The 30-Minute Ad Account Audit That Could Save You Thousands
Three settings in your Google Ads account reveal whether your PPC agency is optimising or coasting. Here is how to check.
Graeme is the founder and principal consultant at Strathmark Consulting. With over a decade of experience across agency, contracting, and in-house roles for major international brands, he advises leadership teams on digital strategy, agency oversight, and marketing infrastructure across the UK, US, UAE, and Europe.
Why Most Ad Accounts Leak Money
Google Ads is an extraordinarily powerful platform. It is also extraordinarily easy to waste money on. The default settings are designed to maximise Google's revenue, not yours. And most agencies — even competent ones — leave critical settings on default because changing them requires vigilance, not just setup.
Over the past decade, I have audited hundreds of ad accounts across industries ranging from financial services to e-commerce to professional services. The same mistakes appear with depressing regularity. Not because the people managing them are incompetent, but because the platform is designed to make overspending the path of least resistance.
Here are the three areas you can check in under 30 minutes — without any specialist knowledge — to determine whether your spend is being managed properly.
1. The Search Terms Report
This is the single most revealing diagnostic in any Google Ads account. Navigate to Keywords → Search Terms and look at what people actually typed before clicking your ad.
What to look for
- Irrelevant queries: If you sell enterprise software and you see search terms like "free project management tool" or "what is CRM," you are paying for clicks from people who will never buy. Every one of those clicks costs real money.
- Competitor brand terms: Unless you have a deliberate conquest strategy, appearing on competitor brand terms is typically expensive and low-converting. If your agency has not explicitly discussed this with you, it is likely happening by accident.
- Negative keyword freshness: Check the last time negative keywords were added. If it has been more than 30 days, your account is leaking. Search behaviour evolves constantly. An account that is not adding negative keywords weekly is an account that is paying for waste.
The real cost
In a typical B2B account spending £15,000–£30,000 per month, poor search term management wastes 15–30% of total spend. That is £2,250–£9,000 per month — or up to £108,000 per year — going to clicks that could never convert.
2. Location Targeting Settings
This is the most commonly misconfigured setting in Google Ads, and it is buried in a place most advertisers never look.
Go to Settings → Locations and click into the advanced options. You will see a targeting option that reads either:
- "Presence or interest" (the default) — This shows your ads to people in your target location AND people who have shown "interest" in your location. In practice, this means someone in another country searching about your city will see your ad.
- "Presence" — This shows your ads only to people physically located in your target area.
Why this matters
If you are a local or regional business, the default "presence or interest" setting can mean 20–40% of your clicks come from people who are nowhere near you. A solicitor in Manchester does not want to pay £15 per click from someone in Singapore who searched "Manchester law firms" out of curiosity.
I have audited accounts where changing this single setting reduced cost per acquisition by 35% overnight. Not through clever strategy. Just by stopping the account from showing ads to people who could never become customers.
How to check
Run a geographic performance report for the past 90 days. If you see significant spend from locations outside your service area, the setting is wrong. This takes two minutes to verify and two clicks to fix.
3. Conversion Tracking Configuration
This is the most consequential setting of all, because it determines what the platform optimises toward. If your conversion tracking is misconfigured, every automated bidding decision Google makes is based on bad data.
The common failure
Navigate to Tools → Conversions and look at what actions are being tracked as primary conversions. In a well-configured account, you should see:
- Form submissions (contact, demo request, quote request)
- Phone calls of meaningful duration (typically 60+ seconds)
- Purchases or transaction completions
In a poorly configured account — which is the majority — you will also see:
- Page views counted as conversions
- Button clicks counted as conversions
- Scroll depth or time on site counted as conversions
- Newsletter signups weighted equally to purchase completions
Why this is catastrophic
Modern Google Ads runs on automated bidding strategies — Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximise Conversions. All of these use machine learning to optimise toward your defined conversion actions. If "page view" is a conversion, the algorithm will optimise for page views. It will find you the cheapest possible clicks from the least qualified visitors, because that is what you told it to do.
Your CPA will look fantastic. Your pipeline will be empty. Your agency will show you a report full of "conversions" that are actually just people landing on your thank-you page from an organic search.
The Broader Pattern
These three checks are diagnostic, not therapeutic. They tell you whether your account is being managed with care, but they do not fix the underlying problems. Those require deeper work: restructuring campaigns, rebuilding conversion tracking, implementing proper attribution.
But they serve a critical purpose. They give you — the person writing the cheques — enough information to ask the right questions. And in my experience, agencies that are doing good work welcome scrutiny. The ones that deflect, obfuscate, or respond with jargon are the ones with something to hide.
What to Do With What You Find
If your account passes all three checks, your agency is probably competent. Continue to monitor quarterly.
If it fails one, raise it with your agency and give them 30 days to correct it. Mistakes happen.
If it fails two or more, you have a structural problem. The account is not being managed — it is being maintained. There is a meaningful difference, and it is costing you money every day it continues.
Whether you bring in an independent auditor, switch agencies, or build internal capability, the status quo is not a neutral option. An underperforming ad account does not just waste money. It actively trains Google's algorithms on bad data, making recovery harder the longer it continues.
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