How I audit a Google Ads account in 30 minutes before I take on a new client.

Most audits take two weeks and produce a forty-page deck nobody reads. I do mine in thirty minutes and it tells me almost everything I need to know. Here are the four things I check, in the exact order I check them.

Before I agree to take on a new Google Ads client, I always ask for read-only access to their account for a day.

Not a sales call. Not a questionnaire. Not a deep-dive discovery session. Just thirty minutes alone with the account, before any pricing, before any proposal, before anyone has spent a rupee on fancy tools. In that thirty minutes, I can tell you with 90% confidence whether this account is a quick fix or a long project, whether the previous team was competent, whether the business owner is being told the truth in their monthly reports, and whether I should take the account at all.

I have done this probably two hundred times by now, across accounts spending anything from a few thousand rupees a month to several lakhs. The pattern is almost always the same. The problems hide in the same four places. If you check them in the right order, you do not need the forty-page deck. You just need thirty minutes and a willingness to look at the raw stuff instead of the dashboard summary.

Here is how I do it.

1. Conversion tracking. Always first. Always.

The first thing I open is the conversions page. Not the overview. Not the campaigns tab. The conversions page.

I am looking for four things. How many conversion actions are set up. Which ones are marked as primary. What values they have attached. And whether any of them are counting the same thing twice.

Here is why this is step one. Everything else in the account, every campaign, every bid strategy, every piece of reported ROAS, is downstream of what the account thinks a conversion is. If the conversions are set up wrong, nothing else matters. The bidding is optimising toward the wrong thing. The reports are lying. The client has been told the account is “performing” based on a number that was never real to begin with.

The things I see go wrong here, almost every time:

• A single “form submission” conversion counted as primary, with no value attached, firing on every form on the site including the newsletter signup and the contact page. The account thinks all leads are equal. They are not.
• Multiple conversion actions all firing on the same purchase or lead, so one action is being counted two or three times. Reported ROAS is three times the real ROAS. Nobody noticed.
• Enhanced conversions not turned on. Offline conversions never set up. The algorithm is bidding on surface-level events, not what actually happens after the click.
• A conversion labeled “Phone Call” that is actually just counting people who viewed the phone number, not people who called.

If I see any of these, I already know the first thirty days of work. Fix tracking. Nothing else matters until this is right.

Time spent: 5 minutes.

2. The search terms report. The one everyone skips.

Next, I go into search terms. Last 30 days. All campaigns. Sorted by cost, highest first.

This is where the real story of the account lives. The campaigns tab tells you how an account is performing on paper. The search terms report tells you what the account is actually doing with the client’s money. These are often two very different stories.

I scroll through the top fifty by spend. I am looking for three patterns.

The first pattern is budget going to junk queries. Searches that have nothing to do with what the business sells. “Free”, “jobs”, “how to”, “DIY”, competitor names being bid on by accident, generic category terms that are too broad to convert. In most accounts I audit, between 20% and 40% of spend is going to queries the client would never choose to pay for if they saw them on a list. Nobody is looking at the list.

The second pattern is the gap between what people search and what the ads say. The query is “emergency plumber near me”. The ad says “best plumbing services in your area”. That is a mismatch. People do not click on vague when they are typing urgent. Fixing this one gap is usually worth 20% to 30% of CTR without touching anything else.

The third pattern is hidden winners. Queries that converted once or twice but have never been promoted into their own campaign. These are the easiest money in any account. Pull them out, build a tight campaign around them, bid them properly. Within a month they usually become the top performers.

The search terms report is the single most underused tool in Google Ads. Most agencies glance at it monthly. The best ones live inside it.

Time spent: 10 minutes.

3. Account structure. Not pretty. Just functional.

Now I open the campaigns tab. I am not looking for clever structure. I am looking for whether the structure is doing the one job it is supposed to do, which is let the account separate signal from noise.

The questions I am asking in my head:

• Are brand and non-brand split into separate campaigns? If no, the brand searches are inflating the account’s performance. Every report is a lie. ROAS looks great because the client’s own name is converting cheaply. Non-brand is probably bleeding money and nobody has noticed because the overall number looks fine.
• Are high-margin products and low-margin products in separate campaigns with separate bid strategies? If no, the account is spending money on low-margin stuff at the same aggression as high-margin, and real profit is leaking out.
• Is Performance Max running alongside Search without proper negative keyword and brand exclusions? If yes, PMax is almost certainly stealing credit from Search and cannibalising the brand traffic. The reports show PMax “crushing it” while Search quietly dies. Classic trap.
• Are there ten campaigns doing the job of three? Or three campaigns doing the job of ten? Both are problems. The first is noise. The second is a lack of control.

I do not need the structure to be elegant. I need it to make decisions possible. Can I see what is working and what is not without doing math in my head? If yes, the structure is fine, even if it is ugly. If no, we are rebuilding.

Time spent: 8 minutes.

4. Change history. The honest confession.

The last five minutes, I always spend in the change history.

This is the one place in Google Ads where you cannot hide. It shows you every change made to the account, who made it, and when. It is the account’s diary. And it tells you more about how the account has been managed than any report ever will.

What I am looking for:

• How many changes per week. An account with zero changes for the last 60 days is being ignored. An account with 400 changes in the last week is being tortured. Both are red flags. Healthy accounts show steady, deliberate work. A few meaningful changes per week, not frantic ones.
• Whether the changes line up with results. If performance dropped on the 15th and I see twenty changes on the 14th, I know what happened. If performance has been flat for three months and the change history shows nothing but automated edits, I know why.
• Who is actually working on the account. Sometimes the change history shows an agency logged in once a month, made a few bid tweaks, and left. The client is paying for “management” that is barely happening.
• Whether anyone has been panicking. Lots of bid strategy swaps in a short window usually means someone was chasing a dip and making it worse. Bid strategies need two to four weeks to settle. If someone changes them weekly, nothing ever learns.

The change history, honestly read, tells you whether the previous team was doing the work or performing the work. There is a difference, and the account always knows.

Time spent: 5 minutes.

What this 30 minutes gives me.

By the end of this process, without opening a single third-party tool, without any fancy software, I can walk into a conversation with the client and tell them specifically:

Whether their tracking is lying to them. How much of their spend is going somewhere useful. Whether the account is structured to let anyone actually improve it. And whether the person running it before me was doing the job or just logging in.

Those four answers decide everything else. The pricing I quote. The timeline I promise. Whether I say yes at all. I have walked away from accounts where the first thirty minutes told me the business owner was being lied to and did not want to hear it. I have taken on accounts where the thirty minutes showed me a clear path to double performance in sixty days just by cleaning up the four things above.

The audit is not magic. It is just discipline. Look at the right four things, in the right order, with no agenda to sell anything, and the truth of the account shows itself fast.

Why most audits are longer, and worse.

A quick note on why most audits take two weeks and produce a huge deck. It is not because the account needs that much analysis. It is because the deck is a sales tool, not a diagnostic one. A long audit, with a lot of pages, justifies a bigger retainer. It makes the agency look thorough. It gives the client something that feels like value.

But the client does not need forty pages. They need the honest answer to four questions. Is the tracking right? Is the spend going to useful queries? Is the structure functional? Has anyone been doing real work on this account? Everything else in an audit is decoration.

If someone is auditing your account and cannot answer those four questions clearly in a thirty-minute conversation, they are either padding the work or they do not actually know what they are looking at. Both are a problem.

The take-home.

If you are a business owner reading this, go run your own version of this audit this week, or ask whoever runs your ads to walk you through those four areas on a call. If they stumble on any of them, you have your answer.

If you are a marketer, build the habit of looking at these four things first on every account you touch, including your own. It will make you faster, sharper, and much harder to fool.

The best marketers I know are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones who know exactly where to look first.

If you want me to run a quiet thirty-minute look at your own account, my inbox is open. No deck, no pitch, just an honest read on what is actually happening in there.

hello@hukumyadav.com