

For bidding, compare the strategy with the number of real conversions feeding it. A target cost per acquisition set on a campaign that records only a handful of conversions a month will swing from week to week, and owners then change it weekly, which makes it worse. If the volume is that thin, consolidate campaigns or use a simpler strategy until there is enough data to judge.

The step most audits skip: what happened to the lead?

Follow it into the CRM. An audit that stops at cost per lead has checked the cheaper half of the system. Take last month's leads from each campaign and mark how many were reached, how many were qualified, and how many bought. A campaign with the lowest cost per lead and no sales is the largest leak in the account, and nothing inside Google Ads will show it.

Once that link exists, it can be sent back. Google Ads supports offline conversion imports, which match a later sale to the original ad click through the Google click ID (GCLID), and Google now recommends enhanced conversions for leads for the same purpose. Bidding then learns from customers, not from form fills.

What to do this week

1. Open the conversions summary and list every primary action. Move anything that is not a sale or a real lead to secondary.
2. Read the top 100 search terms by cost for the last 30 days and add negatives.
3. Open the two Performance Max reports and note the share of brand searches.
4. Check the location option on every campaign.
5. Pull last month's leads by campaign from the CRM and write the number of sales next to each.