PPC Audit Services for Google Ads, Meta Ads & Paid Media Accounts
Identify wasted advertising spend, weak campaign structure, tracking problems, irrelevant traffic and missed growth opportunities through a structured PPC audit focused on commercial performance.
A PPC account can appear active while still underperforming. Campaigns may be generating clicks and conversions, but those conversions may be low quality, incorrectly tracked or too expensive to produce profitable customer acquisition.
Qaushik Labs audits paid advertising accounts across campaign structure, keywords, search terms, audiences, bidding, creative, landing pages, conversion tracking and budget allocation to identify where performance can be improved.
A PPC Audit Should Explain Where Your Advertising Budget Is Actually Going
The purpose of an audit is not to produce a long checklist. It is to identify the issues that have the greatest impact on leads, sales and advertising efficiency.
Paid media accounts often accumulate complexity over time. New campaigns are added, targeting changes, conversion actions multiply, automated bidding is introduced and old settings remain active long after their original purpose has disappeared.
This can make it difficult to determine whether poor results are caused by market conditions, targeting, campaign structure, conversion tracking, landing pages or the underlying offer.
A structured audit separates these issues and prioritises the changes most likely to improve commercial performance.
A PPC Audit Can Help Identify
- Wasted advertising spend
- Irrelevant search traffic
- Weak campaign structure
- Incorrect conversion tracking
- Low-quality lead sources
- Poor geographic targeting
- Inefficient bidding
- Creative fatigue
- Landing-page weaknesses
- Missed scaling opportunities
When Should You Audit a Paid Advertising Account?
Costs Are Increasing
CPC, CPL or CPA has increased without a corresponding improvement in lead quality or customer value.
Lead Quality Is Poor
Campaigns generate enquiries, but sales teams report irrelevant, unqualified or low-intent prospects.
Performance Has Declined
An account that previously performed reliably has gradually become less efficient.
Tracking Is Unclear
Platform conversions do not match CRM, ecommerce, analytics or actual sales data.
The Account Has Become Complex
Multiple campaigns, objectives, agencies or historical changes have made the account difficult to evaluate.
You Want to Scale
Before increasing budget, confirm that campaign structure, tracking and conversion economics are reliable.
What We Review in a PPC Audit
Paid media performance is influenced by more than campaign settings. The audit examines the complete path from audience or search intent through to conversion.
Account Structure
Review campaigns, ad groups, products, services, objectives and budgets to identify unnecessary complexity or insufficient segmentation.
Targeting
Examine keywords, audiences, geographic settings, placements and exclusions.
Conversion Tracking
Verify whether campaigns are optimising toward accurate and commercially meaningful actions.
Advertising Creative
Review ad copy, image and video creative, offers and message relevance.
Landing Pages
Assess whether visitors reach pages that match their intent and support conversion.
Budget Allocation
Identify whether spend is concentrated on campaigns producing commercially useful results.
Google Ads Account Audit
Google Ads accounts can lose efficiency through irrelevant search terms, weak campaign segmentation, incorrect location settings, poor negative keyword coverage or unreliable conversion signals.
Automated campaign types and bidding strategies can amplify these problems if the underlying data is inaccurate.
Our audit examines how search demand is being captured, what Google is actually spending money on and whether that traffic contributes to useful customer acquisition.
Google Ads Audit Areas
- Campaign structure
- Search terms
- Keyword targeting
- Match types
- Negative keywords
- Search partner settings
- Location targeting
- Bidding strategies
- Performance Max structure
- Shopping and product feeds
- Ad assets
- Conversion tracking
Are You Paying for Searches That Will Never Become Customers?
One of the most important parts of a Google Ads audit is comparing the keywords being targeted with the actual searches generating clicks.
Irrelevant Queries
Identify searches unrelated to the product, service or commercial objective.
Low-Intent Searches
Separate research, informational and low-commercial-intent traffic from genuine buying or enquiry intent.
New Opportunities
Search-term reports can also reveal converting keywords that deserve dedicated campaigns or landing pages.
Negative Keyword Audit
Negative keywords are one of the simplest controls available in paid search, yet they are often neglected as accounts grow.
A business may repeatedly pay for searches involving jobs, training, free resources, unrelated locations or services it does not provide.
We review historical search behaviour to identify negative keyword opportunities while avoiding exclusions that could accidentally remove valuable demand.
Common Negative Keyword Categories
- Jobs and careers
- Free resources
- Unrelated products
- Wrong services
- Unserviceable locations
- Educational intent
- DIY intent
- Irrelevant meanings
Performance Max Audit
Performance Max can simplify campaign management, but automation does not remove the need for commercial oversight.
Conversion Inputs
Review whether Performance Max is optimising toward genuinely valuable actions.
Asset Groups
Assess whether products, services and creative are grouped logically enough to provide useful signals.
Product Performance
Ecommerce accounts should identify where automated spend is concentrated across different products.
Brand Traffic
Understand whether apparent performance depends heavily on existing brand demand.
Search Insights
Examine available search and audience insights to understand the demand being captured.
Budget Allocation
Determine whether automation is spending across products and categories in line with commercial priorities.
Facebook & Instagram Ads Account Audit
Meta accounts usually require a different audit framework because performance depends heavily on creative response, conversion signals and the relationship between audience, offer and campaign objective.
A campaign can generate very cheap leads while producing little commercial value if forms are too easy to complete or campaigns optimise toward weak signals.
We review both platform performance and what happens after the lead or purchase reaches the business.
Meta Ads Audit Areas
- Campaign objectives
- Campaign structure
- Audience strategy
- Creative performance
- Frequency
- Placement performance
- Lead-form quality
- Landing pages
- Pixel implementation
- Conversions API
- Conversion events
- Customer acquisition cost
Advertising Creative Audit
Paid media performance can deteriorate even when targeting remains unchanged because customers stop responding to the advertisements.
Message Testing
Review whether campaigns test genuinely different customer propositions rather than cosmetic variations.
Creative Fatigue
Identify advertisements that may be losing effectiveness as audience frequency increases.
Format Coverage
Evaluate whether image, video, carousel or other available formats are being used appropriately.
Offer Clarity
Determine whether customers can quickly understand the service, product or proposition being promoted.
Ad-to-Page Consistency
Compare advertisement messaging with the landing page customers reach after clicking.
Creative-Level Economics
Compare advertisements based on conversions and customer value rather than engagement metrics alone.
Conversion Tracking Is Often the Most Important Part of a PPC Audit
If conversion data is wrong, campaign optimisation can be wrong even when every other account setting appears technically correct.
Missing Conversions
Important calls, forms, purchases or appointment actions may not be tracked at all.
Duplicate Conversions
The same customer action may be recorded multiple times, artificially improving reported performance.
Wrong Primary Goals
Campaigns may optimise toward page views, button clicks or other low-value events.
Lead Quality Gap
Advertising platforms may report conversions without knowing whether those leads become qualified opportunities.
Revenue Errors
Incorrect ecommerce values can distort ROAS and automated bidding decisions.
Offline Conversions
Businesses with longer sales journeys may need to connect advertising leads with CRM or offline sales outcomes.
A £10 Lead Can Be More Expensive Than a £50 Lead
Cost per lead only becomes meaningful when considered alongside lead quality and sales conversion.
An advertising campaign generating inexpensive enquiries may appear efficient until the business discovers that almost none of those prospects meet its requirements.
A PPC audit should therefore examine downstream commercial outcomes where that information is available.
Lead Quality Signals
- Correct location
- Relevant service
- Appropriate budget
- Realistic timeline
- Valid contact information
- Sales qualification
- Appointment booked
- Opportunity created
- Customer acquired
Location Targeting Audit
Businesses can waste significant advertising budget reaching locations they cannot serve profitably.
Target Locations
Confirm campaigns are targeting the intended cities, regions or service areas.
Location Options
Review platform location settings that can change who is considered eligible to see the advertisement.
Geographic Performance
Compare CPL, CPA, revenue and lead quality across different geographic markets.
PPC Budget Allocation Audit
A common problem is not insufficient budget, but budget being distributed to the wrong campaigns.
High-Spend Campaigns
Identify whether the largest campaigns are producing proportional commercial value.
Limited Campaigns
Identify profitable campaigns that may be unnecessarily constrained by budget.
Marginal Spend
Determine whether additional budget is improving total customer acquisition or simply increasing cost.
PPC Audits Should Include Landing Pages
Advertising platforms can deliver qualified traffic, but poor landing pages can prevent that traffic from converting.
If a campaign has strong commercial intent but weak conversion rates, the problem may be outside the advertising account itself.
We therefore review the relationship between the ad, the customer's expectation and the destination page.
Landing Page Audit Areas
- Message relevance
- Headline clarity
- Offer clarity
- Mobile usability
- Page speed
- Trust signals
- Form friction
- Calls to action
- Conversion tracking
PPC Performance Cannot Be Audited Without Understanding Customer Value
There is no universal good CPL, CPA or ROAS. The correct target depends on the economics of the business.
Average Customer Value
Understand the value generated when an advertising lead becomes a customer.
Gross Margin
Revenue alone does not determine whether ecommerce acquisition is profitable.
Sales Conversion Rate
Lead generation should consider how many enquiries ultimately convert into customers.
Lifetime Value
Repeat purchases may justify a higher initial customer acquisition cost.
Sales Cycle
Long consideration periods can make immediate platform attribution incomplete.
Operational Capacity
Scaling advertising makes little sense if the business cannot effectively handle additional demand.
Paid Advertising Audit for Ecommerce Stores
Ecommerce accounts require product-level analysis because revenue and profitability can vary substantially across the catalogue.
Product Performance
Identify which products generate revenue, profit and inefficient advertising spend.
Merchant Center
Review feed quality, product titles, attributes and potential product disapprovals.
ROAS Quality
Compare advertising revenue against actual margins and commercial objectives.
New vs Existing Customers
Understand whether advertising is acquiring genuinely new customers or capturing repeat demand.
Category Performance
Evaluate major categories separately instead of relying entirely on account-level averages.
Landing Page Conversion
Review whether product and collection pages convert paid traffic efficiently.
Ecommerce businesses may also benefit from our Ecommerce SEO services .
A Useful PPC Audit Should Prioritise Actions
Finding 100 issues is less useful than knowing which five should be fixed first.
Critical Issues
Problems affecting tracking, major budget waste or campaign optimisation should receive immediate attention.
Efficiency Improvements
Changes that can reduce waste or improve conversion quality should be prioritised next.
Growth Opportunities
Identify campaigns, services, products or locations that may justify additional investment.
How We Audit Paid Advertising Accounts
Understand the Business
Establish products, services, customer value, margins and commercial objectives.
Review Measurement
Validate conversion tracking before relying heavily on reported campaign performance.
Analyse Account Structure
Examine campaigns, ad groups, objectives, targeting and budget distribution.
Analyse Traffic Quality
Review searches, audiences, placements, locations and other traffic sources.
Review Conversion Journey
Evaluate advertisements, landing pages, lead quality and sales outcomes where available.
Prioritise Actions
Organise findings according to commercial impact and practical implementation priority.
Advertising Performance Should Be Evaluated Against Industry Economics
Jewellery
Review Shopping, Search, Meta prospecting, remarketing and ecommerce acquisition performance.
Jewellery Digital MarketingInterior Designers
Evaluate whether paid campaigns are generating realistic project opportunities rather than cheap enquiries.
Interior Designers Digital MarketingFurniture
Audit campaigns for showroom visits, product enquiries, ecommerce purchases and commercial furniture leads.
Furniture Digital MarketingHealthcare
Review local targeting, treatment campaigns, appointment generation and patient enquiry quality.
Healthcare Digital MarketingBeauty
Evaluate advertising for appointments, treatments, courses and training enquiries.
Beauty Digital MarketingConstruction
Assess campaign quality around high-value construction, renovation and contracting enquiries.
Construction Digital MarketingFrom PPC Audit to Ongoing Campaign Management
An audit can stand alone or act as the starting point for restructuring and ongoing paid media management.
Google Ads Management
Search, Shopping, Performance Max and other Google campaigns focused on measurable acquisition.
Explore Google AdsMeta Ads Management
Facebook and Instagram advertising built around creative performance, leads and ecommerce sales.
Explore Meta AdsChatGPT Ads
Prepare for conversational advertising and emerging AI-native customer acquisition opportunities.
Explore ChatGPT AdsServices That Support PPC Performance
PPC Audit FAQs
What is a PPC audit?
A PPC audit is a structured review of paid advertising campaigns designed to identify problems with targeting, structure, bidding, tracking, creative, landing pages and advertising efficiency.
What platforms can be included in a PPC audit?
PPC audits can include Google Ads, Meta Ads and other relevant paid media platforms depending on the campaigns currently being used.
Can you audit Google Ads without taking over the account?
Yes. An audit can be completed as a standalone diagnostic exercise without requiring ongoing campaign management.
How do you identify wasted Google Ads spend?
We review search terms, targeting, locations, campaign structure, conversion performance and other areas where spend may not be contributing to useful business outcomes.
Does a PPC audit include conversion tracking?
Yes. Conversion tracking is a critical audit area because inaccurate conversion signals can distort reporting, automated bidding and campaign optimisation.
Can a PPC audit help with poor-quality leads?
Yes. The audit can examine keywords, audiences, locations, forms, creative and optimisation signals that may be contributing to low-quality enquiries.
Should I audit campaigns before increasing my budget?
It is often useful. Scaling inefficient campaigns can simply increase wasted spend, so validating tracking, traffic quality and customer economics before substantial budget increases can reduce risk.
What happens after a PPC audit?
Findings can be prioritised into immediate fixes, efficiency improvements and growth opportunities. The business can implement them internally or use them as the basis for ongoing paid media management.
Audit PPC Performance Before Spending More
If Google Ads or Meta Ads is generating inconsistent results, expensive leads, weak sales or unclear reporting, Qaushik Labs can review the account and identify the issues most likely to affect commercial performance.