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Google Ads audit: how to check your own account

By Abhishek Thakral · abhi.performs, Dubai · Updated October 2026 · 9 min read

Some Google Ads audit checklists online run to 90 points. For a UAE business that sells over the phone, on WhatsApp or in a showroom, a handful of those decide whether the account works at all, and the conversion setting comes first. If the account counts the wrong thing as a conversion, every other number in it is misleading.

This is the self-check I use when someone asks me to look at their account: an owner who is not sure what the agency is doing, or a marketing manager who has just inherited an account. It needs read-only access and a free afternoon, and you do not need to change anything while you do it.

What a Google Ads audit should answer

A useful Google Ads account audit answers three questions: are you counting real business results, is money going where you would choose, and are the leads followed up? Everything else is detail.

Ask whoever runs the account for Read-only access. Google's access levels let a Read-only user view campaigns and run performance reports, but not edit campaigns, so you cannot break anything by accident. While you have the access screen open, check who holds Admin access. It should include someone in your business, not only your agency.

Write down what you find and leave the fixes until the end. Changing settings halfway through makes the rest of the audit harder to read.

Step 1: read the change history

Google's change history lists the changes made to your account, campaigns and ad groups over the past 2 years: budgets, paused campaigns, added keywords and who made each change. Open it under Campaigns, then Change history, and filter by date and type of change.

You are looking for three things:

• Who works on the account. If nobody has changed anything in two months, nobody is actively working on it, whatever the invoice says.
• Changes made by Google. Recommendations applied automatically show up here too, which leads into Step 3.
• Big changes before a bad month. A budget cut, a new bid strategy or a paused campaign often explains a drop in leads better than any theory about the algorithm.

Step 2: check what Google counts as a conversion

Google bids only on primary conversion actions: they fill the "Conversions" column, while secondary actions sit in "All conversions" for observation only, according to Google's conversions summary help page. Open Goals, then Conversions, then Summary.

For each goal, look at which actions are set to Primary. In lead-gen accounts I often find page views, button clicks or "contact page visits" counted as conversions. Each one tells Smart Bidding to find more people who do that, and none of them is a lead.

Then check three more things:

• Account-default goals. A goal set as an account default is added to every campaign that uses the default settings. One wrong action here affects the whole account.
• The Status column. Hover over it. Google's help page says "Inactive" or "Needs Attention" often points to a tag that is misconfigured or missing from the site. "No recent conversions" is not always a tracking error and can come from low traffic.
• What happens after the form. If your sales close offline, Google only sees the form-fill. Sending qualified leads and deals back is covered in my guide to Google Ads offline conversion import.

Step 3: find the settings Google switched on for you

Google Ads can apply some recommendations automatically, including ones that widen where your ads show, such as broad match keywords, search partners and Display expansion. Google lists them on its auto-apply help page. Check this before you judge the campaigns.

Open Recommendations and look at the auto-apply settings, then the History tab. Auto-apply is set for the whole account and can be switched off at any time. The ones I look at first in a lead-gen account:

• Add broad match keywords and Add keywords. New keywords nobody chose.
• Expand your reach with Google search partners and Use Display expansion. Your Search budget can end up on other sites. Google now has a middle option for partners, which I cover in Search Partners channel controls.
• Adjust your CPA targets. Your targets can move without anyone in your business agreeing.

Then open each campaign's location settings. Google's location options page says "Presence or Interest" is the default, which also reaches people who have only shown interest in your area. Dubai draws a lot of searches from abroad, so a clinic or local service is often better on "Presence", people in or regularly in your locations. An off-plan developer selling to overseas investors may want the default.

Do not fix this by excluding cities. I once excluded a handful of weak cities in a profitable clinic's Search campaign and watched ROAS fall from 3.5x to 1.4x, and it only came back when I removed them. The full story is in my location exclusions mistake.

Last, check whether AI Max is on in your Search campaigns. Google turns it on by default in new ones, and it changes which searches and pages your ads use. My guide to AI Max for Search campaigns covers what to check.

Step 4: read the search terms report

The search terms report shows the actual searches that triggered your ads and what they cost. Open Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms, and set the date range to the last 90 days.

Sort by cost and read the top of the list. Turn on the "Keyword" column, which Google does not show by default, to see which of your keywords matched each search. You are looking for searches you would never pay for: jobs, free, courses, DIY, competitors' names if you did not choose to bid on them, and services you do not offer. If most of the waste comes from broad match keywords, read broad match vs exact match before you change every keyword.

Two things to know before you add negatives:

• Not every search is shown. Google leaves out search terms without enough query activity, for privacy. The report is a sample of where the money went, not the full list.
• Negatives do not cover close variants. Google's negative keywords page says you need to add synonyms and singular or plural forms yourself. In the UAE that also means the Arabic version of a word if you run Arabic ads.

Words you never want, such as "jobs" or "salary", belong in an account-level negative list, which Google applies to all eligible Search and Shopping inventory in the account.

Step 5: follow one lead from click to WhatsApp

No report in Google Ads tells you what happens after someone fills in your form, so test it yourself. Submit an enquiry on your own landing page, or on a Google lead form if you use one, and time what happens next.

• Where did the lead go? Into your CRM, an inbox someone reads, or a spreadsheet nobody opens?
• How fast did anyone reply? In the UAE, a WhatsApp message within minutes beats an email two days later.
• Was the lead marked? Can you tell later whether it became a booking or a sale? Without that, Step 2 cannot be fixed.

If the leads themselves are poor, look at the form before the campaign. Adding a qualifying question is often the quickest fix, as in my guide to qualifying questions on Google Ads lead forms.

Why optimisation score is not a Google Ads audit

Google's optimisation score page defines it as an estimate of how well your account is set to perform, and says you can reach 100% by applying or dismissing all recommendations. Dismissing counts the same as applying.

So a 100% score tells you someone has dealt with every recommendation. It does not tell you the account counts the right conversions or reaches the right people. I treat a high score as neither good nor bad news. When an agency reports it as proof of good management, ask what was dismissed and why. The same goes for Google Ads Quality Score: Google calls it a diagnostic, not a KPI.

Google Ads audit checklist: the fix order

Fix problems in the order below, because each fix makes the next one easier to judge. Change one thing at a time and give it a couple of weeks before you read the result.

1. Make sure you own the account. Admin access for someone in your business.
2. Fix the primary conversion. A real lead, a qualified lead or a booked consultation, never a page view.
3. Turn off auto-apply recommendations you would not have chosen yourself.
4. Set the location option for each campaign: "Presence" for local services, the default only when overseas buyers are real customers.
5. Add negatives from 90 days of search terms, with plurals, synonyms and Arabic versions.
6. Fix lead handling: every lead into the CRM and a WhatsApp reply within minutes.
7. Send qualified leads back to Google Ads so bidding learns from outcomes, not form-fills.

Once the account is sound, make sure you can follow it each month: see what a good monthly PPC report should show.

If you would rather have someone run this with you, it is the first thing we do in Google Ads management.

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