The Google Ads Audit

What it does

You pay for this every month. Most owners can't say what they got for it last month. A lot of them get a PDF from the company running it that says "impressions are up." This audit reads the real account, the same screens I'd open on a first call, and tells you in dollars where the money went.

It never changes anything. Not a setting, not a keyword, not a budget. It reads and takes screenshots. If a screen asks it to apply something, it backs out.

Before you start

• An AI that can drive a browser. Claude on the desktop app, Claude in Chrome, or ChatGPT in agent mode.
• Sign in to Google Ads first, in that browser. Read-only access is enough. It never asks for a password.
• No login? If your marketing company runs it and you can't get in, that's the first finding, and the file has the email to send them. Short version: add me as Admin, and confirm the account is under my business name.
• About 20 minutes.

What it checks

• What counts as a lead, before anything else. Every "conversion" in the account, and whether it counts a real call or form, or noise like a page view or a click on the phone number. If it's noise, every number in every report you've ever gotten is inflated, and the audit says so at the top.
• Where the ads show. Towns or radius, and the quiet setting underneath: "presence" or "presence or interest." The second one is the default and spends money on people in other states.
• Search partners and Display. Both on by default, both spend contractor money on junk.
• What people typed. The search terms report, last 90 days, top 100 at least. Each one sorted: money, wrong job, wrong place, do-it-yourself, job seekers, competitor names, junk. Everything but money, added up, is wasted spend. In dollars.
• Keywords and match types. Broad match with a short negative list is where the junk comes from.
• Ads and where they land. Does a "water heater repair" ad land on a water heater page or the home page? Is the number on that page the same as everywhere else? Is the page even yours?
• Auto-apply. Whether Google has been editing the account by itself.
• Performance Max and Local Services, if you have them.
• Billing and access. Whose card, whose name, and whether you're an Admin on your own account.

What you get back

One page. The wasted-spend number: dollars and share of the 90 days. The three biggest things with screenshots. A table of where the money went, by bucket, with the worst terms named. A Keep / Fix / Cut line for every setting. Cost per lead, with the conversion warning attached. Cost per booked job if you can tell it how many leads turned into work, or "can't tell" if you can't, which is its own finding. And the plain sentence: is this buying jobs or buying clicks.

The honest part

This is the account half of my first-call audit, nearly complete. It can't hear call recordings, and it can't see inside Performance Max, because nobody can. It also doesn't fix anything, on purpose. The fix-first is almost always the same three moves: make the conversions count real leads, add the negatives from the waste list, and turn off search partners and Display. If you want someone to do those, you know where I am. If you want to do them yourself, the file tells you which screens.

It's working if

• It told you what "conversion" means in your account before it showed you a single number.
• The wasted-spend number is in dollars and you can see the ten worst searches that made it up.
• It never asked for a password and never clicked Apply.

Common questions

My ads guy has the login, not me.

Then that's finding one, and it matters more than anything in the account. The audit drafts the email asking for Admin access. A real marketing company sends it back the same day.

Will it pause anything or change my budget?

No. It can't. It reads and screenshots. If a screen asks it to confirm something, it backs out.

What if I don't know how many leads became jobs?

It says "can't tell" for cost per booked job and tells you that answering it is the most useful thing you can start doing: ask every caller where they found you and write it down.

Is it going to tell me my agency is bad?

It won't say that. It shows the screen. The screen says what it says.

Where it fits

The audit Ask Joey sends you to when you're paying for ads and can't say what you get. Run the website audit after it, because every ad lands on a page and that page decides whether the click becomes a call.