Six pillars, twenty-five checks, thresholds for each, and the decision matrix that turns audit findings into a prioritized fix list. Written for agency owners and senior in-house managers, not first-week PPC hires.
A PPC audit is a structured review of a paid-search account across six pillars: account foundation, campaign structure, conversion tracking, bidding strategy, creative and ad copy, and landing-page UX. The goal is to surface waste, identify under-served high-intent traffic, and rebuild a prioritized fix list. Budget 60 to 90 minutes for the first pass on a mid-size account.
Done well, an audit will tell you exactly where the next $1,000 of ad spend should not go. It catches broken tracking, broad-match runaway, under-funded high-Quality-Score campaigns, attribution drift after a Smart Bidding migration, and the dead RSAs nobody refreshed since the last quarterly review. It builds a defensible memo you can hand a client (or a CFO) within two hours.
It will not tell you whether the offer is competitive, whether the sales team is closing the leads it gets, or whether the market just shifted under the account. Those questions need a different room and a different conversation. An audit finds the symptoms. The diagnosis still requires senior judgment.
1. New client onboarding. Day 1 to Day 3 of takeover, before you change a single bid. The audit produces a baseline snapshot and a 30-day fix plan that doubles as your "I read your account" credibility document. Time-box: 90 minutes. Anyone billing for a takeover and skipping this step is leaving findings on the table.
2. Quarterly health check. End of every quarter, on every account in the portfolio. Output is a delta-vs-last-quarter memo plus a prioritized backlog. Time-box: 60 minutes per account. If you cannot run a quarterly audit in 60 minutes, the audit framework needs simplification, not the account.
3. Performance crisis. A metric crossed a defined threshold. ROAS down more than 25 percent week-over-week. CPA up more than 40 percent. IS lost to budget over 30 percent in a category that was historically funded. Output: a root-cause memo plus same-day actions. Time-box: same day, 2 hours.
Less than quarterly is too rare; the account drifts faster than you notice. Monthly is overkill unless ad spend is over $50K per month or the account is in active crisis. Standardize on quarterly with crisis-trigger overrides.
Not every audit needs to be exhaustive. Match scope to trigger. A pre-call diagnostic does not need forensic depth. A QBR audit does not need same-day urgency. Use the three-tier menu below to right-size the work, then map the 25 master checks downstream.
| Tier | Trigger | Duration | Checks | Output |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quick | Pre-call diagnostic, new-prospect scoping | 30 min | 7 (Pillars 1 to 3) | 1-page memo |
| Deep | Quarterly health check on existing account | 60 to 90 min | 18 | Prioritized 30-day fix list |
| Forensic | Crisis: ROAS collapse, IS collapse, CPA spike | 2 to 3 hours | All 25 + drill-down | Root-cause memo, same-day actions |
The full 25-point checklist below feeds all three tiers. For Quick, run checks 1 through 7. For Deep, run 1 through 18. For Forensic, run all 25 and follow the anomalies wherever they lead. When a forensic audit reveals a sudden ROAS collapse rather than a structural issue, the ROAS dropped suddenly diagnostic covers the eight-step recovery path in depth.
Walk these in pillar order. Foundation first, because it gates everything downstream. Structure second, because misnamed campaigns waste the next two hours. Tracking third, because every bid decision rides on it. The remaining three pillars (bidding, creative, landing) only matter if the first three are clean.
An audit produces 20 to 40 findings on a typical account. Triage them. Not every finding deserves the same response. Use the 3-by-3 matrix below to decide what to do with each finding by severity and effort to fix.
| Severity | Quick fix | Medium effort | Strategic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Critical | Apply today | 30-day fix plan | Client call required |
| Important | 30-day fix plan | Backlog batch | Client memo at QBR |
| Nice-to-have | Backlog batch | Backlog batch | Drop unless asked |
Critical and Quick. Broken conversion tracking. A broad-match keyword with $300 spend and zero conversions in 14 days. Apply today; document the change in the audit log. No client call needed for a fix that prevents active bleeding.
Critical and Strategic. PMax structurally misconfigured. Attribution model change recommended. Cross-portfolio budget reallocation north of $20K. Schedule a client call. Do not unilaterally move tens of thousands of monthly spend, even when you have admin access. When the audit findings keep stacking up and the account is being actively managed by another vendor, the agency-readiness signals piece covers what to do with the client conversation that follows.
Important and Quick. Add five missing sitelinks. Fix one RSA stuck at Poor Ad Strength. Tighten geo targeting on one campaign. Batch all of these into a single 30-day fix list and send one client memo at month-end. Streaming 30 micro-updates over a month trains the client to ignore your communications.
If you run audits manually every quarter, you are rediscovering 70 percent of the same findings each quarter. The cadence per check matters more than the completeness per audit. Automate the recurring 18 checks. Keep human attention on the 7 strategic checks.
Implementation options range from native Google Ads automated rules (spend anomalies, IS breach) and free Google Ads scripts (search-terms-waste, daily anomaly) to third-party tools like Optmyzr or Adalysis for the rolling 18-check rhythm. The 7 strategic checks stay manual because their answers depend on context that a tool cannot infer: client tolerance for risk, season-specific budget shifts, sales-team feedback loops. The Quality Score deep guide covers when a low Quality Score is the symptom vs the disease, and that distinction still needs a human.
Automating the recurring checks does not replace senior judgment. It frees senior judgment for the work that actually requires it.
How long should a PPC audit take? A Quick audit is 30 minutes. A Deep quarterly audit is 60 to 90 minutes. A Forensic crisis audit is 2 to 3 hours. Anything claiming "comprehensive audit in 15 minutes" is either a sales pitch or a shallow check; both are fine, neither is an audit.
What's the difference between a PPC audit and an account review? An audit is a structured pass against a checklist with thresholds and a fixed scope. An account review is a freeform look at performance, often driven by a client question. Audits produce a defensible memo; reviews produce a conversation. You need both.
How often should I audit a Google Ads account? Quarterly is the standard cadence. Monthly is overkill below $50K per month spend. Crisis-triggered audits override the cadence: a ROAS drop over 25 percent or CPA spike over 40 percent triggers a same-day forensic audit regardless of the calendar.
What's the single most important PPC audit check? Conversion-tracking variance against the source-of-truth (Shopify, Stripe, CRM). If revenue reported in Google Ads disagrees with the source-of-truth by more than 15 percent over 7 days, every downstream metric is suspect and every bid decision rides on a wrong number. Fix tracking first.
Can I automate a full PPC audit? No. You can automate the recurring 18 of 25 checks (the threshold-driven ones). The remaining 7 are strategic and depend on client context, sales-team feedback, and offer competitiveness. The right phrase is "automate the rhythm, keep the judgment."
What are the most common findings in a first-time PPC audit? Across the accounts we onboard, the top five recurring findings are: missing or partial enhanced conversions, broad-match keyword waste over $500 per month, RSA Ad Strength stuck at Poor on top campaigns, missing extensions on at least half of campaigns, and a Smart Bidding strategy applied to a campaign with under 15 conversions per month. All five are fixable in under a week.
Vox runs a cross-campaign budget audit weekly. It finds the misspent percentage, proposes a trailing-28-day reallocation, and waits for your approval. One click and the spend follows the QS plus volume signal, not the original budget assumption.
Maximus orchestrates 18 of the 25 recurring checks on a Monday-morning cadence. It surfaces only the deltas: what crossed a threshold this week that was clean last week. The 7 strategic checks stay on your quarterly calendar. The math works out to roughly 7 hours back per account per quarter.
Aegis (Risk review) catches the audit findings that turn into crises if ignored: conversion-tracking variance crossing 18 percent, IS lost to budget crossing 30 percent, search-terms waste compounding past $500 per week. Escalations are pushed within 24 hours, not at quarter-end.
Connect Google Ads, let Vox, Maximus, and Aegis run the 18 recurring checks for you. The 7 strategic checks stay on your quarterly calendar where they belong. See pricing tiers for Co-pilot, Approval, and Autonomous modes.
Start B6 Free Trial