How Do You Audit an Existing PPC Account?

Inheriting an existing PPC account, whether from a previous agency, a former employee, or your own accumulated years of campaigns, means inheriting every decision made along the way, good and bad. A proper audit finds exactly what's working, what's quietly wasting budget, and what's been left misconfigured since the account was first built. This guide walks through a structured process for auditing an account thoroughly, rather than just skimming the dashboard for obvious red flags.

Why a Structured Audit Beats a Quick Scan

Most people open an existing account and start with whatever catches their eye first, usually the campaigns spending the most. This approach misses systemic issues that don't show up in a quick glance, like a tracking setup that's been broken for months, or a Quality Score problem quietly inflating costs across dozens of keywords. A structured audit works through the account layer by layer, from account settings down to individual keywords, so nothing significant gets missed simply because it wasn't the first thing visible on the dashboard.

Step One: Account Structure and Settings

Campaign Organization

Check whether campaigns are organized logically, by product line, service, or intent, rather than as one large catch-all campaign trying to cover everything. A poorly structured account often has overlapping keywords across multiple campaigns, competing against each other in the same auction and quietly driving up costs.

Conversion Tracking

Confirm conversion tracking is actually firing correctly, for every conversion action currently marked as active in the account. This is one of the most commonly broken elements in an inherited account, since a website redesign, a platform migration, or a tag manager change can silently break tracking without triggering any obvious alert. An account optimizing toward broken or inaccurate conversion data has effectively been flying blind, regardless of how good the rest of the setup looks.

Linked Accounts and Data Sources

Check whether Google Analytics, Google Merchant Center, and any relevant CRM integrations are properly linked and actively syncing data. A previously linked account that's since disconnected, often due to an expired authorization or an unrelated account change elsewhere, can quietly cut off data the campaigns are still assumed to be using.

Step Two: Budget and Bidding Review

Budget Allocation Across Campaigns

Compare each campaign's budget against its actual performance. Look specifically for high-performing campaigns being capped by budget, alongside underperforming campaigns receiving a disproportionate share of overall spend, a common and easily overlooked misallocation in accounts that haven't been reviewed in a while.

Bid Strategy Appropriateness

Review which bid strategy each campaign is using and whether it still fits the campaign's actual goal and current data volume. An automated bid strategy set up when a campaign had very little conversion data may have been performing poorly simply because the algorithm never had enough data to optimize properly, a problem that may have resolved itself since if the campaign now has significantly more conversion history to work with.

Step Three: Keyword-Level Review

Search Terms Report

Pull the search terms report and review what people were actually searching when your ads showed, not just the keywords you targeted. This frequently reveals irrelevant traffic slipping through broad match keywords, wasting spend on searches that were never going to convert.

Negative Keyword Coverage

Check whether a negative keyword list has been actively maintained, or whether it's been left untouched for a long stretch of time. An account with no recent negative keyword additions, despite months or years of search term data available, is very likely bleeding budget on irrelevant traffic that a quick negative keyword pass would eliminate.

Keyword Match Types

Review the balance of exact, phrase, and broad match keywords across the account. An account leaning heavily on broad match without strong negative keyword coverage and careful monitoring often shows inflated impression volume paired with a weak overall conversion rate.

Quality Score Distribution

Look at Quality Score across all active keywords, not just the ones spending the most. A cluster of keywords with persistently low Quality Scores points to a deeper relevance or landing page issue worth investigating in more depth, rather than a scattered, unrelated set of underperformers.

Step Four: Ad Copy and Creative Review

Ad Testing History

Check whether ad groups have multiple ad variations actively testing against each other, or whether a single ad has been running unchanged for a long period. Stagnant, untested ad copy is one of the most common, easily fixable issues found in an inherited account.

Ad Extension Completeness

Confirm sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and any other relevant extensions are fully configured, current, and not pointing to outdated pages or promotions that ended long ago.

Ad Relevance to Landing Pages

Click through a sample of your own ads across different campaigns and confirm each one lands on a page that still matches what the ad promises. Outdated promotions, discontinued products, or content that's since been moved or redesigned are common culprits behind a relevance mismatch that's gone unnoticed.

Step Five: Audience and Targeting Review

Location Targeting

Confirm geographic targeting still matches the business's actual current service area, since this is often set once at account creation and never revisited, even as a business's service area expands or contracts over time.

Audience Layering

Check whether relevant audience segments, like remarketing lists or in-market audiences, are being layered onto campaigns for insight or bid adjustment purposes, rather than left completely unused.

Device Performance

Review performance broken down by device type. A significant performance gap between mobile and desktop, without any corresponding bid adjustment or dedicated mobile landing page experience, often points to an easy, high-impact fix.

A Practical Audit Checklist

How to Prioritize What You Find

An audit typically surfaces more issues than can be fixed all at once. Prioritize based on two factors: how much wasted spend or missed opportunity the issue represents, and how quickly it can realistically be fixed. Broken conversion tracking and irrelevant traffic from missing negative keywords usually sit at the top of this list, since they directly waste existing budget and are typically fast to correct, while deeper structural changes, like fully reorganizing campaign structure, often take longer and can wait until the more urgent fixes are addressed first.

Documenting the Audit for Future Reference

Record findings in a clear, organized format rather than only making changes directly in the account, since a documented audit gives you a before-and-after reference point to measure improvement against, and provides useful context for anyone else who works on the account later. This documentation also becomes valuable evidence of the specific value added, particularly useful if the audit was conducted to demonstrate an improvement opportunity to a client or stakeholder.

Final Thoughts

A thorough PPC audit works systematically through account structure, budget and bidding, keyword-level data, ad copy, and targeting, rather than reacting only to whatever looks obviously wrong at first glance. Broken conversion tracking and unmaintained negative keywords are often the most damaging, and the most fixable, issues an audit uncovers. Prioritize fixes by combining potential impact with ease of implementation, document what you find and change, and treat the audit as the foundation for an ongoing optimization plan rather than a one-time cleanup exercise.