The PPC Audit We Actually Run: The Production Checklist With Real Findings From $12.5M+ Managed

A working PPC audit checklist runs in a strict order: conversion data quality first, budget control second, waste elimination third, bidding signal fourth, creative and assets last. The order is the whole trick. Negative keywords do not matter if the data deciding what "converts" is noise. Tuning a bid strategy is pointless when the strategy is optimizing toward scroll events.

This is the checklist our audit system runs in production, not a listicle written for a keyword. We manage 64+ active Google Ads accounts for 50 billing clients, with $3M+ in ad spend managed per year and $12.5M+ in advertising managed since 2016. In June 2026 we ran this audit across our whole portfolio at once: a point-in-time scan of 60 active accounts, layered on top of conversion-health snapshots covering 68 accounts and a search-term collector that has swept our accounts weekly since mid-March. What follows is each check, what we pull for it, how often it finds a problem, and real anonymized findings with the dollar amounts attached.

Where these numbers come from

A few denominators show up below, so here is the honest accounting. "X of 60" figures come from the portfolio-wide scan we ran on June 2, 2026. "X of 68" figures come from our latest per-account conversion-health and asset snapshots, which include a few house and inactive accounts. The landing-page and account-access checks come from companion audit collectors that have covered 64 and 66 accounts so far. Search-term waste figures come from our collector's flags between March 19 and May 25, 2026, deduplicated by account and term. Every example is real and lightly genericized: "a church Grant," "a home-services paid account." No client names, ever.

One more disclosure: our portfolio skews nonprofit. 35+ of our accounts run the Google Ad Grant, so the two Grant checks below are marked as "if you run Ad Grants" items. Everything else applies to any account spending real money.

The 15-point PPC audit checklist

#	Check	How often we find a problem
1	Conversion actions measure real outcomes, not engagement	Conversion-action clutter in 35% of accounts; most damaging finding when present
2	No overlapping actions double-counting one lead	Common in nearly every deep conversion audit
3	Conversion tracking exists at all	Occasional, catastrophic when found
4	Enhanced Conversions enabled	Missing in 79% of accounts
5	No enabled campaigns recording zero conversions	43% of accounts
6	Every landing page tagged and reachable	All 64 accounts our landing-page auditor has covered so far
7	Impression share lost to rank vs budget, diagnosed before any budget change	47% of scanned accounts were rank-limited; 7% were budget-capped winners
8	Ad Grants: full use of the $10,000 monthly credit	Roughly half of Grant accounts underspending
9	Ad Grants: no campaign over the $329/day cap	Occasional; tops the fix list when present
10	No spend on zero-conversion search terms	87% of accounts
11	No disapproved-ad clusters suppressing delivery	23% of accounts
12	No dark or zombie campaigns	23% of accounts
13	Bid strategy matches the goal	Rare; mostly accounts unmanaged for years
14	Assets, extensions, and PMax components complete	Asset gaps in 53% of accounts
15	Account access hygiene	75% of accounts have at least one access finding

Phase 1: Conversion data quality (checks 1-6)

Everything in a Google Ads account is downstream of its conversion data. Smart Bidding spends your money toward whatever the account calls a conversion. If that definition is wrong, the machine works hard at the wrong job. So we start here, always.

1. List every conversion action and ask what it actually counts

Pull the full list of conversion actions and check which ones are set as Primary. The failure pattern: engagement events, 30-second page views, 90% scroll depth, driving-direction clicks, set as Primary and biddable. The account "converts" constantly while the bidding algorithm optimizes toward noise.

Real finding: a Grant account showed 175.95 conversions on 231 clicks, a 76% conversion rate, because page-view and scroll events were counted as conversions. Another logged 1,352 conversions on roughly 392 clicks, spread across 38 separate conversion actions. In our latest snapshots, 24 of 68 accounts (35%) had 10 or more conversion actions configured. The fix costs nothing: demote engagement events to Secondary, and keep form submissions, calls, and purchases as the only Primary actions. We hold ourselves to that standard portfolio-wide, which is why the 2,000+ leads, calls, and purchases we report each month are counted strictly, with no page views and no micro-conversions.

2. Hunt for overlapping actions counting one lead several times

One user behavior should fire one Primary conversion. In practice, accounts accumulate trackers over the years and nobody retires the old ones. In one deep audit we found five call-shaped conversion actions enabled at once: a website phone-click action, a forwarded-call action, a legacy tel-link click, and a duplicated legacy "Calls from ads" pair with 5-second and 10-second count thresholds, so a single tap-to-call could land in several of them at the same time. The same audit found the account valuing an appointment form submission at $10 while a plain tel-link tap carried $40, and the identical form action in its sister account carried $50. Every report and every bid decision in that account was built on noisy, self-contradicting data.

3. Confirm conversion tracking exists at all

It sounds too basic to check. Check it anyway. In our latest snapshots, 10 of 68 accounts had zero active conversion actions, which means bidding has literally nothing to optimize toward. One was a home-services account that spent over $5,000 in the prior 30 days. This finding is catastrophic when it lands on an account spending real money, and it is always the first fix.

4. Check Enhanced Conversions

Enhanced Conversions sends hashed first-party data alongside the conversion, improving match rates and the signal Smart Bidding learns from. In our latest snapshots, 54 of 68 accounts (79%) lacked it. That is four out of five audits. It is usually a one-time setup task that pays back on every conversion afterward.

5. Find enabled campaigns recording zero conversions

29 of 68 accounts (43%) had at least one enabled campaign with zero conversions recorded over 30 days. One church Grant had 8 enabled campaigns at zero, including all five of its city-targeted local campaigns. The reflex is to call those campaigns failures and pause them. Usually the truth is duller: a conversion-goal mapping or tracking-coverage gap, where the campaign produces outcomes the account never records. Diagnose before you pause.

6. Walk the landing pages

Every ad's destination needs three things: it loads, it has the tag plan on it, and it gives the visitor something to do. All 64 of the accounts our landing-page auditor has covered so far had at least one landing-page tracking or quality finding. Not most. All of them. Real examples: a multi-page microsite where zero of the five audited pages had Google Tag Manager installed, and an account with four unreachable landing pages, including its appointment-request page. Ads were buying clicks to a door that did not open.

Phase 2: Budget control (checks 7-9)

7. Pull impression share lost to rank vs lost to budget before touching any budget

This is the single most useful diagnostic in the audit, because the two readings prescribe opposite fixes. The largest cluster in our scan, 28 of 60 accounts (47%), was stuck at roughly 10% search impression share with about 90% of impressions lost to Ad Rank and nearly zero lost to budget. Raising budgets there does nothing; the fix is Quality Score work, tighter ad groups, and better ads.

The inverse case is rarer and more fun to fix: budget-capped winners. 4 of 60 accounts (7%) had campaigns with proven, acceptable CPAs being throttled by budget. One paid account was losing about 76% of its impression share to budget at roughly $33/day on campaigns that were converting fine; others were losing 29% to 37%. That is growth sitting on a shelf, and the fix is a budget line, not a rebuild.

8. If you run Ad Grants: check utilization of the $10,000 credit

The Google Ad Grant gives eligible 501(c)(3) nonprofits $10,000 per month in free search advertising. The audit question is simple: how much of it is actually being used? In our scan, 17 of 35 Grant accounts were spending under $8,000 of the credit, and 7 were under $5,000. The worst case we found was a Grant account spending $58 of its $10,000.

Here is the part most checklists miss: underspending is almost never a budget-settings problem. In 21 of 60 scanned accounts the root cause was the rank floor described in check 7, so raising campaign budgets changed nothing. The unspent credit is a keyword and Quality Score problem wearing a budget costume. That diagnosis is the foundation of how we run Ad Grant management.

9. If you run Ad Grants: check every campaign against the $329/day cap

Grant policy caps each campaign at $329/day. A campaign budgeted above that is a standing policy violation that risks suspension of the entire $10,000 monthly credit. We found a PMax campaign at $400/day and another campaign at $394.80/day, both inside otherwise healthy, converting accounts. It only appears occasionally, but when it does, it goes to the top of the fix list, because compliance failures zero out everything else.

Phase 3: Waste elimination (checks 10-12)

10. Pull search terms with spend and zero conversions

This is where audits earn their keep in hard dollars. Between March 19 and May 25, 2026, our search-term collector flagged 8,706 unique search terms with spend and zero conversions across 55 of our 63 accounts (87%), roughly $343,000 in cumulative flagged waste, averaging about $39 per term. Treat that total as directional rather than annualized, but the per-account pattern is consistent: nearly every audit finds money riding on queries that have never converted.

Real examples: one church Grant was flagged for $630 on "sermon audio" and $484 on "what is the sinner's prayer," all with zero recorded conversions. One pregnancy clinic paid for clicks on "free baby products"; another kept paying for "gynecologist" searches that never converted. Broad-match leakage lives in this bucket too; irrelevant query families riding broad keywords show up as zero-conversion terms long before anyone notices the match type. The fix is negative keywords, applied weekly, not once at launch. We published a full breakdown of what 1.3 million search-term rows taught us in our search terms study.

11. Check for disapproved-ad clusters

Single disapprovals are routine. Clusters silently strangle delivery. 14 of 60 accounts (23%) had disapproved ads at scan time. The worst case: 10 of 14 enabled ads (71%) disapproved in an account's core campaigns, leaving its highest-value campaigns barely able to serve despite $4,600/month of spend. Another account had half its ads disapproved. Nobody inside those accounts had been alerted, because Google does not exactly shout about it.

12. Find the dark and zombie campaigns

Enabled does not mean running. 14 of 60 accounts (23%) had campaigns that were switched on and delivering nothing: zero impressions or zero spend over 30 days. Causes we found included paused budgets, over-restrictive targeting, billing issues, and leftover $1/day budgets. One paid account delivered $0 and zero impressions over 30 days with ads enabled. Another had 4 of its 7 campaigns at zero impressions. A third ran a $1/day zombie search campaign alongside its working channel for no reason anyone could remember.

Phase 4: Bidding signal (check 13)

13. Confirm the bid strategy matches the goal

Manual CPC still running on lead gen, or Target Impression Share applied where conversions are the goal, both mean the account is steering with the wrong instrument. This finding is rare in our data, one or two accounts out of 60, and it concentrates in accounts that have gone unmanaged for years. But the cost is real: one paid account's lone Manual CPC campaign was converting at roughly a $193 CPA while losing 60% of its impressions to rank. The fix was moving to conversion-based bidding, which is only safe once checks 1 through 6 have made the conversion data worth bidding on. That sequencing is the reason this check sits at number 13 and not number 1.

Phase 5: Creative and assets (check 14)

14. Audit assets, extensions, and PMax completeness

36 of 68 accounts (53%) had asset gaps: campaigns short on image assets, sitelinks below the four-per-campaign minimum, missing callouts, or no structured snippets. PMax has its own failure modes, and every one of the 29 accounts running PMax in our snapshots had at least one: an asset group missing its logo, business name, and final URL all at once; campaigns below image minimums; PMax running fully unguided with no audience signals. These are the cheapest fixes on the list, and they compound, because assets feed Ad Rank, and Ad Rank was the binding constraint in nearly half the accounts we scanned.

The housekeeping check most audits skip

15. Account access hygiene

The lowest-severity item on the list and still worth two minutes: 50 of the 66 accounts in our access audit (75%) had at least one access finding. One account had zero users with direct access, meaning no human could manage it. Another had 5 pending access invitations older than 30 days. Several had exactly one admin, which is one departure away from an orphaned account. Whoever audits your account should also tell you who can get into it.

How to run this on your own account

You can work this list yourself in an afternoon. Go in order. Phase 1 is the part most owners skip because it is the least visible, and it is exactly where the expensive problems live; if you only do one phase, do that one. If you want the shorter symptom-first version, we also keep a list of the seven Google Ads mistakes we see most often in new accounts.

Or have us run it. Our free growth audit runs these checks against your account with the same collectors we use on our own portfolio, the ones that produced every number in this post. You get the findings with dollar amounts, in plain English, whether or not you ever hire us. If you do want help fixing what it finds, our Google Ads management runs month to month with published pricing, no contracts.

Frequently asked questions

What should a PPC audit checklist include?

Five layers, in order: conversion data quality (are the conversions real outcomes or engagement noise), budget control (including impression share lost to rank versus budget), waste elimination (search terms, disapproved ads, zombie campaigns), bidding signal (does the bid strategy match the goal), and creative and assets. Finish with account access hygiene. The order matters because every downstream check depends on clean conversion data.

What is the most common problem found in a PPC audit?

In our portfolio data, the most widespread findings are landing pages outside the tag plan (every one of the 64 accounts our landing-page auditor has covered had at least one tracking or quality finding) and missing Enhanced Conversions (79%). The most damaging finding when present is engagement events counted as primary conversions. One account we audited showed a 76% conversion rate because page views and scroll events were being counted as conversions, and Smart Bidding was optimizing toward that noise.

How much wasted ad spend does a PPC audit find?

Our search-term collector flagged 8,706 unique search terms with spend and zero conversions across 87% of the accounts we manage over roughly ten weeks in spring 2026, about $343,000 in flagged waste, averaging about $39 per term. That figure is directional and specific to our portfolio, but the pattern holds: nearly every account has money riding on queries that have never converted.

How often should you audit a Google Ads account?

Run the full audit when you take over an account and roughly once a year after that. Run the lighter checks on a schedule: search terms weekly for the first 90 days, conversion tracking verified monthly with a test lead, and disapproved ads and budget caps on a daily automated scan if you have one. Most of the expensive findings in our data sat unnoticed for months because nobody had scheduled the check.

What does a Google Ad Grant audit check that a regular PPC audit does not?

Three Grant-specific items: utilization of the $10,000 monthly credit (about half the Grant accounts we scanned were spending under $8,000 of it), the $329 per-day per-campaign budget cap, and the 5% minimum click-through rate rule. Underspending is usually a Quality Score and Ad Rank problem rather than a budget problem, so the fix is tighter keywords and better ads, not bigger campaign budgets.