You don’t need an agency to tell you whether your Google Ads account is healthy. You need admin access, the last 90 days of data, your own job numbers next to you, and about 45 minutes. This is the checklist we run when a new account lands on our desk, in the order we run it.
If you want to know where the money usually goes before you start: tracking. Nearly every account we open has something wrong with what’s being counted as a conversion, and because every other decision in the account depends on that number, it’s where I’d start every time. Then the bid strategy, then the search terms, then the location settings, networks, Google’s auto-applied recommendations and the change history. Most accounts leak money in at least three of these.
Before you start
Have these open:
- Google Ads, with the date range set to the last 90 days
- Your job software or diary, so you can compare what Google says with what actually happened
- Somewhere to write down anything that looks off
If you can’t get admin access to your own ad account, write that down as finding number one. You should always own your ad account, full stop, and any agency that won’t give you access is telling you something.
1. What counts as a conversion? (5 minutes)
Go to Goals, then Conversions, and look at every action marked as primary. Those are the things Google reports as conversions and, more importantly, the things it bids towards.
Good looks like a short list: calls from ads, calls from the website, form enquiries, online bookings. Bad looks like page views, clicks on your email address, time on site or “engaged visits” sitting in there as primary conversions. If Google is told a page view is a win, it’ll happily buy you thousands of page views.
2. Is anything being counted twice? (5 minutes)
This is the leak we find most often, and nobody notices it because the numbers look good. The website sends two events for every form submission, both are set as primary, and every enquiry quietly counts twice. The account looks half again as busy as the inbox.
Compare last month’s conversions in Google with your actual enquiries. If Google says 90 and your inbox and phone say 55, something is double counting, and until you fix it nothing else in the account can be trusted.
3. How much is your own name doing? (3 minutes)
Search for your business name in the search terms report. People who searched your name were going to find you anyway, and in a lot of accounts they make up a big share of the reported conversions, which flatters everything.
Bidding on your own name is often sensible, because competitors can bid on it too and it’s cheap. Just keep it in a campaign of its own so it doesn’t make the rest of the account look better than it is.
4. What is each campaign bidding for? (3 minutes)
Look at the bid strategy column. If a campaign that’s meant to bring you leads is set to Maximise Clicks, it’s buying visits, not enquiries, and it has no idea whether anyone rang.
In August 2026, Master Plumber Services’ account had five campaigns all on Maximise Clicks, and leads were costing $920 each. Moved to one campaign bidding for conversions, they cost $152 by October. Same business, same website. The full story is in the Master Plumber Services case study.
5. What are people actually searching? (8 minutes)
Open the search terms report and sort by cost. Read the top 50 searches you paid for. You will almost certainly find a few that make you wince: DIY searches, job hunters, competitors’ names you didn’t mean to bid on, or services you don’t even offer.
Every irrelevant search you find, add as a negative keyword. Then make this a weekly habit, because new ones turn up every week.
6. Who are your ads being shown to? (3 minutes)
In each campaign’s location settings, check the targeting option. Google’s default shows your ads to people in your area and to people who are only “interested in” your area. For a local business, that second group mostly means clicks from people on the other side of the country. Google explains both options in target ads to geographic locations.
While you’re in there, check that the areas match where you’ll actually travel or where your clients come from. A Melbourne tradie can end up paying for clicks from Perth for months without knowing it.
7. Which networks are you on? (2 minutes)
Search campaigns can also show on Google’s search partner sites and on the Display Network. Display inside a search campaign is usually a quiet leak: cheap clicks from banner ads on random websites and apps, from people who weren’t searching for anything.
If Display is ticked on a search campaign, look at its results on their own before deciding whether to keep it. Usually you won’t want to.
8. Is Google changing things without asking? (3 minutes)
Go to Recommendations and look for the auto-apply settings. Google can apply some of its own recommendations automatically, like broadening your keywords or adding new ones it thinks are relevant. Some of them help. Some quietly spend more of your money on searches you never chose.
Turn off anything you didn’t knowingly agree to, then review the recommendations yourself when you’ve got time. Google’s suggestions are written by Google, for Google.
9. Are the cheap conversions real? (5 minutes)
If a Performance Max or broad match campaign is reporting leads far cheaper than everything else in the account, be suspicious before you’re pleased. In one plumbing account, Performance Max reported 103 conversions for $2,916 in a single month, a fraction of what the search leads cost.
Check those conversions against your job book. If you can’t match them to real calls and jobs, don’t let them steer your budget. We’ve written more on this in Performance Max: what Google won’t tell you.
10. Is the structure right for the budget? (3 minutes)
Count your campaigns and divide your daily budget between them. Too many campaigns on a small budget and none of them get enough data to learn. Too few, and your expensive searches eat everything before the cheap ones get a look in.
Uplumb, a new plumbing account we launched in Brisbane, paid $403 a lead with a single campaign for everything. When blocked drains and hot water got their own campaigns, it fell to $107. The rule we use is simple: split work out when it behaves differently, otherwise keep it together.
11. Where do the ads send people? (3 minutes)
Click your own ads, from a real search rather than your bookmarks. If a search for a specific service lands on your homepage, that’s a leak. Each main service should land on a page about that service, with your phone number at the top. We’ve put real numbers on what a difference this makes in what’s a good website conversion rate.
12. Is anyone actually working on it? (2 minutes)
Open the change history and set it to 90 days. You’ll see every change made in the account, when, and by whom.
It doesn’t need hundreds of changes. But if you pay an agency every month and the change history shows a handful of edits in three months, you’ve learnt something worth knowing. We go through what a month of real work should look like in what a Google Ads agency does each month.
What to do with what you find
Fix the tracking first, always. Every other decision, from bids to budgets, relies on the conversions being real. Then clean up the search terms and the location settings, which save money from the day you do them. Leave the structural changes until last, because they reset some of the learning and you want to make them deliberately, not in a rush on a Friday afternoon.
And judge the result on booked jobs, not on what the account reports about itself.
Questions people ask me about this
How often should I audit my Google Ads account?
Run the full checklist every quarter. Check the search terms and the change history every week or two, which only takes a few minutes once you know where to look.
Can I audit my agency’s work if they own the account?
You should be able to see everything, at the very least. If an agency won’t give you access to your own ad account, that’s your answer about the agency.
Do you do free audits?
No. If you’d rather we went through your account properly, our digital marketing audit is paid, and I’ll tell you the price before you commit to anything. Or book a call and we’ll talk through what you found.
What’s the most common problem you find?
Tracking, every time. Double counted forms, page views counted as leads, and calls not counted at all. It’s rarely dramatic. It’s just quietly wrong.
Found something you’d rather not fix yourself?
Get in touch and bring what you found. I’ll tell you what matters, what doesn’t, and what I’d fix first. Here’s how we run Google Ads management and conversion tracking.
