How to Audit a PPC Account in an Hour: The 9-Point Checklist

You have one hour to audit a PPC account - no time for fluff. Run through 9 checkpoints in order and you'll surface the leaks, the waste, and the quick wins fast enough to hand back a sharp review before the hour's up. Built for ppc consultants who need speed without cutting corners.

01Before You Start: What You Need

Gather the essentials before you open the account: read-only or admin access to the ad platform, Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, whatever it is. Grab the conversion tracking setup too - Google Tag Manager, pixel, or a third-party tool like Keitaro or Binom - because without conversion data, half the audit is just guesswork.

Set a timer for 60 minutes and hold to it - no extensions. The goal here is a high-level diagnosis, not a forensic deep dive; you flag the issues, and the account manager fixes them later. Have a blank doc or spreadsheet open to log findings as you go.

• Ad platform access (read-only is fine)
• Conversion tracking access (platform + any third-party tracker)
• Timer set to 60 minutes
• Blank doc or spreadsheet for notes

021. Account Structure and Settings - 5 Minutes

Start with the skeleton: campaign types, bidding strategies, budget distribution. Campaigns organized by goal - awareness, consideration, conversion - or by product and category? A messy structure hides problems underneath it, and for a ppc consultant, this is the first sign of whether the account was built with discipline.

Check the conversion tracking setup first: is the primary conversion action actually set correctly? Plenty of accounts track clicks as conversions, which is a red flag on its own. Verify the attribution model too - last-click is fine for most e-commerce, but longer B2B cycles usually need data-driven or linear instead. Note any mismatch you find.

Common structural issues

One campaign running 200 ad groups with no theme at all. Or the opposite: every product in its own campaign on a $5 budget. Both waste money. Good structure lands around 5-15 ad groups per campaign, tightly themed, and it's worth checking location targeting too - sometimes ads are still running in countries the business doesn't even ship to.

032. Keyword and Audience Health - 10 Minutes

Pull the search terms report for the last 30 days and scan for irrelevant queries eating the budget. In Google Ads, look hard at match types - broad match burns cash fast unless it's tightly managed with negatives. A ppc consultant should expect 10-20% of spend going to irrelevant terms even in a moderately well-managed account.

For Meta, review the audience targeting - too many interests stacked together expands reach but drags relevance down. Look for overlap between ad sets too, which is common when audiences get duplicated; the audience overlap tool will show it if you have access. Check frequency last: above 4-5 on a conversion campaign, fatigue is likely already setting in.

043. Ad Copy and Creatives - 10 Minutes

Check whether the ad copy actually matches the landing pages. The common disconnect is a headline promising one thing and a landing page delivering another, which kills quality score and conversion rate together. Look at three ads per ad group at least; if they're all identical, nobody is testing anything, and that's budget left on the table.

Look at creative freshness next. On Meta, the same image running for 4 weeks straight has usually already dropped CTR by 20-40%. On Google, responsive search ads sitting at low ad strength, Poor or Average, need more headlines and descriptions added. Count the unique creatives per campaign - fewer than 3 signals nobody's touched the account in a while.

054. Landing Page and Conversion Path - 10 Minutes

Click through from the ad to the landing page yourself and time it - does it load in under 3 seconds? Google's PageSpeed Insights or just the browser's network tab will tell you. A 1-second delay typically costs about 7% of conversions, and the mobile version needs checking separately, since plenty of accounts never look at it.

Count the clicks in the conversion path from landing page to conversion - fewer is always better. For a lead form, count the fields too: more than 5 often cuts conversion rate by 30-50%. For e-commerce, check whether the checkout flow is actually clear, and confirm the conversion event fires correctly using the platform's test or preview tools.

065. Bidding and Budgets - 5 Minutes

Look at the bid strategy per campaign: manual CPC, enhanced CPC, or automated - Target CPA, Target ROAS. Automated bidding needs roughly 30+ conversions in the last 30 days to work well for Target CPA, closer to 50 for Target ROAS; below that threshold, manual CPC usually wins. Check for portfolio bid strategies too - they're often set once and forgotten.

On budget distribution, 80% of spend going to 20% of campaigns is normal, the Pareto principle at work - the problem is a high-CPA campaign getting the biggest share instead. Check daily budget against actual daily spend as well: Google can spend up to 2x the average daily budget on a high-traffic day, though it's capped at roughly 30.4x the daily budget across a month, so account for that swing.

076. Tracking and Attribution - 10 Minutes

Most leaks hide here. Open the tracking setup - Google Ads conversion tracking, Meta pixel events, any server-side or third-party tracker like Keitaro or Binom - and check whether the same conversion gets counted twice, a page view plus a form submission, say. That alone inflates reported conversions past what's real.

Compare platform-reported conversions against actual business data - CRM, sales, analytics. A gap of 20-40% is common enough, down to ad blockers, cross-device issues, or attribution windows, but for a ppc consultant a gap over 50% is a red flag. Check whether offline conversions are even imported; if not, you're flying blind on half the picture.

087. Negative Keywords and Exclusions - 5 Minutes

Pull the negative keyword list at both campaign and ad group level - an empty list is a warning sign by itself. A typical, moderately sized campaign should carry at least 50-100 negatives. The common misses are competitor names, 'free', 'job', 'review' unless it's actually relevant to the offer, and placements for display and YouTube need the same scrutiny: exclude the irrelevant sites and channels.

098. Performance Trends and Anomalies - 5 Minutes

Pull the last 90 days of performance and plot CPC, CTR, conversion rate, and CPA weekly, watching for sudden spikes or drops. A CPA jump of 30%+ in a single week usually points to a tracking break, audience fatigue, or a competitor moving. Check seasonality too - if the account runs holiday campaigns, compare year over year before drawing conclusions.

Segment by device, time of day, and location - it's common to find mobile running at 2x the CPA of desktop, or ads that stop converting outright after 8 PM. Both are quick wins once you see them: adjust the bid modifiers, or schedule the ads around the dead hours.

109. Extension and Ad Assets - 5 Minutes

Check which ad extensions on Google or ad assets on Meta are actually enabled. Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets - when they're relevant, they lift CTR by 10-20%, and plenty of accounts leave them incomplete or outdated anyway. For a ppc consultant, missing extensions are the easiest fix in the whole audit.

Review the automated assets too. Google will auto-generate extensions on its own, and sometimes what it generates is irrelevant, a 'Get directions' link for a delivery-only business, say. Disable whatever doesn't fit.

11Common Mistakes to Avoid

Don't audit in isolation. Without knowing the client's actual goals, brand awareness versus direct sales, it's easy to misjudge performance entirely, so clarify KPIs before you start. And don't rely only on platform data; pull analytics or CRM data to validate what the platform is telling you.

The other common mistake is over-focusing on small issues - a 1% CTR difference isn't going to save the account. The big three that matter are tracking accuracy, keyword waste, and landing page alignment. And resist trying to fix everything in one report; three to five critical changes are what a client can actually act on.

12What to Expect After the Audit

A well-managed account turns up 2-3 moderate issues and a handful of minor tweaks. A neglected one turns up 5-8 critical problems: broken tracking, bloated keyword lists, stale creatives, poor landing pages. CPA typically drops 20-40% after the top three issues get fixed.

On timeframe: tracking fixes take 1-2 days, developer dependent, and keyword cleanups show impact within 1-2 weeks as spend reroutes itself. Creative refreshes lift CTR within days. Budget reallocation can improve ROAS by 10-30% over a month, but there's no version of this that happens overnight.

13FAQ

Can I audit any PPC platform with this checklist?

Yes, the principles carry over to Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and others. Only the specifics shift: video completion rate for TikTok, job title targeting for LinkedIn. The core structure, tracking, and creative review stay the same everywhere.

What if I don't have access to conversion data?

The audit is limited without it, but not useless - you can still review structure, keywords, ads, and landing pages. Flag the missing conversion data itself as a critical issue, and recommend installing tracking before any optimization even starts.

How often should I run this audit?

Monthly for active accounts spending over $10k/day. Quarterly is enough for smaller ones. Auditing more often than that just adds over-optimization and noise, not insight.

What's the biggest time-waster in an audit?

Getting lost in granular data, individual keyword performance and the like, instead of patterns across campaigns. Work from averages and aggregates. The 80/20 rule holds here too: 20% of the issues cause 80% of the waste.

Ioann Putevoy

Head of Traffic & growth lead. I build products and take them to market - see the portfolio.