Why Most Google Ads Audits Are Worthless

The "Free Audit" Game

You've seen the offers:

• "Free Google Ads audit—find hidden opportunities!"
• "We'll review your account at no cost"
• "Discover what your agency is missing"

Most of these aren't audits. They're sales pitches disguised as analysis.

What Bad Audits Look Like

The Checklist Approach

Junior staff runs through a generic checklist:

• ❌ No negative keywords (maybe relevant, maybe not)
• ❌ Low quality scores (often meaningless)
• ❌ No responsive search ads (check-the-box issue)
• ❌ Missing extensions (minor impact)

They flag cosmetic issues without understanding whether they matter for your business.

The Scare Tactics

"You're wasting 40% of your budget!"

Based on what? Usually a surface-level spend analysis that ignores:

• What you're actually trying to achieve
• Your industry benchmarks
• Whether "waste" is actually strategic prospecting

The Template Report

20-page PDF that could apply to any account. Generic recommendations. No specific actions. Designed to look thorough while saying nothing.

The Conflict of Interest

Agency audits are sales tools. They're designed to:

1. Find enough problems to justify switching
2. Not find problems so severe you question all agencies
3. Create urgency to sign before problems "get worse"

The incentive isn't to give you truth—it's to win your business.

What a Real Audit Contains

Business Context First

Before looking at the account:

• What are your margins by product category?
• What does a valuable customer look like?
• What are your growth constraints?
• What has worked historically?

Without this, you can't interpret whether account structure makes sense.

Structural Analysis

Not "you should have more ad groups" but:

• Does campaign structure match your commercial reality?
• Are high-margin and low-margin products separated?
• Is branded search isolated from prospecting?
• Does structure enable the analysis you need?

Commercial Evaluation

The questions that matter:

• What's the contribution profit per channel?
• Which products are actually profitable after ad spend?
• Where is budget going toward low-LTV customers?
• What's the true new customer acquisition cost?

Read how we approach this.

Incrementality Assessment

The hardest question: what would happen without this spend?

• Branded search: likely would convert anyway
• Remarketing: some incremental, some not
• Prospecting: genuinely new demand (hopefully)

Bad audits never touch this. Good audits at least attempt it.

Specific Recommendations

Not "optimise your feed" but:

• "Move products X, Y, Z to separate campaign because margins differ by 15%"
• "Reduce budget on Campaign A by 20% and reallocate to Campaign B based on contribution analysis"
• "Restructure Performance Max asset groups to separate new vs returning customer targeting"

The Cost of Proper Audits

Real audits take time:

• Business discovery: 1-2 hours
• Account analysis: 4-8 hours
• Data integration: 2-3 hours
• Recommendation development: 2-4 hours

That's 10-15 hours of senior strategist time. It's not free.

Agencies offering "free audits" are either:

1. Doing 30-minute surface reviews
2. Building the cost into ongoing fees
3. Using junior staff at minimal real cost

What to Demand

When evaluating any audit:

Ask for specifics: "What exactly should I change, and what impact do you expect?"

Ask for data: "Show me the analysis behind this recommendation."

Ask about margins: "How did you account for product profitability?"

Ask about incrementality: "How do you know this spend is creating new demand?"

If they can't answer, the audit isn't worth the PDF it's printed on.

Want an audit that actually matters? Our process includes full commercial analysis, incrementality assessment, and specific implementation recommendations.