6 Google Ads Audit Questions Every Head of Growth Should Ask

When you’re measuring a search ad’s performance, every dollar counts, both in terms of monthly spend and revenue earned. However, most enterprise-level accounts leave revenue on the table due to inefficient campaigns, poor tracking, and misallocated budgets.

The solution isn’t a bigger budget or a creative shake-up; it’s about asking the right Google Ads performance questions during strategic reviews. In asking these six audit questions, you can turn costly flaws into opportunities for growth. 

Why Regular Google Ads Audits Are Essential for Growth

The downside of managing enterprise-level Google Ads budgets is that small problems become expensive fast. When you’re spending big money every month, a poorly structured campaign or broken tracking can cost tens of thousands in wasted spend. Conducting regular audits can help you catch these issues before they drain your budget.

The best part about auditing high-spend accounts is that improvements scale with your budget. For instance, you fix a 10% inefficiency in a $10,000 account, saving $1,000. Fix the same issue in a $100,000 account and you save $10,000. These results mean even small improvements in major accounts can turn into significant savings. Similar to one of Socium’s core values, 1% better every day, small compounding gains can really play an impact as your budget grows.

On the other hand, ignoring problems also scales with your budget. Conducting regular audits isn’t fun, but problems compound quickly when you don’t do them, worsening the situation. For example, you may be wasting spend on unrelated traffic. In other cases, broken conversion tracking can lead to poor optimization decisions. Budget flows to underperforming campaigns while high performers stay limited. 

While this may sound like doom and gloom, these issues are preventable with the right paid search audit strategies.

6 Essential Google Ads Audit Questions

1. Are Campaigns Structured for Maximum Efficiency?

Your Google Ads campaign structure determines everything else. A poor structure makes optimization harder, wastes money, and stymies growth. 

In this case, the question isn’t if campaigns are running, but whether they’re set up to scale. That’s because structure controls how you allocate budget, measure performance, and make strategic decisions across your entire account. 

A smart structure means organizing campaigns around your business rather than Google’s automated suggestions¹. Grouping campaigns by profit margins, customer types, or seasons makes it easier to allocate money where it matters most and optimize based on real results.

Now, look at your campaign names and ad groups. Can you quickly determine which campaigns bring the biggest customers? Can you easily move money from weak performers to strong ones? If not, your structure needs work. Good structure makes decisions easier, not harder².

2. How Accurate is Your Conversion Tracking?

Tracking accuracy makes or breaks your entire account. Bad Google Ads conversion tracking leads to poor decisions based on an incomplete view of customer behavior. Unfortunately, this results in wasted money and missed chances. When Google’s algorithms optimize based on incorrect data, they make the wrong bidding and targeting choices throughout your account. 

Of course, the bigger your account, the more complex the customer journey gets. They might research on mobile, compare on desktop, and buy in-store. You might also be unclear on what counts as a conversion action, meaning demo and appointment requests or gated content downloads might be in the mix when you only want to look at completed purchases³. The problem is that the standard Google Ads conversion tracking often misses these nuances, painting an incomplete picture of what works.

Common tracking problems include duplicate codes, wrong time windows, and tracking meaningless metrics instead of actual sales. You want to find an agency (like ourselves) who can audit existing conversion tracking set-ups and provide clear recommendations and action-steps. 

3. Is Your Budget Optimally Allocated Across Campaigns?

Budget allocation in big accounts isn’t about spreading money evenly. Instead, it’s about putting dollars where they’ll drive the most growth. Many accounts have strong campaigns that need more budget, while weak ones get too much. This misallocation happens because marketers often set budgets once and forget about them, rather than adjusting based on performance data.

Working with an MMM tool or an incremental tool will help identify what ROAS targets you should try to hit that will ultimately funnel back down to the greater goal. Usually, you want to find a balance between attracting new customers while remaining profitable on a first-order basis.

Timing and location matter, too. It’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy, so some campaigns work better at certain times of year or in specific markets⁴. Smart budget allocation adjusts for these patterns and moves money when and where it will be the most effective. 

4. Are We Effectively Leveraging Audiences and CRM Data?

Generic targeting works for generic results, and that’s perfectly fine when you’re dealing with smaller accounts. However, it’s a different story when you’re handling enterprise accounts, which need sophisticated audience strategies. If you’re not using your CRM data in Google Ads, you’re missing out on major opportunities.

Existing customers are goldmines for audience creation. Upload customer lists for remarketing and develop “lookalike audiences” based on your best customers⁵. Recent buyers don’t need to be convinced, so feel free to exclude them from acquisition campaigns.

These strategies improve both efficiency and customer experience by applying your budget to people who haven’t purchased yet while avoiding the annoying “buy now” ads to customers who have already converted.

Go beyond basic demographics. Depending on audience sizes uploads, try to create audiences based on purchase history, lifetime value, or engagement levels. Remember to target premium customers differently from price-conscious shoppers. This personalized approach drives better results than one-size-fits-all campaigns.

5. Are Negative Keywords Managed Strategically?

This may sound like a strange term, but there are “negative keywords” out there, yet they actually provide a positive service⁶. Negative keywords tell Google which searches should never trigger your ads, which saves you money on irrelevant traffic from people who aren’t going to convert. For example, if you sell premium hats, you don’t want ads showing for “discount hats” searches. 

The bigger your account, the more this waste costs, so strategic negative keyword management becomes essential. That’s why it’s important to run regular search term analyses to see what’s triggering your ads and make sure your budget isn’t being wasted. Look for patterns in irrelevant searches and add smart negative keywords to block them. 

That said, you still need to be careful not to go overboard with exclusions, since too many negative keywords or negative lists that overlap too much with regular keywords can block legitimate traffic and limit growth opportunities¹.

To stay on top of things, it’s best to review search terms weekly to catch new waste. Create negative keyword lists that apply across relevant campaigns so you don’t have to add the same exclusions repeatedly, which can become tedious. With that out of the way, you can simply monitor performance to ensure you’re blocking waste without blocking growth.

6. Do We Have the Most Strategic Google Shopping and PMAX Setup?

Performance Max (PMAX) and traditional Google Shopping campaigns are related but ultimately serve different purposes. In fact, choosing the right one impacts how much control you have over your ads and budget. 

PMAX is Google’s automated solution that shows your products across all Google properties, while traditional Google Shopping campaigns provide control over bids, keywords, and targeting down to the granular level⁷.

PMAX works well when you have a large product catalog and prefer Google to handle most decisions automatically. It will find new customers across YouTube, Gmail, Search, and other Google sites, and you won’t have to be too hands-on with it. However, there are two main drawbacks: limited insight into what’s working and less control over where your budget goes.

Traditional Shopping campaigns require a more hands-on approach, but you’ll have more detailed insights to drive your strategy and control over ad placements. You can see which products and search terms drive sales; adjust bids by product category; and fine-tune when and where ads appear. These controls are particularly beneficial when managing profit margins or focusing on specific products.

Choose your setup based on your team’s capacity, profit margins, and how much control your business requires.

Using Audit Insights to Drive Strategic Decisions

Your Google Ads audit checklist only works if you act on it. Focus on changes that impact revenue the most and are easiest to implement.

Then, connect your audit findings to bigger business goals because you can’t just optimize for Google Ads metrics. There are customer acquisition costs, lifetime value, and overall profit to also consider. Accounting for these factors helps ensure your paid search audit strategies support real growth.

Remember to establish regular audit schedules with monthly reviews for quick fixes. Save the big changes for quarterly reviews. Document your findings and track changes over time. This approach sounds extensive, but it turns auditing into an advantage that builds over time.

If you’re not sure what to do with the findings from your Google Ads audit or need help getting started, let’s talk.

FAQ

Why is accurate conversion tracking often overlooked in audits?

Conversion tracking setup can be technically complex, leading teams to assume accuracy without validation, causing poor strategic decisions based on faulty data.

When should we choose Performance Max (PMAX) over traditional Google Shopping?

PMAX is advantageous for brands aiming for automation-driven scale, while traditional Shopping campaigns offer greater manual control, ideal for nuanced product strategies. It also depends on your goals and if you’re chasing new customer acquisition or revenue.

How often should I review negative keywords?

It depends on your client size and campaign lifecycle. Early-stage campaigns should be monitored closely and frequently—daily or every few days initially—to quickly eliminate waste. 

Once stabilized, weekly reviews generally suffice to maintain efficiency.

What’s the ideal mix between keyword match types? 

This varies based on your campaign’s conversion volume and overall scale. Larger brands with ample conversion data can effectively leverage broad match keywords, providing Google with sufficient signals for optimization. Smaller brands or those with lower conversion volumes should rely more heavily on exact match to maintain precise control and cost efficiency.

Sources

1. How to audit a Google Ads account: the ultimate PPC audit checklist. Adalysis. Retrieved on June 21, 2025, from https://adalysis.com/how-to-audit-a-google-ads-account-the-ultimate-ppc-audit-checklist-2021/
2. Roche, J. (1 January 2025). How to Do a Google Ads Audit in 2025—9 Things You Can’t Miss. JRR Marketing. Retrieved on June 21, 2025, from https://josiahroche.co/blog/how-to-do-a-google-ads-audit/
3. Morgan, M. (8 August 2024). 6 Google Ads Conversion Tracking Mistakes to Avoid (At All Costs!). Wordstream. Retrieved on June 21, 2025, from https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2023/02/08/google-ads-conversion-tracking-mistakes
4. Reji, R. (4 February 2025). How to Conduct a Google Ads Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide (+ Checklist). Optmyzr. Retrieved on June 21, 2025, from https://www.optmyzr.com/blog/google-ads-audit/#6-fine-tune-your-budget-allocation-and-bidding-strategies
5. Use Lookalike segments to grow your audience. Google Ads Help. Retrieved on June 21, 2025, from https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/13541369?hl=en
6. Silva, C. (2 February 2024). Negative Keywords: What They Are & How to Use Them. SEMRush. Retrieved on June 21, 2025, from https://www.semrush.com/blog/negative-keywords/
7. (January 2023). Get better results across All Google Ads channels with Performance Max campaigns. Google Ads. Retrieved on June 21, 2025, from https://business.google.com/us/resources/articles/benefits-of-performance-max/