Most Google Ads accounts I audit are not broken, they are just leaking. Nobody set a bad campaign live on purpose. It is thirty small defaults left untouched over eighteen months that add up to a third of the budget going nowhere. Here is the order I check things in, and it is the same order regardless of budget size.
1. Search terms report first, always
Before touching bids or budgets, I pull the last 90 days of search terms and sort by cost. This is the single fastest way to find waste. Broad match campaigns running for more than six months without a negative keyword list attached almost always have 10 to 20% of spend going to irrelevant queries. I have seen a roofing client paying for clicks on "roofing jobs hiring" for four months straight.
2. Match type mix
If a campaign is over 80% broad match with no smart bidding signal to guide it, that is a red flag, not a strategy. Broad match works when you feed it strong conversion data and let automated bidding do the targeting. Broad match on a manual CPC campaign with thin conversion volume is just an expensive way to buy irrelevant traffic.
3. Conversion tracking accuracy
I check this before I trust a single number in the account. Duplicate conversion actions, phone calls counted twice, form submissions firing on the thank-you page and again on page load. Bad tracking makes every other decision downstream wrong, because you are optimising toward a number that does not reflect reality.
4. Device and location bid adjustments left on old defaults
Someone set a negative 20% mobile bid adjustment two years ago because mobile converted worse at the time. Mobile behaviour changes. I re-run the segmentation from scratch rather than trusting historical adjustments, because the account structure often outlives the reasoning behind it.
5. Ad schedule dayparting nobody remembers setting
Ads paused overnight for a B2B account that later started selling to a segment that researches at night. Check who the current customer actually is, not who they were when the schedule was built.
6. Landing page to ad copy mismatch
The ad promises "free consultation," the landing page opens with a pricing table. Quality Score takes a hit and so does conversion rate. This is a five-minute fix that gets skipped constantly because it requires opening the actual page instead of just the dashboard.
7. Auto-applied recommendations
Google's auto-apply setting will happily raise your budgets and add broad keywords on your behalf if you leave it switched on. I turn this off on every account on day one. Recommendations are worth reviewing individually, not accepting on autopilot.
8. Attribution model versus sales cycle length
Last-click attribution on a business with a 45-day sales cycle will systematically undercount the top-of-funnel campaigns that started the journey, leading you to cut the wrong thing. Match the attribution model to how the business actually buys.
“None of this requires a bigger budget. It requires someone to actually open the account and look, which is rarer than it should be.”
What to do with this list
Run through these eight in order on your own account this week. Most take under ten minutes each. If you find three or more issues, that is a normal-sized account, not a disaster, but it is worth a second pair of eyes before you increase spend on top of the leak. That is what the free audit call is for.