How often should you audit a Google Ads account?
Run a full audit when you take over an account, when performance shifts without an obvious reason, and at least once or twice a year on a stable account. In between, a short monthly check catches most problems before they get expensive.
The monthly check is small: conversion action status, the search terms report, change history and budget pacing. It takes about fifteen minutes. The full audit goes through structure, bidding, ads and assets, audiences, feeds and landing pages, and it's worth doing before any big decision.
Big decisions are the real trigger. Before you raise budget, switch agencies, launch a new site or change bid strategy, audit first. Raising budget on a leaking account just buys more of the leak. If a new site is coming, pair the audit with our site migration work so tracking survives the move. Our free audit fits these moments, and results come back within 48 hours.
Sources: Review your account history - Google Ads Help
What should I fix first after a Google Ads audit?
Fix measurement first, then the bid strategy, then wasted search terms, in that order. Every other change depends on the conversion data being true.
If conversions are double counted or the wrong action is set as primary, Smart Bidding is optimizing toward a false story, and any bid change you make sits on top of it. Once tracking is right, check that each campaign's bid strategy actually matches the goal you judge it by. Then add negatives for search terms that can never convert. That cleanup is free and should happen before you raise budget, or you're buying more of the same waste.
Read the audit score as a punch list, not a grade. The top critical issue is today's job. The long tail of warnings can wait a few weeks. Our audits rank every fix by impact and effort for exactly this reason. If tracking is the problem, a conversion tracking audit comes before anything else, and target changes come after, on the bidding strategy side.
Can a Google Ads audit tell me whether my current agency is doing its job?
Yes, and you can start before any audit by checking three things you can see yourself: who owns the account, whether change history shows steady real work, and whether reporting separates brand from non-brand. You don't need to be a PPC specialist to read any of them.
Ownership first. The account should be under your business, with your billing and at least one admin from your own company. The access and security page lists every user and manager account linked to it. Next, open change history. It records changes made in the interface, Google Ads Editor, the API and automated rules, and shows who made them. Weeks of nothing, or only budget edits, tells you a lot.
Then read the reports. If brand and non-brand are blended, a strong brand campaign can hide weak everything else. Ask how they handle negative keywords and at what conversion volume they turn on Smart Bidding. A good agency answers plainly. If the answers are vague, an outside audit costs you nothing, needs only read-only access and doesn't require telling anyone. If you want a new team after that, see our Google Ads management.
Sources: About access levels in your Google Ads account - Google Ads Help, Review your account history - Google Ads Help
What date range should a Google Ads audit cover?
Use the last 30 days against the 30 before for most accounts, and stretch to 60 or 90 days when conversions are low or the sales cycle is long. You want a sample big enough that one good or bad week doesn't decide the verdict.
Three adjustments matter. Leave out the most recent days still waiting on conversion lag; Google suggests excluding days where fewer than 90% of conversions have been reported, or the latest week will look worse than it was. Check change history across the window, so you know whether a bid strategy switch or budget cut explains a shift before you blame a campaign. And compare like with like. A holiday week against a normal week tells you about the calendar, not the account.
For seasonal businesses we also pull the same period last year. For structural checks like match types, negative coverage and missing assets, the date range matters less, because those settings are either right or wrong today. Buddy's 250 checks run on whatever range you give it, so pick the range before you read the score.
Sources: Test your bid strategy (accounting for conversion lag) - Google Ads Help, Review your account history - Google Ads Help
Can AI audit my Google Ads account?
Yes, an AI agent can run the mechanical part of an audit well, checking hundreds of settings across every campaign in minutes. What it can't do alone is judge which findings matter for your business.
That's how we split the work. Buddy, John's open-source AI agent for Google Ads, connects to the live account through the Google Ads API and runs the 250-point audit. You ask for it in plain English, on the web or in the Buddy by Ahmeego app for iOS and Android, and it comes back with a score and a short list of critical issues. Buddy asks before it changes anything and labels every change so it can be rolled back.
Then a strategist reads the results against your margins, goals and history. An automated check can flag a campaign with a CPA goal on the wrong bid strategy. It takes a person to know that campaign is your brand defense and should be left alone. To try the AI half yourself, the audit engine is on our tools page. For both halves, ask for the free audit, or read how we deploy agents in AI implementation.
