What a Google Ads Audit Actually Finds

I've now looked under the hood of enough Google Ads accounts, self-managed and agency-run, to stop being surprised by what turns up. The same three problems show up again and again, and none of them are visible from the reports your agency sends you every month.

The tracking is wrong, and has been for a while

This is the one that catches people out most. Your monthly report shows conversions climbing, so everything looks fine. Then you open the account and find the conversion action counting every form page view, not just submissions, or a duplicate tag firing twice per lead, or tracking that quietly broke after a website update six months ago and was never reconnected. The dashboard still shows numbers. They're just not the numbers you think they are.

I don't take an agency's reported results at face value in an audit. I check what the conversion action is actually counting, whether it matches a real business outcome, and whether the numbers in Google Ads line up with what's landing in your inbox or CRM. Most of the time they don't match closely enough to explain by rounding.

Broad match is spending your budget on searches that were never going to convert

Google pushes broad match hard, and to be fair to it, broad match paired with genuinely good conversion data can work. The problem is most small accounts don't have the conversion volume for Smart Bidding to learn from, so broad match ends up matching on vague relevance instead of real intent. I've seen trade services accounts paying for clicks on "how to" searches from people who were never going to hire anyone, and service businesses paying for clicks in suburbs an hour outside where they'll actually travel.

None of this shows up as an obvious red flag in the dashboard. It shows up as a search terms report nobody's opened in months.

The account is still running on whatever it defaulted to

Campaigns get built, launched, and then left. Bid strategies set at kickoff and never revisited once there was enough data to justify a change. Ad groups from eighteen months ago sitting next to ones added last quarter, with no consistency in structure between them. Auto-apply recommendations quietly switching on because nobody went in and turned them off.

None of this is malicious. It's just what happens when an account isn't actively reviewed, whether that's because a freelancer took on too many clients or an agency account manager moved on and nobody picked it back up properly.

Why this matters more in a seasonal market

Cairns adds a layer most audit checklists don't account for. Cost per click on tourism and trade terms moves hard between wet and dry season, and a bid strategy or budget that made sense in June can be badly out of step with the market by November. An account that isn't reviewed regularly doesn't just drift, it ends up paying peak-season prices for off-peak traffic without anyone noticing until the quarterly numbers look off.

What to do with this

If any of this sounds familiar, and you're not sure whether it applies to your account specifically, that's what a standalone audit is for. It's a read-only review, no changes to your live account, and no obligation to move to ongoing management afterward. You get a plain write-up of what's actually happening in your account, not what the dashboard says is happening.