PPC audit: what one actually found in a live account
A real Google Ads audit, anonymised: where the money was leaking, the fixes that cost nothing, and why nobody had spotted any of it.
The short version
- Every serving keyword in the account, twelve out of twelve, pointed at the homepage instead of the pages built for those searches.
- The brand keyword, the cheapest and warmest traffic available, had been seen five times in a month. The client assumed it was working.
- Advertising clicks were being reported as organic, so the ads looked useless while SEO looked like a hero.
- The biggest fixes cost nothing. A PPC audit is not about spending more. It is about reading the account.
This is what a PPC audit actually produces when someone reads the account rather than skimming the dashboard. The account belongs to a global B2B manufacturer, anonymised. It was live, spending daily and professionally managed. Every finding below had been sitting in plain sight, keyword by keyword, for anyone who looked.
Finding one: every pound landed on the homepage
The account had a dozen serving keywords, each one describing a specific product search. Every single one sent its click to the homepage. Not the product pages built for those exact searches. The homepage, where a buyer looking for one specific thing was greeted with everything.
Google grades this relationship between keyword and landing page, and all twelve carried a below-average rating. That rating quietly inflates the cost of every click through Quality Score. The fix was administrative: point each keyword at its right page. No new budget, no new copy, just alignment.
Google grades every landing page. Nobody had looked at the grades.
quality score is a bill you chooseFinding two: the invisible brand keyword
The account's own brand keyword, the warmest and cheapest traffic any advertiser can buy, had been served five times in a month. Five impressions. A bid set too low and pointed at the wrong page had effectively switched it off, and because the campaign-level numbers looked plausible, nobody noticed for months.
This is the recurring theme of every google ads audit we run: accounts are reviewed at the level of totals, and totals hide everything. The failure was invisible in every summary. It took one look at the keyword itself.
the cheapest sign on the road was the one switched off.
Finding three: the report was lying, politely
The lie
Paid traffic filed under organic
A misconfiguration meant ad clicks were reported as organic search. The ads looked like they did nothing while SEO looked heroic. Any budget decision made on that report would have been made on fiction.
The cost
Decisions made on fiction
A business reading that report would rationally cut the ads that were working and double down on an organic performance that did not exist. Wrong data does not stay harmless. It gets used.
Attribution truth is the least glamorous part of a ppc audit and the most valuable. Before judging what the ads achieve, you have to be certain the numbers describing them are real. Ours are checked against reality as standard, which is the tracking discipline we covered in advanced conversion tracking: what it finds.
Finding four: too many keywords, too little signal
The account carried several dozen keywords on a modest daily budget: orphaned product grades with no page to land on, research-intent terms that would never buy, duplicate exact-match twins splitting their own data, and no negative keywords to keep out competitor-brand and market-research searches.
Spread thinly, every keyword learns slowly and nothing accumulates enough data to optimise. The audit recommendation was pruning, consolidation and a negative list: fewer keywords, each with a clear job, a right page and enough traffic to actually learn from.
the totals looked fine. The totals always look fine.
Finding five: the algorithm was starving
The deepest problem was not in the ad account at all. B2B sites produce a handful of hard conversions a month, and Google's Smart Bidding needs volume to learn. Below that threshold it is guessing with your money, and no amount of in-account tuning fixes it.
The answer came from the measurement side: the site's strongest buying signals, completed product comparisons and specification downloads, were made trackable and fed to the ad account as conversions. That is what gives Smart Bidding enough food to optimise at B2B volumes, and it is why serious ads work and serious tracking are one project, not two. The tracking half of this story is written up here.
The biggest fixes cost nothing. Finding them required reading the account.
what you pay an auditor for
What a proper PPC audit covers
01
Landing page alignment
Every keyword checked against the page it lands on, with Google's own quality grades read keyword by keyword.
02
Search terms and negatives
What real searches trigger your ads, which are noise, and the negative list that keeps the wrong audience out.
03
Keyword structure
Duplicates, orphans and dead weight pruned so the remaining keywords have data enough to learn.
04
Attribution truth
Whether the numbers describing the account are real: paid and organic actually separated, conversions verified.
05
Conversion supply
Whether Smart Bidding has enough signals to learn from, and where mid-funnel tracking can feed it.
06
Findings ranked by money
A plain-English letter: what we found, what it costs you, what to change first. Not a 60-page PDF of screenshots.
For context on what ongoing management should cost after an audit, see what Google Ads management costs in the UK, and our paid ads service page covers how we run accounts after the clean-up.
FAQ
What is a PPC audit?
A structured review of a paid advertising account: where the spend goes, what each keyword lands on, what real search terms trigger the ads, whether the conversion data is true and where money is leaking. The output is a prioritised list of fixes, most of which typically cost nothing to implement.
What does a Google Ads audit check?
Keyword-by-keyword landing pages and quality ratings, search terms and negatives, account structure, bids, attribution accuracy and conversion tracking health. The findings in this post are the typical shape: structural problems invisible in campaign totals.
Do you need access to our account?
Read-only access is enough for the audit, granted from your own Google Ads account in a few clicks and revocable any time. You keep ownership of everything.
What if the audit finds nothing wrong?
Then you get a short letter saying so, and you have bought certainty rather than fixes. It is rare, and honestly, an account managed at totals level almost always hides at least one finding like the ones above.
Want your account read keyword by keyword, with findings ranked by money?
Book a PPC audit