How to Audit a Google Ads Account You Just Inherited

A practitioner's order of operations for auditing an unfamiliar account without breaking what already works.

October 16, 2026 · QueryCut

Audit in this order: verify conversion tracking is counting the right actions, then read the money (where spend goes versus where conversions come from), then check search terms and negatives, then bids and budgets. Do not change anything structural for the first week. The single most dangerous assumption in an inherited account is that the numbers on the dashboard mean what you think they mean, so you confirm the measurement layer before you trust a single performance verdict.

First: confirm what the account is actually measuring

Every optimization decision downstream rests on conversion data, so if tracking is wrong, you will confidently optimize toward garbage. Go to Goals > Conversions > Summary. For each conversion action, check three things: the status (is it recording recent conversions, or has it gone 'No recent conversions'), whether it is set to 'Primary' or 'Secondary', and the counting setting ('One' versus 'Every').

The counting setting is where inherited accounts lie to you. A lead-gen account counting 'Every' conversion will inflate numbers when one person submits a form three times, or when a thank-you page gets reloaded. An e-commerce account should usually count 'Every' (every purchase matters) but a lead account should usually count 'One'. If someone set a lead form to 'Every', your reported cost per conversion is fiction and every CPA-based decision built on it is wrong.

Also check the attribution model (now data-driven by default, but older accounts may still sit on last-click) and the conversion window. A 90-day window makes recent campaigns look worse than mature ones purely because conversions are still rolling in. Note these before you compare anything. If you find double-counting (a 'Purchase' action and a 'Google Analytics purchase' both set to Primary), that alone can explain a suspiciously good ROAS.

Read the money before you read the opinions

Pull a 90-day view at the campaign level and sort by cost descending. You are answering one question: does spend concentrate where conversions concentrate? It is normal for the top three campaigns to eat most of the budget. It is a red flag when a campaign is top-three in spend and bottom-half in conversions.

Then segment the account by network. In the campaign table, use Segment > Network (with search partners). Display and Search spend getting blended in one reported number hides a common inherited mess: a 'Search' campaign with Display Network expansion left on, quietly spending a third of its budget on placements nobody chose. Shopping, Performance Max, and Search each behave differently in the auction, so never judge them against one blended CPA.

Check the time window honestly. Thirty days is too short to trust for anything but the highest-volume campaigns, because a handful of conversions swings the read. Ninety days smooths seasonality and gives most campaigns enough clicks to mean something. If a campaign has under roughly 100 clicks in 90 days, treat its CPA as a rumor, not a fact.

The search terms report is where the waste lives

Go to Campaigns > Insights and reports > Search terms. This is the highest-leverage screen in any inherited search account because it shows what people actually typed, as opposed to the keywords someone hoped they would type. Broad match and loosened phrase match mean the gap between the two is often large. Waste here is extremely common: irrelevant queries, job-seeker searches, competitor-name clicks, and 'free' or 'DIY' intent terms that will never convert.

Sort by cost and scan the top terms for intent mismatch. The decision rule for cutting: if a search term has spent more than roughly 3x your target cost per acquisition with zero conversions, add it as a negative. Below that, wait, because a single conversion you have not seen yet can flip the verdict and the cost of waiting is usually smaller than the cost of blocking a converter. For low-volume terms, group by theme rather than cutting one by one.

Remember the mechanics when you add negatives. A single negative keyword matches up to 10 words; longer phrases silently fail to block. Negatives do not account for close variants, so negative 'plumbers' will not stop 'plumber' (singular). And a negative at the ad group level only protects that ad group, which is why a shared negative list applied at the account or campaign level is the cleaner tool for broad junk like 'jobs', 'salary', and 'free'. Reviewing search terms by hand across a large account is slow, which is exactly the chore tools like QueryCut exist to compress, but the logic above is what you are applying either way.

Structure, bidding, and the traps that look like problems

Now look at Smart Bidding. Check each campaign's bid strategy and its target. A Target CPA or Target ROAS that was set during a different season, or set manually to an aggressive number, will throttle volume. The trap: do not rip out an automated bid strategy you just inherited on day one. These strategies learn from conversion history, and resetting them re-triggers a learning period where performance is unstable for one to two weeks. If the strategy is working, leave it. If it is clearly misconfigured (a Target ROAS of 1000 percent that is starving the campaign of impressions), loosen the target gradually, by 10 to 20 percent, rather than switching strategies entirely.

Check ad strength and asset counts in Responsive Search Ads, but weight this lightly. Ad strength is a Google-opinion metric about asset variety, not a performance guarantee; an 'Average' ad that converts beats an 'Excellent' one that does not. The more useful structural check is whether ad groups are themed tightly enough that one set of ads matches all the keywords in them. Sprawling ad groups with 40 unrelated keywords are a sign the account was never maintained.

The classic inherited-account trap: pausing the biggest spender because it has the worst-looking CPA. Before you do, check whether it is an upper-funnel or brand-defense campaign, whether other campaigns depend on it for assists, and whether its conversions are delayed by a long sales cycle. The obvious cut is sometimes the wrong move because the campaign's job was never direct-response conversion.

What you cannot know, and how to document it

Be honest about the limits. You cannot see why the previous manager made a given choice; some strange settings are mistakes and some are deliberate responses to context you lack. You cannot fully trust conversion data from before you verified tracking, so treat the pre-audit period as directional only. And data-driven attribution is a black box: you can see the credited conversions but not the exact path logic, so do not over-interpret small attribution shifts.

Write a one-page findings doc as you go: tracking issues found, where spend is concentrated, the top waste terms, bid strategies and their targets, and anything you deliberately chose not to touch yet and why. This protects you when results move in week two and someone asks what you changed. It also forces you to separate 'confirmed problem' from 'looks suspicious, needs more data'.

Set a review date two weeks out before you make your first structural change. The audit tells you where to look; the two-week window tells you whether your reads were real or just noise in a short time frame.

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