Audit Your Google Ads Account in 5 Steps to Stop Wasting Budget on Invisible Mistakes

Google Ads Audit With Claude

By the end of this guide, you'll be able to run a complete Google Ads audit in under 20 minutes using Claude — catching wasted spend, identifying underperforming keywords, and generating a prioritized action plan you can hand directly to your client or use yourself.

Who This Is For

  • You're running Google Ads yourself or managing an account someone else set up

  • You're getting clicks but not conversions and don't know why

  • You inherited an account and don't know what's broken under the hood

  • Your cost per conversion keeps climbing and adjusting bids isn't fixing it

  • You want a quarterly account health check before you scale spend

What You'll Fix

Five structural problems that cause most Google Ads waste — in the order you should fix them:

  1. Conversion tracking errors — duplicate tags inflating reported conversions and corrupting Smart Bidding

  2. Mixed Search + Display campaigns — search budget silently routing to display placements with no purchase intent

  3. Broad match keyword waste — budget going to irrelevant queries with no negative keyword list to stop it

  4. Under-resourced PMAX campaigns — incomplete asset groups limiting auction eligibility

  5. Wrong conversion goals — Smart Bidding optimizing for page views and scroll depth instead of revenue

What You'll Need

  • An active Google Ads account with spend history

  • Google Tag Assistant Legacy — free Chrome extension (search "Tag Assistant Legacy" in the Chrome Web Store)

  • 45–60 minutes

Going Further

  • Monthly Search Terms review — set a recurring calendar reminder to pull the Search Terms report, add new negatives, and check for new waste categories. Broad match evolves constantly.

  • PMAX asset rotation — after filling asset slots, check asset performance quarterly. Google shows which headlines and images are getting the most impressions. Remove the lowest performers and test new ones.

  • Conversion tracking audit after any site change — any time you update your website, CMS, or tag setup, re-run Step 1. Tag fires break silently and no one notices until ROAS craters.