Paid Media

Google Ads Audit Checklist: 15 Things to Check Before You Blame the Algorithm

By Haris Ahmed Siddiqui · · 12 min read

If your Google Ads spend is climbing but leads are flat, the problem is almost never “the algorithm”. After running PPC accounts for Pakistani businesses since 2009, I can tell you the leak is usually sitting in plain sight inside your own account. This is a hands-on Google Ads audit you can run yourself in an afternoon — built for owners and marketing managers who want to find wasted budget before paying anyone for a deep-dive.

You do not need to be a certified expert to spot the obvious bleeders. You need a checklist and a willingness to actually open the account. Let’s go.

Before You Start: What a Real Google Ads Audit Actually Looks At

A proper PPC audit checklist is not “is my quality score green?”. It follows the money from the moment someone searches to the moment they pay you. Most accounts I review for clients in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad lose 25-40% of budget to four or five fixable problems. The goal of this Google Ads account review is to find those problems with evidence, not vibes.

Open your account in a desktop browser, set the date range to the last 90 days, and have these three reports ready: the Search Terms report, the Campaigns view, and your conversion settings. That is where the truth lives.

Part 1: Stop the Obvious Money Leaks (Checks 1-5)

1. Read your Search Terms report — every account hides waste here

This is the single most valuable five minutes in any Google Ads audit. Go to a campaign, click “Search terms”, and look at what people actually typed before clicking your ad. Not your keywords — the real queries.

You will find clicks on “free”, “jobs”, “salary”, “what is”, and competitor names you never wanted to pay for. If you sell premium UPS units and you are paying for “UPS repair near me” or “ups load shedding fix tutorial”, that is wasted ad spend, full stop. Export this report and highlight every term that has cost money but produced zero conversions.

2. Run a negative keywords audit

Everything you flagged in the search terms report becomes a negative keyword. A serious negative keywords audit means you have a shared negative keyword list applied across campaigns — covering job-seekers, freebie-hunters, DIY searchers, and irrelevant cities if you only serve certain areas.

  • Brand terms of competitors you do not want to bid on
  • “Free”, “cheap”, “second hand”, “used” if you sell new or premium
  • “Course”, “tutorial”, “PDF”, “jobs”, “salary”
  • Cities or regions you cannot deliver to

If your account has fewer than 20-30 negatives and it has been running for months, this is your biggest leak right here.

3. Check your keyword match types

If your campaigns are full of broad match keywords with no tight negative lists, Google is spending your money on loosely related searches. Broad match can work — but only with strong conversion tracking and an aggressive negative strategy feeding it. For most small Pakistani advertisers running PKR 50,000-200,000 a month, phrase and exact match give you far more control over where the rupees go.

4. Confirm conversion tracking actually works

This is the check most people skip and it invalidates everything else. If conversion tracking is broken, every “optimisation” you make is guesswork. Verify:

  • Your conversion actions fire on the real thank-you page or after a genuine form submit — not on every page load
  • WhatsApp click, call clicks, and form fills are tracked separately
  • You are not double-counting (a click counted as both a “lead” and a “page view” conversion)
  • The conversion value or count matches what you see in your CRM or inbox

If a campaign shows 80 conversions but your sales team remembers 12 real enquiries, your data is lying to you. Fix this first.

5. Find the campaigns spending money with zero conversions

Sort your campaigns by cost, descending. Any campaign that has spent meaningful budget over 90 days with no conversions needs an honest answer: is it broken, mistargeted, or just pointless? Pausing one dead campaign often funds two months of a working one.

Part 2: Targeting and Settings That Quietly Drain Budget (Checks 6-10)

6. Audit your location targeting

Open location settings and check the “Location options” — this is buried on purpose. The default setting often means “people in OR interested in your location”. That means someone in Dubai searching about Lahore can trigger your ad. If you serve customers physically in Pakistan, set it to “Presence: people in your targeted locations”. I have seen this one toggle cut 15% of wasted spend instantly.

7. Check the Search Partners and Display Network settings

Search campaigns often have “Display Network” quietly switched on. Display traffic on a Search campaign usually converts far worse and inflates your click numbers with cheap, low-intent impressions. Unless you deliberately want it, turn it off and judge Display on its own merits in a separate campaign.

8. Review your ad schedule and device performance

Segment your data by device and by time of day. Most Pakistani buyers are on mid-range Android phones, so mobile traffic dominates — but check whether mobile actually converts for you. If desktop converts at half the cost, adjust bids accordingly. Same for hours: if nobody answers the phone after 9 PM, why are you paying premium clicks at midnight?

9. Look at geographic performance within Pakistan

Pull the location report (where users were located). You will often find one city eating budget while another quietly delivers cheaper leads. If Karachi clicks cost you triple what Faisalabad clicks do for the same product, that is a bid adjustment waiting to happen — not a reason to blame the platform.

10. Check landing page and payment friction

Your ad can be perfect and still waste money if the landing page fails. Click your own ads (carefully) and check:

  • Does the page load fast on a mid-range Android over 4G? A 6-second load kills your conversion rate.
  • Is there a WhatsApp button and a phone number above the fold? Many Pakistani buyers prefer to message before they buy.
  • If you sell online, do you clearly show JazzCash, Easypaisa, bank transfer and cash on delivery? Hidden or limited payment options lose ready buyers.
  • Does the page match the ad? If the ad says “AC installation” and the page is a generic homepage, you lose them.

Half of “bad PPC” is actually a landing page problem. If yours needs work, a focused fix from a proper web design and landing page team often pays for itself faster than any bid tweak.

Part 3: Structure, Bidding and Creative (Checks 11-15)

11. Review your bidding strategy honestly

“Maximise clicks” does exactly that — buys clicks, not customers. If you have reliable conversion tracking, a conversion-based strategy (Maximise Conversions or Target CPA) usually spends smarter. But — and this matters — automated bidding needs data. If you get fewer than roughly 15-30 conversions a month, automated strategies starve and behave erratically. Match the strategy to your actual volume.

12. Check account structure and Single Keyword Ad Groups

If one ad group contains 40 unrelated keywords, your ads can never be tightly relevant to all of them. Tighter ad groups mean more relevant ads, better quality scores, and lower cost per click. You do not need extreme single-keyword ad groups for everything, but each ad group should be one clear theme.

13. Count your ads and assets per ad group

Each ad group should have at least 2-3 responsive search ads being tested, plus full assets:

  • Sitelinks pointing to real pages
  • Callout extensions (free delivery, 1-year warranty, 24/7 support)
  • Call assets with a number that actually rings during business hours
  • Location and structured snippet assets where relevant

Missing assets mean smaller ads, lower click-through, and higher cost. This is free real estate you are leaving on the table.

14. Review Quality Score on your top-spend keywords

Add the Quality Score column and sort by cost. For your highest-spending keywords, low QS (below 5-6) means you are overpaying per click. Diagnose it: is it the expected click-through rate, the ad relevance, or the landing page experience? QS is a symptom, not the disease — use it to point you at the real fix.

15. Look at impression share and where you are losing it

Check “Search impression share” plus “lost IS (budget)” and “lost IS (rank)”. This tells you whether you are losing visibility because your budget is too small or because your ads simply are not competitive enough. The fix is completely different for each — and guessing wrong wastes another month.

Putting It Together: How to Read Your Audit Results

Once you have run all 15 checks, you will have a list. Sort it ruthlessly by impact:

  1. Broken conversion tracking — fix before anything else, or you are flying blind.
  2. Wasted spend on bad search terms — add negatives today, this is instant savings.
  3. Location and network settings — five-minute toggles with real impact.
  4. Landing page and payment friction — the slow burn that quietly caps every campaign.
  5. Structure, bidding and creative — the longer-term gains.

Honestly, most owners who run this checklist find 2-3 fixes that recover real money within a week. That is the point — a Google Ads account review should pay for itself in clarity even before you change strategy. And if you also run organic, remember that paid and organic reinforce each other; pairing PPC with solid SEO work usually lowers your blended cost per lead over time.

When to Stop Auditing Yourself and Bring in Help

Self-audit until you hit one of these walls: your conversion tracking is tangled across tag manager and you cannot untangle it; your account has hundreds of keywords and the structure is a maze; or you have fixed the obvious leaks and still cannot get cost per lead down to where the business needs it. At that point a paid deep-dive from an experienced PPC management team is worth it — not to “do magic”, but to bring a second set of trained eyes and a faster path to the fixes you cannot see from inside.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does a Google Ads audit take?

A focused self-audit using this checklist takes 2-4 hours if your account is small to medium. A professional, evidence-based audit of a larger account usually takes one to two working days, because checking conversion tracking and search terms properly cannot be rushed without missing the real leaks.

How much should a PPC audit cost in Pakistan?

It varies with account size, but a one-off professional audit for a typical small-business account commonly runs in the range of PKR 25,000-60,000, depending on spend and complexity. Many agencies, including us, offer a free initial review to identify the biggest issues before you commit to anything paid. Be wary of anyone quoting a price without first looking at your account.

Can I fix wasted ad spend without an expert?

Yes — the biggest wins (negative keywords, location settings, turning off Display on Search campaigns, pausing dead campaigns) are things an owner can do directly. You bring in an expert when the diagnosis gets technical, like broken conversion tracking or restructuring a messy account, not for the basics this checklist covers.

How often should I run a Google Ads account review?

Check your search terms report and negatives at least every two weeks while a campaign is active. Run the full 15-point audit quarterly, and any time performance shifts suddenly. Markets, competitors and seasons change — an account you set up six months ago is almost certainly leaking somewhere by now.

Why are my clicks going up but my leads staying flat?

Usually one of three things: you are buying clicks from irrelevant search terms, your conversion tracking is not recording the real leads, or your landing page or payment options are failing ready buyers. This checklist isolates which one it is, so you stop guessing and fix the actual cause.

Is broad match keyword ever a good idea?

It can be, but only with strong conversion tracking, a conversion-based bidding strategy, and a constantly updated negative keyword list feeding it. Without those guardrails, broad match is the fastest way to burn budget. For most advertisers under PKR 200,000 a month, start with phrase and exact match.

Want a Second Set of Eyes on Your Account?

Run this checklist first — genuinely, do it. If you find the leaks and fix them yourself, brilliant, that is a win. But if you hit a wall, or you have fixed the obvious problems and your cost per lead is still too high, we are happy to take a look. One Source Soft has managed paid search for Pakistani businesses for years, and our public Google reviews reflect how we work: straight answers, no jargon, no lock-in contracts.

We offer a free initial Google Ads audit where we run these exact checks on your account and tell you plainly what we’d fix and why — before you spend a single rupee with us. Learn more about our PPC management service, or get in touch and we’ll review your account this week. No pressure, just an honest read on where your budget is going.

Related reading

Keep reading