How do you audit a Google Ads account you've inherited?

When an account lands on your desk, the temptation is to fix what looks wrong straight away. I'd resist it. A Google Ads account is a record of decisions someone made for reasons you can't see yet, and the quickest way to lose that record is to start pausing things.

The audit has one job: find out what the account is actually optimising for, and whether the data it learns from can be trusted. Everything else (ad copy, keywords, bids) sits downstream of that.

Why should you audit before you change anything?

An audit done in the right order saves you from fixing the wrong thing. Each step below depends on the one before it, because search terms and structure mean little until you trust the numbers.

The order I check things in

1. Access and ownership. Who owns the account, who else has access, and is billing yours or someone else's?
2. Conversion tracking. What is being counted, and does it match a real business outcome?
3. Change history. What was changed, when, and what happened next?
4. Search terms. What are people actually typing before they see the ads?
5. Structure and budget. Which campaigns get the money, and why?
6. Ads and landing pages. Only now, because they're the easiest thing to see and the least likely to be the root cause.

That order is deliberate. Steps one to three tell you whether the numbers are real. Steps four to six tell you where the money goes. Reading them the other way round means you'll spend a day tuning an account that was measuring the wrong thing.

What do you check first: access and conversion tracking?

Access and billing

Before any analysis, confirm the account sits under an account you control or at least can see, and look at who has access. Google documents user access levels for manager accounts, and the practical point is simple: if a previous agency still has admin rights, or the account is only reachable through their manager account, sort that out in week one, calmly and in writing. You can't audit something you could lose access to.

Conversion goals: the setting that steers everything

This is where I'd spend the most time. Google splits conversion actions into primary and secondary. According to Google Ads Help, primary actions feed the main Conversions column and, where the goal is used for bidding, they steer Smart Bidding. Secondary actions are observation only. Google also notes that conversions imported from Google Analytics start as secondary, and that a wrong setting can stop Smart Bidding optimising well.

So ask these questions of every conversion action:

• Is it a real outcome (a quote request, a call, a purchase), or a soft signal like a page view or a button click?
• Is it counted once per enquiry, or every time someone reloads a thank-you page?
• Is it primary because someone chose that, or because it was the default?
• Does the number in the account roughly match what the business says it received?

If an account is bidding towards page views, it will find you cheap page views. The campaign looks efficient and the phone doesn't ring. I'd rather inherit a messy account with honest conversions than a tidy one that's counting the wrong thing. Uppercut's piece on what to track before you pay for traffic goes further on setting this up from scratch.

How do you use change history to read the account's past?

Change history is the closest thing an inherited account has to a diary. Google's documentation says it covers the past two years, and you can filter by date range, change type, campaign or ad group. That makes it easy to answer the questions that matter: when did the budget jump, when did the bid strategy change, and what was edited just before performance moved?

Google also annotates changes directly on performance charts, which Search Engine Journal reported in February 2020. Hovering over a marker shows what was edited in that period, so you can line a dip or a spike up against a specific decision.

What I look for

• Bid strategy swaps. A move from manual bidding to a target-based strategy resets how the account learns.
• Conversion goal edits. A change here can make before and after numbers incomparable.
• Bursts of edits. Dozens of changes in a day usually mean someone was panicking.
• Long silences. No changes for months means nobody was minding the account.

One limit worth knowing: the Google Ads API's change event data goes back only 30 days, so if you're pulling history through a script or a tool, the interface is the better source for the long view.

What can the search terms report tell you about an inherited account?

The search terms report shows the actual searches that triggered the ads, along with how each matched your keywords. It's the quickest honest view of whether the account is reaching buyers or just anyone who typed a related word.

Google is upfront that the report leaves out low-volume queries for privacy, so it never shows the whole picture. It's still the best evidence you have. Pull a long date range, sort by spend, and read the top fifty terms with the business owner beside you if you can.

Three patterns that matter

• Irrelevant spend. Searches for jobs, free options, DIY or the wrong product. These point to missing negatives or loose matching.
• Brand terms hiding the results. If most conversions come from people already searching for the business, the non-brand campaigns may be weaker than the blended number suggests.
• Good terms with no campaign of their own. Queries that convert but sit inside a catch-all campaign deserve their own budget line.

If the findings point to loose matching, Uppercut has already covered the fix in how to stop broad match burning your budget, and automated campaign types are covered in why Performance Max wastes budget. I won't repeat either here. The audit question is only whether the account has the problem, not how to cure it.

What should you leave alone in the first week?

The audit is read-only. Here's what I'd keep my hands off until the picture is clear, and why.

The Smart Bidding timing comes from the same Google Ads Help page on conversion actions, and the Quality Score point from Google's Quality Score explainer.

The one thing I'd fix straight away

If tracking is plainly broken, or the account is spending on something clearly wrong, fix that first and tell the owner you did. Everything else waits. A short, written list of "found, fixed, waiting" in the first week builds more trust than a flurry of edits.

What does fixing the foundations actually do?

I can't share ad account data from clients, so I'll stick to published Uppercut case studies, which the team delivered together. More are on my results page.

Element Fitness already had a Google Ads account. Per the case study, it lacked proper structure, campaigns were broad and there was no ad copy testing. Moving to conversion-focused bidding and tighter keyword targeting went alongside a 104% rise in PPC sessions, a 20% lift in website conversion rate and a 223% rise in free trial sign-ups.

For Pamido, the published results show a 280% rise in Google Ads conversions and a 68% drop in cost per conversion over a six-month comparison, with the case study noting that conversion growth outpaced the change in media spend. That programme also included SEO work, so I wouldn't credit the ads alone.

Neither is a promise of what an audit will do for your account. What they show is the pattern: the gains came from getting structure, targeting and measurement right, not from a clever trick. I worked on these with the Uppercut team, and the lesson I take is that the boring checks come first. If you'd like a second pair of eyes on an account you've inherited, that's the work I do as a Google Ads consultant in Sydney.

A simple scorecard to take away

If you'd rather talk it through, get in touch and bring the account.