A Google Ads audit is a checkup of your account that finds where money leaks out: wrong keywords, missing negative keywords, broken tracking, and clicks sent to the wrong page. After 15 years of looking inside contractor ad accounts, the biggest money mistake we see is always the same one, and you can find it yourself in about ten minutes.

What is a Google Ads audit?

A Google Ads account audit is a structured review of your campaigns, keywords, ads, and settings to find wasted ad spend and missed opportunity. A good ads audit answers one question: is every dollar in this account pointed at people who can become customers?

You do not need a fancy Google Ads audit template or a paid PPC audit tool to start. You need to know where accounts leak. Since 2013 we have managed advertising for home service businesses across 87+ trades, and the same handful of leaks show up in account after account. The rest of this post is the checklist we use, starting with the leak that costs the most.

Leak #1: No negative keyword list (the biggest one)

Here is Keith's take, straight from the audits he does: the absolute biggest money mistake in a Google Ads account is not creating a negative keyword list. The account pays for traffic from people searching for things those advertisers will never sell. Wrong words, wrong intent, no commercial value. If the list is not built and updated on a regular basis, the account spends a tremendous amount of money on keywords that never would have turned into business in the first place.

Negative keywords tell Google which searches you do NOT want. A remodeler bidding on "kitchen remodel" can show up for "kitchen remodel ideas free," "kitchen remodel jobs hiring," and "DIY kitchen remodel." Real clicks, real charges, zero chance of a sale. Broad match keywords make this worse because Google stretches your keyword to loosely related searches unless you fence it in.

How to find it in ten minutes

Open your account and go to the search terms report. This shows the real searches that triggered your ads, not the keywords you bid on. Sort by cost. Every irrelevant search you see is money already spent. Add each one as a negative keyword at the campaign or ad group level, and repeat this check every week. This one habit is the cheapest fix in all of paid search.

Leak #2: No conversion tracking

The second leak decides whether you can even find the others. If the account is not tracking calls and form fills, nobody knows which keywords produce jobs and which just produce clicks. Google's own bidding strategies also fly blind without conversion data, so the machine optimizes for clicks instead of customers.

We wrote a full breakdown of this problem in advertising without tracking is just expensive hoping. The short version: every phone call and every form on your site should be counted as a conversion before you judge campaign performance on anything.

Leak #3: Clicks sent to the homepage

Landing pages are where ad money becomes leads, and most contractor accounts send every click to the homepage. A homepage has ten links and no single job to do. A landing page has one job: turn this visitor into a call. Weak landing pages also drag down quality score, which raises what you pay per click across the account.

Check each ad group. The ad promises "water heater replacement," so the click should land on a water heater page with one form and one phone number. We covered how to build one in what is a landing page and why do your ads need one.

Leak #4: One giant ad group for everything

Account structure sounds boring until you see what a mess costs. When one ad group holds 40 keywords for six different services, Google cannot match the right ad copy to the right search, relevance drops, quality score drops, and cost per click climbs.

The fix is simple grouping: one ad group per service, with tightly related keywords and ads written for that exact service. Mixing exact match, phrase match keywords, and broad match is fine, but each ad group should be about one thing. While you are in there, check campaign settings: search campaigns should not be silently opted into the display network, and your ads should only run in areas you actually serve.

Leak #5: Set it and forget it

The last leak is not a setting. It is neglect. PPC campaigns decay. Search behavior shifts, competitors change bids, and Google rolls out changes like dynamic search ads, new ad formats, and automatic ad rotation defaults. An account nobody has opened in three months is almost always bleeding somewhere.

Your 15-minute Google Ads audit checklist

What a Google Ads audit is worth

At $90.92 per lead, waste is not a rounding error. Every wasted click pushes your real cost per lead higher, and every dollar you recover from irrelevant keywords goes straight back into searches that produce jobs. That is why a successful Google Ads campaign is usually not the one with the cleverest ads. It is the one where somebody keeps plugging the leaks.

If you are still deciding where ad money should go in the first place, read our comparison of Google Ads vs Facebook Ads and the Google Ads beginner's guide. And remember that paid search traffic only pays off when the phone gets answered: missed calls are the silent killer.

FAQ: Google Ads audits

Does Google do audits for you?

Google offers automated recommendations inside the account, but remember who they come from. Some suggestions help. Others simply increase your spend. Treat Google's recommendations as ideas to review, not orders to accept, and never enable auto-apply without checking each change.

How often should I audit my account?

Do the ten-minute search terms check weekly and a full account audit quarterly. A free Google Ads audit from an agency can be useful too, just know that most are sales tools. Ask whoever does it to show you the search terms they would add as negatives. That reveals whether they actually looked.

Is $20 a day good for Google Ads?

It can be, for one service in one area, but only in a clean account. At small budgets, waste hurts more. A $600 monthly budget with no negative keywords can lose a big share of its relevant keywords budget to searches that never buy, which is exactly why the audit comes before the budget increase.