Account Health
The PPC audit checklist
The exact checklist we work through on every account review, organized by tracking, structure, targeting, creative, and bidding. Free to copy, use, and run yourself.
The methodology
What we look for
When an ad account is failing, the instinct is often to rewrite the ad copy or double the budget. The reality is usually less dramatic and more technical. Accounts fail because the structure prevents the budget from reaching the right searches, or because the tracking is misinforming the bidding algorithm.
This is the framework Viper Hold uses to audit prospective client accounts. You are welcome to run it yourself. If you go through these checks, you will uncover 90% of the wasted spend in your campaigns.
If you prefer not to spend an afternoon digging through search term reports, we run this process as a free service. You grant us read only access, and we deliver a written report detailing where the budget is leaking and what the fixes are worth.
Phase 1
Measurement and Tracking
If this layer is broken, every other observation is a guess. We do not look at bids until we trust the data.
- Are the primary conversion actions actually driving business value, or are they vanity metrics like "time on site"?
- Are there duplicate conversion tags firing for the same action?
- If the account is e commerce, is dynamic revenue tracking passing the exact cart value back to the platform?
- For lead generation, are offline conversions being imported back into the account to differentiate signed contracts from junk leads?
- Is Consent Mode implemented to handle users who decline cookies?
- Do the platform conversion totals reconcile (within 10-15%) with the CRM or shopping backend?
Phase 2
Account Structure and Targeting
How the campaigns are organized dictates how budget flows.
- Are brand terms and non brand terms separated into entirely different campaigns to protect the data?
- Is the Search Network campaign opted out of the Display Network expansion?
- Are location settings strictly set to "Presence" rather than the default "Presence or Interest"?
- Is the account relying heavily on Broad Match keywords without an extensive and actively managed negative keyword list?
- Are there campaign budgets that consistently exhaust early in the day, leaving high converting evening hours unserved?
- Are audiences layered onto the search campaigns in "Observation" mode to gather data on customer profiles?
Phase 3
Creative and Landing Pages
What the user sees before and after the click.
- Does the ad headline directly mirror the user’s search intent?
- Are there at least four ad extensions (sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets) active to maximize visual real estate?
- Is the ad copy making a specific, differentiated claim, or just relying on generic filler like "Best Service in Town"?
- Does the post click landing page immediately deliver what the ad promised?
- Is the primary call to action above the fold on mobile devices?
- Are landing pages taking longer than three seconds to load on a 4G connection?
Phase 4
Bidding and Automation
Checking whether the machine learning has been given the right guardrails.
- Is the chosen bid strategy aligned with the actual business goal (e.g. Target CPA for leads, Target ROAS for e commerce)?
- If using Target CPA, is the target set realistically based on a rolling 30 day historical average?
- If Performance Max is running, are brand exclusions applied so it doesn’t cannibalize existing search traffic?
- Are there massive bid adjustments applied manually that conflict with an automated bidding strategy?
- Is the account suffering from constant bid strategy resets due to overly frequent budget or target changes?
Questions
Frequently asked questions
How often should an ad account be audited?
A full structural audit is required when taking over an account or when performance heavily degrades. Otherwise, a lighter version of this checklist should be run quarterly to ensure automation hasn’t drifted.
Do I need special tools to run this audit?
No. Everything on this checklist can be investigated directly within the Google Ads or Microsoft Ads interface, supplemented by Google Analytics and your own CRM data.
Next step
Find out what your account is wasting
Send us access and we will come back with a written audit: where the budget is leaking, what it is costing you, and the three fixes worth doing first. No charge, no obligation.