PPC AuditA checklist that starts with the money

Audit in order of impact#

Most audit templates are long lists of settings, each given equal weight. That produces reports with dozens of findings and no sense of which ones matter. A wrong conversion setting can distort every decision in the account; a missing callout asset costs a little click-through rate. They do not belong on the same page with the same font size.

This checklist is ordered by impact. If you only have an hour, work from the top. If the first section reveals that tracking is broken, stop and fix that before reviewing anything else, because every other number in the account depends on it.

1. Measurement: is the data true?#

Start by comparing what the ad platforms report with what the business records. Pull conversions by month from each platform and from your CRM or sales system. They will never match exactly, but large or growing gaps signal tracking problems, attribution overlap or both.

2. Economics: are targets grounded?#

Next, check whether the account's goals come from the business or from habit. Ask what the target CPA or ROAS is, where it came from, and when it was last reviewed. Calculate break-even using current margins. Many accounts run on targets set years ago, for a different product mix or price list.

• Is there a documented allowable cost per customer, and does finance agree with it?
• Are targets above break-even ROAS, or below break-even CPA, with room for overheads?
• Are brand and non-brand performance reported separately, so brand does not flatter the total?
• Are new and returning customers distinguished where possible?
• Has any incrementality test been run on major campaigns?

See ROAS versus CPA for the break-even arithmetic.

3. Structure and traffic: what is the money buying?#

With measurement and economics understood, look at where spend actually goes. Sort campaigns by spend and examine the top few in depth, rather than skimming every campaign equally.

The search terms review is usually where audits find the largest immediately recoverable waste. Our negative keywords guide sets out the method.

4. Bidding and budgets#

• Strategy fit: is each campaign's bid strategy appropriate for its volume and goal? See smart bidding.
• Target realism: are targets close to recent actual performance, or so tight they choke volume?
• Change history: how often have targets and budgets changed? Frequent changes keep campaigns in learning.
• Budget constraints: are profitable campaigns limited by budget while weaker ones spend freely?
• Impression share lost to budget versus rank: each points to a different fix.

5. Creative and landing pages#

Review ads for the highest-spending ad groups. Do headlines reflect the queries? Is there specific proof? Are assets complete? Then click through to the landing pages on a phone. Does each page answer its ad's promise in the first screen? Does it load quickly? Our guides to ad copywriting and PPC landing pages give the criteria.

6. Beyond Google: multi-platform checks#

Most businesses advertise on more than one platform, and each reports conversions by its own rules. An audit that looks at one platform in isolation can miss the biggest issue: two or three platforms claiming the same sales. Add up the conversions every platform reports for a month and compare the total with what the business actually recorded.

• Meta and other social platforms: check the optimisation event, the attribution setting, the server-side event setup and creative freshness.
• LinkedIn: check lead quality from native forms and whether pipeline is tracked in the CRM.
• Marketplaces: check ACoS against margin and TACoS over time.
• Across all: check that UTM parameters are consistent, so analytics can compare channels on a common basis.

If the platforms collectively claim far more conversions than the business recorded, attribution overlap is inflating everyone's results. That is not a reason to distrust every number, but it is a reason to judge budget allocation on tests and business data rather than on platform dashboards. See attribution models.

Scoring and prioritising findings#

Write findings as decisions, not observations. 'Search terms include job-seeker queries' is an observation. 'Add the employment negative list to all non-brand campaigns this week, and report the irrelevant spend it removes next month' is a decision someone can act on. Rank by impact and effort, and agree an owner and a date for each.

After the audit#

An audit is only useful if the fixes happen and are checked. Record a baseline for the key measures before changes, implement in priority order, and review the same measures after a full conversion cycle. Some fixes, particularly tracking corrections, will make performance look worse at first, because the data becomes honest. That is progress, not failure.

For an audit of a whole marketing operation rather than one account, our marketing KPIs guide helps define what good looks like.

Published by Fabulous.Media, a network of specialist marketing agencies. Updated 9 October 2026. Platform features change often; check current official documentation before acting on platform-specific detail.