Tracking and results8 min read

The 20-minute Google Ads audit for small businesses

You do not need an agency to find the most common problems in a Google Ads account. Set a timer, open your account and work through these nine checks in order. The first one matters most: if tracking is wrong, every other number is too.

Before you start

Set the date range to the last 30 days, or 90 days if the account is small. Have a note open for things to fix. Do not change anything during the audit; list first, fix afterwards, one change at a time.

1. Conversion tracking (4 minutes)

Go to Goals and open your conversion actions. Look at the status column for each one.

• Unverified means the tag has not fired yet. Normal for a brand-new action; a problem after a few days.
• Inactive or Needs attention usually means the tag is missing or misconfigured. Google’s Tag Assistant helps you trace it.
• No recent conversions can be fine. It means the tag is seen but nothing was recorded recently.

Then ask three questions. Is each action something you actually want: an enquiry, a call, a booking, a sale? Are only those set as primary, so bidding optimises to them? And is anything counted twice, for example a form tracked by both a Google Ads tag and an imported Analytics goal?

Finally, compare the last month’s conversions with your own records. If Google says 60 enquiries and your inbox says 25, fix that before anything else.

2. Search terms (4 minutes)

Open Insights and reports → Search terms. This report shows the real searches that triggered your ads, not your keywords. Sort by cost.

Look down the top 50 rows and mark anything that could never become a customer: jobs, free, DIY, a competitor’s name you do not want, a service you do not offer, a town you do not cover. Some low-volume searches are hidden for privacy, so you will not see everything, but most spend is usually visible.

If you run Performance Max, check its search terms too. Google added a search terms report for Performance Max campaigns, found in the same Insights and reports area.

3. Negative keywords (2 minutes)

Take the list from step 2 and check it is covered by negative keywords. Look at three places:

• Campaign and ad group negatives.
• Shared negative keyword lists, and whether they are actually applied to each campaign.
• Account-level negatives, which apply to all Search and Shopping inventory, including Performance Max.

A common gap: a negative list exists but a newer campaign was never added to it. Remember that negative keywords match differently from normal keywords, and do not cover close variants such as plurals or misspellings. Add those yourself.

4. Match types (2 minutes)

Open Keywords and add the match type column. Google offers three: broad, phrase and exact. Broad is the default and reaches the widest range of related searches. Exact gives the most control.

Broad match can work well with Smart Bidding and good conversion data. Without them, it often drifts. A simple rule for small budgets: if your tracking is weak or your search terms report was full of junk, lean on phrase and exact until both are fixed.

Also look for keywords with spend but no conversions over the period. They are candidates to pause, but check their search terms first.

5. Location settings (2 minutes)

Open each campaign’s Settings → Locations. Check two things.

First, the areas. Are they the places you actually serve? A radius drawn years ago may no longer match your delivery or travel area.

Second, the location options. The default is Presence or interest, which shows ads to people in your area and to people who have shown interest in it. Presence limits ads to people likely to be in or regularly in your areas. For a local service business that cannot serve people elsewhere, Presence is usually the safer choice. Then check the locations report to see where clicks actually came from.

6. Budget pacing (2 minutes)

Your daily budget is an average, not a hard cap. Google can spend up to twice your average daily budget on a given day, but no more than 30.4 times it over a month. So a £20 or $20 daily budget can spend £40 or $40 on a busy day, and up to £608 or $608 in a month.

Check three things:

• Does 30.4 times your daily budgets, added up, match what you mean to spend each month?
• Are any campaigns marked Limited by budget? If they are your best performers, they may deserve money from weaker ones.
• How much of this month’s spend has gone already, compared with how far through the month you are?

7. Ads, ad strength and assets (2 minutes)

Open Ads. Each responsive search ad can have up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and Google rates it from Poor to Excellent with Ad strength. Ad strength measures variety and relevance, not results, so treat it as a guide. Still, an ad with a handful of near-identical headlines is worth fixing.

Check the ads say what makes you different: price, speed, area, guarantees, reviews. Then look at Assets. Sitelinks, callouts, a call asset if you want calls, and a location asset for local businesses all make your ad bigger and more useful. Check that phone numbers and opening hours are current.

8. Landing pages (1 minute)

Click through from your top two or three ads on your phone. Does the page match the search and the ad? Does it load quickly? Is the phone number tappable and the form short? Does the form actually submit? A broken form wastes every click that reaches it.

9. Automatic changes (1 minute)

Open Recommendations and check whether auto-applied recommendations are switched on. Some can add keywords, change bidding or adjust ads without you. That may be fine, but you should know which ones are on. You can review the queue and turn each type off.

After the audit: fix in this order

1. Broken or duplicated conversion tracking.
2. Wrong locations and obvious wasted searches.
3. Budget settings that do not match your monthly plan.
4. Match types, ads and assets.
5. Landing page fixes.

Make one change at a time where you can, and note the date. Automated bidding can take a week or two to settle after a big change, so judge results over weeks, not days.

Making it a habit

A one-off audit catches the big problems. The small ones come back: new junk searches every week, spend running ahead of the month, a form that stops working after a website update. Most accounts benefit from a quick check every week and this full audit once a month.

If you would rather not do it by hand, that is the work AdsEye’s AI ads specialist, Max, does every day. He reviews each campaign against your goal each morning, keeps spend on pace hourly, runs eight tracking checks scored out of 100 and pauses a platform’s campaigns at 97% of its monthly budget until the 1st. Bigger decisions wait for your yes. Results vary, and no tool can promise them.