What a Real PPC Audit Covers — and the Five Things a Free One Skips

A PPC audit should end with a decision about money: what to stop paying for, what to fix before spending more, and what to measure differently. If it ends with a score out of 100 and a list of settings to tidy, it audited the account’s housekeeping, not its economics.

This guide is for growth leads at B2B SaaS and fintech companies who want to run that kind of audit themselves, or check one someone else ran. It covers the method in the order money moves through a Google Ads account, then the five checks free audits tend to leave out, and closes with a checklist you can work through this week.

Every statement below about Google Ads’ own rules and features links to Google’s help page for it, checked on October 6, 2026.

What a PPC audit is actually for

A PPC audit is a structured review of a paid search account that answers one question: is the spend producing the outcome the business needs, and if not, where does it break? Whether you call it a PPC audit, a paid search audit or, in the older vocabulary, an AdWords audit, the work is the same.

Settings, structure and ad copy all matter, but only as causes. The effect worth auditing is whether a dollar of spend turns into pipeline. An account can follow every best practice and still lose money, because it is optimizing toward the wrong signal. An untidy account can be profitable.

For B2B companies the gap between those two is often structural. A sale takes weeks or months, and the ad platform sees only the start of it. A lead form fires a conversion in Google Ads today; the contract it produced might be signed next quarter. Most of what follows is about closing that distance, and about finding the wasted ad spend that hides inside it.

How to run a Google Ads audit, in the order the money moves

A Google Ads audit works best in the order money flows through the account: the signal it bids toward, where the clicks come from, how campaigns are built to buy them, what the ads and pages say, and whether the account is allowed to keep running at all.

Fix the earlier layers first. A cleaner keyword list helps nothing if bidding is aimed at the wrong conversion. The same order applies whether the account belongs to a SaaS company or a fintech; our SaaS PPC and fintech PPC pages set out how we run each kind once the audit is done.

1. Start with the conversion signal

Open the conversions summary under Goals and list every conversion action. Google splits them into two kinds. Primary actions are reported in the Conversions column and used for bidding, as long as the goal they belong to is used for bidding; secondary actions are for observation only and appear in the All conversions column, unless they sit in a custom goal (Google Ads Help, primary and secondary conversion actions). Google’s page warns that misconfiguring this can prevent Smart Bidding from optimizing effectively.

Ask one question of each primary action: if this number doubled tomorrow, would revenue follow?

• A demo request or a qualified lead usually earns its place as primary.
• A newsletter signup, a pricing-page view or a scroll event counted as primary pulls bidding toward cheap, low-intent traffic.
• Anything you want to watch but not buy belongs in secondary.

2. See where the spend actually goes

The search terms report shows the real searches that triggered your ads, and, once you switch on the Keyword column, which of your keywords matched each one (Google Ads Help, search terms report). Sort it by cost, not by clicks, and read the top of the list as your buyer would. Every irrelevant term with spend against it is a negative keyword you have not added yet.

One limit to know: Google omits search terms without enough query activity, under its data privacy standards. The report may not explain all of your spend at search-term level, so note the share of cost it does explain before drawing conclusions from it.

3. Check structure and bidding against the goal

Next, look at how campaigns are built. Do brand and non-brand terms share a budget? Are match types doing what you think they are? Does the bid strategy suit the amount of conversion data the account actually has?

Google notes that Smart Bidding strategies need a learning phase of 7 to 14 days, and that changes to budgets, targets or conversion goals during that period reset the learning window (Google Ads Help). An account whose targets change every few days may never have finished learning.

4. Read the ads and landing pages together

An ad makes a promise and the landing page has to keep it in the first screen. Check that each ad group’s message matches the page it sends traffic to, that the page loads quickly on mobile, and that the form asks for no more than your sales team needs.

For financial products, also check disclosures. Google’s financial products and services policy says required disclosures cannot sit in roll-over text or behind another link or tab; they must be clearly and immediately visible without needing to click or hover (Google Advertising Policies Help, financial products and services).

5. Confirm the account’s standing

Finally, check Policy Manager for disapproved or limited ads, and check the account’s verification status. An account that loses its right to advertise in a market loses everything above it. For financial services that is a country-by-country question, covered in the next section.

The five things a free PPC audit skips

A free audit has to be quick to be free, so it reads what the account shows on the surface: settings, optimization score, ad strength, missing assets. That is useful, but none of it tells you whether the spend produces revenue.

The five checks below take longer and need access beyond Google Ads, which is why a quick audit tends to leave them out. Ask whether any audit you are handed covered them.

1. Whether a “conversion” is revenue

Google Ads records the form fill. It does not know whether that lead became a customer unless you tell it. The mechanism is offline conversion import: Google Ads gives every ad click that reaches your website a unique Google Click ID (GCLID), you store it with the lead, and when the lead converts offline, for example by signing a contract, you send the GCLID back with the type of conversion and when it happened (Google Ads Help, offline conversion imports).

For accounts not yet importing, Google recommends starting with enhanced conversions for leads, which it describes as an upgraded offline conversion import that uses user-provided data such as email addresses. If the form fill is your primary conversion and nothing comes back from the CRM, Smart Bidding optimizes toward whoever fills in forms, not whoever buys. A free audit that never opens your CRM cannot tell you which of those your account is doing.

2. Whether the conversion window matches your sales cycle

A conversion window is how long after an ad interaction Google Ads will still record a conversion. For Search and Display, the default click-through window is 30 days, and it can be set as long as 90 days depending on the conversion source (Google Ads Help, conversion windows). A conversion that happens after the window closes is not recorded, and a change to the window applies only from that day forward.

If your sales cycle runs four months, a 30-day window credits the account only with the deals that closed fast, which may not be the ones that mattered most. To choose a window, Google suggests checking the time lag report in attribution reports. For cycles longer than 90 days no window covers the whole journey, which is one more reason the offline import in point 1 matters. We cover how long acquisition takes to pay back in our guide to CAC payback period.

3. What automation has changed in the account

Google Ads can apply recommendations automatically. The recommendations eligible for auto-apply include adding broad match keywords, expanding reach to Google search partners and using Display expansion, among others (Google Ads Help, applying recommendations automatically). Once auto-apply is switched on, each of these can change who sees your ads without a fresh decision from your team.

Change history lists edits made to the account over the past two years, including who made them, and changes made by automated systems can appear under users such as “Google Ads system” (Google Ads Help, change history). Google also notes that some account-level settings changes, and some changes made by Google representatives during consultations, are sometimes not listed.

Read the last 90 days of change history against the performance timeline before judging any campaign. A drop that lines up with an auto-applied change is a different problem from a drop in demand.

4. Treating optimization score as a health check

Optimization score is Google’s estimate of how well an account is set to perform, shown from 0 to 100% (Google Ads Help, optimization score). Google calculates it from the account’s statistics, settings and status, the impact of the recommendations available and recent recommendation history, and its page states plainly that an account can reach 100% by applying or dismissing all of its recommendations.

Google says that working through its recommendations can help performance. But because dismissing them counts the same as applying them, the score tells you how much of the recommendation list has been dealt with, not whether the account makes money. A score of 100% and a loss-making account can coexist. A free audit that leads with it is reporting a number you can move to 100% without changing a single result.

5. Whether the account is allowed to keep advertising

For fintech, the most expensive finding may not be a wasted keyword at all. It can be an account that cannot run in a market. Google’s financial services verification applies in 42 countries, including the United Kingdom, with a separate verification needed for each targeted location. The United States is not on the list (Google Advertising Policies Help, relevant regulators and enforcement dates, 42 countries counted October 6, 2026).

In the UK, the business information an FCA-authorised firm provides during verification must exactly match the details on the FCA register, and verification can fail on a mismatched organization name or registration number (Google Advertising Policies Help, financial services verification, United Kingdom). The same page says that, beginning from 26 September, a contact with the same email domain as the FCA-registered firm must be added to the Google Ads account before applying; the page gives no year. A UK-targeted fintech campaign stuck there does not need a better bid strategy; it needs the verification route settled. We walk through the UK routes in our guide to Google Ads financial services verification.

For a SaaS account this check takes minutes. For a fintech account it comes first.

A PPC account audit checklist you can run this week

Here is the method as a working PPC account audit. Most items take minutes with admin access to Google Ads and read access to your CRM. Work from the top, and fix anything in the first block before moving on.

Measurement

• List every primary conversion action and confirm each one predicts revenue.
• Check each action’s click-through conversion window against your median sales cycle.
• Confirm closed deals flow back from the CRM, through offline conversion import or enhanced conversions for leads.

Spend

• Sort the search terms report by cost for the last 90 days and add negative keywords.
• Note what share of cost the report explains at search-term level.
• Separate brand from non-brand spend.

Automation and history

• Open the auto-apply settings and list what is switched on.
• Read 90 days of change history against the performance timeline.
• Note the optimization score, then set it aside.

Ads, pages and standing

• Match each ad group’s promise to the first screen of its landing page.
• Confirm required disclosures are visible without a click or hover.
• Check Policy Manager for disapproved or limited ads.
• For financial services, confirm verification status for every country you target.

A Google Ads account audit like this covers half of search. If you are reviewing organic search at the same time, our SEO audit checklist applies the same logic to the other half.

FAQ: PPC audits

PPC audit: what to do next

Start with the measurement block of the checklist. If your primary conversions do not predict revenue, every other finding in a PPC audit is measured against the wrong number, so fix that first and give the account a few weeks of cleaner data before judging campaigns.

If you would rather have it done, our Acquisition Audit is a two-week, fixed-fee review at $2,500 covering paid accounts and compliance risk, tracking gaps, a keyword and demand map, and technical and content SEO, ending in a prioritized 90-day plan you can run in-house or with anyone else. Either way, the five questions above are the ones to ask of any audit you are handed.