Most wasted ad spend hides in the same handful of places. Work through this checklist top to bottom — or paste your account and let the grader flag the gaps for you.
A Google Ads audit isn't about touching everything — it's about finding the few settings quietly draining budget. This checklist is ordered by impact: structure and wasted spend first, then relevance, then the copy and tracking that decide whether good traffic converts.
Mixed-intent campaigns make budgets and bids impossible to control. Search, Display, and brand should never share a campaign.
Limited-by-budget on a profitable campaign is lost revenue. Shift spend from underperformers first.
Display's cheap, low-intent clicks otherwise eat the budget meant for high-intent search.
Without negatives you pay for irrelevant searches — the single biggest source of wasted spend.
The search terms report shows what people actually typed. Mine it for negatives every week.
Keywords that spend without converting are a tax on the account. Pause or rework them.
Tight ad groups let you write ads that match the keyword, which lifts Quality Score and lowers CPC.
Query-to-ad relevance is a direct Quality Score input and improves CTR.
A mismatch between ad and landing page hurts Quality Score and conversion rate at once.
Thin asset sets cap Ad Strength and give Google nothing to optimize.
Average or Poor usually means too few or too-similar assets.
Extensions add free real estate and lift CTR; missing them is leaving clicks on the table.
Optimizing toward a broken or vanity conversion wastes the whole budget chasing the wrong signal.
Counting every page view or click as a conversion makes the data useless for bidding.
A light review weekly (search terms, budget pacing, negatives) and a full audit monthly or quarterly. The checklist above works for both — run the top sections weekly and the full list monthly.
Yes. This checklist costs nothing, and Jupitron's Google Ads grader runs an automated pass over your setup and flags the gaps — also free, no account required.