How to Audit a Google Ads Account in 30 Minutes (Free Tool + Checklist)

The short answer

To audit a Google Ads account quickly, export two reports (a campaign report segmented by day and a search terms report), then check five things in order: conversion tracking, spend without conversions, CPA or ROAS against target, budget and rank limits, and wasted search terms. The free PPC Audit Tool runs all five checks in your browser and shows the exact rows behind every finding.

The order matters. If conversion tracking is broken, every CPA and ROAS number in the account is wrong, and any budget change you make based on them is a guess.

Step 1: Export the right two reports

Most audits go wrong before they start because the export is missing columns. Here is what to download from Google Ads.

Campaign report (segment by Day, last 30 to 90 days):

• Campaign, Campaign status, Budget
• Cost, Impr., Clicks
• Conversions, Conv. value
• Search impr. share, Search lost IS (budget), Search lost IS (rank)

Search terms report (no segment):

• Search term, Match type, Campaign, Ad group
• Cost, Clicks, Impr., Conversions

Google Ads downloads CSV files as UTF-16 with a report title and date range at the top and a "Total" row at the bottom. You don't need to clean any of that. The PPC Audit Tool detects the header row, reads the date range and drops total rows so they are not counted twice.

Why segment by day? Without daily rows, you can see that an account had 1,800 conversions last month but not that it had zero in the last four days. Daily data is what catches tracking breaks.

Step 2: Check conversion tracking first

There are two tracking failures to look for.

Spend with zero conversions across the whole account. This usually means the conversion action is inactive, was never imported from GA4, or the export used the wrong conversion column. It can also mean the account genuinely converted nothing, which is a different emergency.

A sudden drop to zero. The more common and more expensive failure: conversions arrive normally for weeks, then stop while spend continues. A website release, a consent banner change, a tag manager edit or an expired offline import can all cause it. The tool flags this as critical when conversions are zero for at least two consecutive days at the end of the period after a normal average beforehand.

What you see	Likely cause	What to check
Zero conversions for 1–3 recent days	Reporting lag, or a fresh break	Tag diagnostics, then re-check tomorrow
Zero conversions for 4+ days, spend normal	Tracking broke	Tag Assistant, GTM history, site releases, consent mode
Conversions but zero conversion value	Values not passed	Purchase tag value parameter, or lead values

When a tracking break shows up, the tool lowers the confidence of every other conversion-based finding from that file. That's deliberate: you should not act on CPA findings until tracking is fixed.

Step 3: Find campaigns spending without converting

Next, look for campaigns that spent meaningful money with no conversions. "Meaningful" needs a threshold, or every small test campaign gets flagged. The tool uses the larger of two numbers: twice your CPA benchmark (your target CPA, or the account average if you didn't enter one) and 5% of account spend.

Before pausing anything, ask what the campaign is for. A video or awareness campaign is supposed to buy reach, not conversions. The tool recognises names such as "Awareness", "Reach" or "Video Views" and downgrades those findings to low severity with a note. A competitor campaign with zero conversions, on the other hand, is usually just waste.

Step 4: Compare CPA and ROAS with your targets

Enter your target CPA and target ROAS for each platform before running the audit. Without targets, the tool can only compare campaigns with the account average, which tells you which campaigns are relatively worse but not whether the account is profitable.

Three findings come out of this step:

• Account CPA above target (more than 15% over). The impact estimate is spend minus conversions × target CPA, shown as a range because not all of it is recoverable.
• ROAS below target (more than 15% under). This uses platform-reported value. Reconcile it with your actual revenue before cutting budgets, because platform attribution and your order system rarely agree exactly.
• A campaign at more than 2× the account CPA while holding at least 10% of spend. This is where most budget can be reallocated.

Step 5: Separate budget limits from rank limits

Two campaigns can both "lose impression share" for opposite reasons:

Metric	What it means	Usual fix
Search lost IS (budget) high	The campaign runs out of money	Add budget, if its CPA is at or below average
Search lost IS (rank) high	Ads lose auctions on bid × quality	Improve ad relevance and landing pages before raising bids

The tool only suggests more budget for a budget-limited campaign when its CPA is at or below the account average. Raising budget on an expensive campaign just buys more expensive conversions. Even then, marginal conversions usually cost more than average ones, so test a 15–20% increase and watch for two weeks.

Step 6: Clean up wasted search terms

The search terms report shows what people actually typed. Look for terms that spent at least one full CPA without converting. In a typical account you will find:

• Free and DIY intent: "free", "giveaway", "how to make"
• Wrong product or service: "repair" for a shop that only sells new
• Jobs and education: "jobs", "salary", "course"
• Competitor brand terms you never meant to buy

The tool lists the top 15 by spend with their cost and clicks. Treat it as a review list, not an automatic negative list. A term can assist conversions without getting the last click, so check intent before adding it as a phrase or exact negative.

Step 7: Read the report like an auditor

Every finding has four parts:

• Severity: critical, high, medium, low or info.
• Evidence: the file, the rows (for example, a campaign name and date range) and the values used.
• Impact range: a low and high estimate with the method written out, so you can challenge it.
• Confidence: a score from 0 to 1 with reasons. It drops for small conversion samples, short date ranges, stale exports, missing columns and the tracking caveat above.

The report also lists what it could not check. If your export has no date column, it says the tracking-break check didn't run. A clean report from a thin export isn't a clean account.

A 30-minute audit schedule

Minutes	Task
0–5	Export the campaign (by day) and search terms reports
5–7	Drop both files into the PPC Audit Tool and enter targets
7–15	Fix or escalate any tracking finding first
15–22	Review high-CPA and zero-conversion campaigns with their purpose in mind
22–28	Build a negative keyword list from the search terms findings
28–30	Download the HTML report and note what to re-check next week

What an automated audit can't tell you

Automated checks are good at measurable problems. They don't know your margins, your sales cycle, which conversions are primary or secondary in your account settings, or whether Performance Max is cannibalising brand searches. Use the findings as a fast first pass, then apply judgement.

For deeper work, the open-source SpendSentry PPC agent for Claude Code adds AI analysis, budget planning and experiment design on top of the same checks, and it can't change your ad account unless you approve the exact change.

Privacy

Your exports contain campaign names, spend and search terms. The PPC Audit Tool reads them entirely in your browser; nothing is uploaded. You can confirm this by disconnecting from the internet after the page loads and running an audit.