Google Ads accounts drift. You launch clean, then months of new keywords, match-type creep, added campaigns, changed landing pages and untouched negatives pile up. Waste accumulates quietly - a few dollars a day on queries you’d never bid on, a keyword that stopped converting, an ad dragging its group down. None of it screams. It just leaks.
A Google Ads audit is how you catch the leaks before they add up to a month of budget. This is a practical checklist you can run yourself this week. Work it in order - the sections are ranked by how much they matter and how fast they pay back. Be honest with yourself about one thing though: an audit only finds the leaks. Fixing them is the point. A list of problems you never action is just a nicely formatted way to keep wasting money.
1. Conversion tracking sanity - do this first
If your conversion tracking is broken, every other number in this audit is a lie. You’ll pause “losing” keywords that actually convert and pour budget into “winners” that don’t. Nothing else matters until this checks out.
What to look for: Open Tools > Conversions. Confirm your primary conversion actions have recent activity, that the counts roughly match reality (compare against your CRM, backend, or Shopify - not just Google’s own number), and that you’re not double-counting. Watch for conversion actions stuck at zero, “no recent conversions” warnings, or a suspicious flood of low-value conversions.
What bad looks like: Tracking that fired six months ago and went quiet after a site migration. Every form submit counted as a conversion including spam. Both “Purchase” and “Begin Checkout” set as primary, so one sale counts twice.
The fix: Repair or reinstall the tag, split primary vs secondary conversion actions so only real outcomes drive bidding, and add deduplication. Do not touch bids or pause anything until the numbers are trustworthy.
2. The search terms report - what you actually paid for
Broad and phrase match invite the long tail, and a chunk of it is junk: “free”, “jobs”, “diy”, the wrong intent entirely, competitor names, plain irrelevance. Every irrelevant click is budget you will not get back.
What to look for: Pull the search terms report for the last 90 days and sort by cost. Read the actual queries that triggered your ads, not the keywords you bid on. Flag anything with real spend and no conversions that has nothing to do with what you sell.
What bad looks like: A “free” or “how to” query near the top of your spend. A term with 40 clicks, meaningful cost, and zero conversions that clearly signals the wrong intent.
The fix: Add the bad ones as negative keywords so they can’t trigger your ads again. Add them at the ad-group level when the term is narrow, campaign level when it applies broadly. This is the single highest-leverage habit in Google Ads - do it weekly, not once.
3. Zero-conversion keywords
The classic leak. A keyword racks up clicks and real spend but never converts. Left alone, it just keeps draining the budget.
What to look for: Filter keywords to a meaningful click threshold - say 30-plus clicks - with zero conversions over the window. Those are your persistent offenders.
What bad looks like: A broad keyword with 60 clicks, $80 spent, and not one conversion sitting quietly in an otherwise fine ad group.
The fix: Pause the persistent offenders or tighten their match type from broad to phrase or exact. Give the surviving keywords the budget the dead ones were eating.
4. Weak ads dragging the group down
When an ad group runs several ads, the laggard soaks up impressions at a fraction of its siblings’ click-through rate - spending to underperform.
What to look for: Inside each ad group with two or more ads, compare each ad’s CTR against the ad-group average. Flag any ad running well below it, especially with high impression volume.
What bad looks like: An ad group where one RSA pulls a 2% CTR and another pulls 5%, yet the weak one still eats a third of the impressions.
The fix: Pause the clear laggards and let the winners take the impressions. Then write a fresh variant to test against your current best - ad testing is never “done”.
5. Keyword conflicts - negatives blocking your own winners
This one is invisible in the standard interface and it stings: a negative keyword you added months ago is now blocking a live keyword you actually want to run. You’re paying to have keywords that can never serve.
What to look for: Cross-reference your negative keyword lists against your active keywords. A negative can block a keyword by exact match, by phrase (word-boundary) match, or by broad (any shared word) match. The broad ones are the sneakiest.
What bad looks like: A campaign-level negative “cheap” silently suppressing your “cheap flights to X” keyword that you spent effort building.
The fix: Remove or narrow the offending negative, or move the live keyword. Keyword Ninja’s Conflicts detector finds these automatically with the exact/phrase/broad relationship spelled out. See the keyword conflicts guide for the full walkthrough.
6. Duplicate keywords across ad groups
The same keyword living in multiple ad groups makes your own keywords compete with each other. That inflates CPCs, splits your data, and hands Google a coin-flip on which one serves.
What to look for: The same text plus match type appearing in more than one ad group inside a campaign. Duplicate-intent, not just exact string matches.
What bad looks like: “running shoes” on phrase match in three ad groups, each with its own bid and its own ads, quietly bidding against itself.
The fix: Consolidate to the single best-performing ad group and remove the duplicates. Keyword Ninja flags duplicate-intent keywords for you so you don’t have to eyeball a spreadsheet.
7. Budget allocation vs performance
Budget rarely follows results on its own. Campaigns that earn get capped; campaigns that don’t keep spending out of habit.
What to look for: Rank campaigns by conversions and cost-per-conversion, not by spend. Find budget-limited campaigns that convert well and are being held back, and full-budget campaigns that convert poorly and aren’t.
What bad looks like: Your best cost-per-conversion campaign flagged “limited by budget” while a tired brand-adjacent campaign runs uncapped at triple the CPA.
The fix: Shift budget toward the constrained winners and cap or restructure the losers. Then recheck in two weeks - allocation is a dial, not a switch.
8. Location and schedule settings
Targeting settings misfire in ways that are easy to miss and expensive to ignore.
What to look for: Confirm location targeting is set to “presence” (people in your area) rather than “presence or interest” if you’re a local business, or you’ll pay for clicks from people merely searching about your city. Check ad schedule and device performance for hours or devices that spend without converting.
What bad looks like: A plumber in one city paying for clicks nationwide because the default interest-based targeting was left on. Heavy overnight spend on a B2B account nobody buys from at 3am.
The fix: Tighten location targeting to presence, and trim schedules or apply bid adjustments where the data justifies it.
How often should you audit?
- Weekly (15 minutes): search terms report and add negatives. This is the one that compounds.
- Monthly (an hour): zero-conversion keywords, weak ads, conflicts, duplicates, budget allocation.
- Quarterly (half a day): the full checklist top to bottom, including conversion tracking and targeting settings, plus a structural sanity check.
Set the cadence and keep it. Accounts that get audited on a schedule drift far less than accounts that get a heroic cleanup once a year.
The fast path: run a free audit in minutes
The manual checklist above is the real work and it always will be. But you don’t have to start from a blank spreadsheet. Keyword Ninja’s free audit connects to your account read-only - no credit card - analyzes the last 90 days, and returns a numbers-only report in minutes: total wasted spend, zero-conversion keywords, junk search terms, and weak ads. It’s the fastest way to see whether the leaks are worth your afternoon.
Be clear on the limits: the free audit is read-only and numbers-only, it looks at a 90-day window, and you can run one per account per week. It tells you where the money is going, not why every campaign is structured the way it is - that judgment is still yours. To go further - the Wasted Spend report with per-item savings estimates, the Conflicts detector, the search-term review deck, and daily anomaly alerts for cost spikes, CTR drops and conversion crashes - the free plan covers the core, and wasted-spend analysis is free on every plan.
Want the deeper reads? Start with 5 signs you’re wasting Google Ads budget, where your ad spend actually goes, and how to reduce your Google Ads costs.
An audit finds the money. You still have to go pick it up.
Run your free audit and see what your account is leaking.