How to Audit a Contractor Google Ads Account Before Making Changes

Define the review and preserve a baseline

Confirm the date range, account, billing owner, service lines, service area and the decision the audit should support. Record current campaign status, budgets, bidding approach, networks, landing pages and conversion actions. Export or capture a baseline according to the business’s data policy before making edits.

Ask the owner whether campaigns have seasonal or contractual constraints and whether another provider is actively working in the account. Avoid changing high-impact settings while you are still learning how leads are routed. An audit can be read-only until the business approves a corrective action.

Review user access and change history

Inspect users, manager links, billing roles and recovery contacts. Confirm that each person has an active business reason for access. Google’s security guidance recommends reviewing account permissions; remove former users through the authorized owner’s process when appropriate.

Use Change History to see who changed budgets, ads, keywords or settings and when. The record also includes some automated and API changes. Compare the timeline with campaign performance, but do not assume correlation proves a change caused the result. Ask the prior operator for context when the record is ambiguous.

Check campaign and service fit

Map each campaign to the work the contractor actually accepts. Confirm locations, schedules, exclusions and ad copy are accurate. Look for a campaign that combines unrelated repair, installation and emergency requests where the office needs different routing or landing pages. A simpler account may outperform a complicated one operationally even if it has fewer segments.

Review whether campaigns are eligible, limited by budget or paused and whether those statuses match the business plan. Do not infer that a low spend means the account needs more keywords; verify service availability, demand, quality and the owner’s budget first.

Inspect actual search terms and landing paths

Use the search terms report where data is available to understand which searches triggered ads and how they performed. Mark each as clearly relevant, possibly relevant or poor fit based on the company’s accepted jobs. Use negative terms cautiously; Google documents that their matching behavior differs from positive keywords.

Follow a sample of ad-to-page paths on mobile. The landing page should explain the same service and area, show a working call or request action, and avoid false availability claims. Verify phone destinations and form state. If a form is embedded, test only through an approved non-production route unless the owner authorizes a controlled record.

Validate conversion actions

List all actions currently reported as conversions and how each is triggered: successful form, call, booking, click, page load or imported event. Confirm names, categories, count rules and whether the action is primary for bidding. A button click should not be presented as a completed lead when the form submission can fail.

Compare a controlled test with the tag preview, analytics and CRM record. Preserve consent settings and avoid duplicate events from both the website and the embedded provider. If the implementation cannot distinguish a click from actual success, mark that as a measurement risk and resolve it before optimizing toward the event.

Rank findings by business risk

Put tracking failures, out-of-area targeting, unmonitored calls, unauthorized access and budget misalignment ahead of cosmetic naming preferences. Separate confirmed defects from observations and recommendations. Each finding should include what was checked, evidence, likely impact, owner and proposed fix.

Do not describe a lost lead or wasted dollar unless the CRM and account evidence support the claim. Note data gaps such as untracked calls, limited query visibility or an incomplete sample. An audit should be honest about what it cannot conclude.

Review changes with the business

Walk through the findings in plain language and show which adjustment addresses each issue. Confirm whether budget, geography, ad claims, tracking or routing changes need owner approval. In the managed Growth service, ordinary campaign monitoring and optimization are included within the agreed scope; media spend remains a separate business cost.

After approval, record the change, make one coherent set of edits and validate the outcome. Keep an undo or recovery path where the platform allows it. Give the owner a clear summary of what changed and what needs observation before another decision is made.

A useful audit output

• Account and date-range baseline.
• Access and change-history findings.
• Campaign-to-service and location map.
• Search-term examples with relevance decisions and proposed exclusions.
• Landing-page and phone/form checks.
• Conversion-action list with success criteria.
• Prioritized fixes, owner approvals and validation steps.

When not to trust a dashboard at face value

A dashboard can count a click, an event or a platform-attributed action without proving a qualified request or booked job. Compare it with real CRM or office outcomes and identify attribution windows. If the source data is incomplete, label the report as directional and repair the tracking before making a large budget decision.

The audit is a point-in-time review. Revisit it when the service mix, season, phone setup, ownership or advertising platform changes. Keep the original evidence so the next reviewer can tell which fixes were completed.