The 10-Point Google Ads Health Check: An Agency Owner's Framework for Auditing New Accounts

Inheriting a new Google Ads account feels a bit like being handed the keys to a mystery car. Is it a finely tuned machine, or is it a clunker held together with duct tape and burning oil on the inside? You just don't know. The client says it's 'going alright', but let's be honest, the previous agency is gone for a reason.

Your first job, before you even think about building a new campaign, is to run a proper diagnostic. You need to understand what's working, what's broken, and where the low-hanging fruit is. This not only forms the basis of your strategy but also immediately demonstrates your value to the new client. It shows you're methodical, you know your stuff, and you're not going to guess with their money.

Over the years at Straight Up Digital, we've refined this process into a repeatable framework. It's not about running some automated tool that spits out a generic score. It's a manual, strategic dig through the account to find the real story. Here's our 10-point health check for taking on any new Google Ads account.

1. Get the Foundations Right: Account Settings

Before you even look at a keyword, check the plumbing. The amount of money wasted on foundational errors is staggering. It's the least glamorous part of an audit, but it's where you'll often find the fastest wins.

Key things to check:

• Conversion Tracking: This is non-negotiable. Is it set up? More importantly, is it tracking actions that actually matter? I've seen accounts 'optimising' for newsletter sign-ups when the client only cares about qualified phone calls. Check the 'Conversions' section to see what's set as a 'Primary' versus 'Secondary' action. The algorithm only optimises for primary actions. Is Google Analytics 4 connected properly? Is enhanced conversion tracking enabled to feed better data back to Google? If the measurement is wrong, every decision that follows will be wrong too.
• Location Targeting: Check the campaign settings. Does the targeting match the client's actual service area? Pay close attention to the advanced setting: 'Target: People in or regularly in your targeted locations'. Too often, it's left on the default 'People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations'. For a local plumber in Sydney, this means they could be paying for clicks from someone in Perth planning a holiday. Add specific exclusions for other states and territories. Precision here is key.
• Change History: This is your secret weapon. The change history tells you a story without the spin. You can see exactly what the last agency was doing. Were they actively managing the account with frequent, small tweaks? Or did they just set it and forget it for three months? You can spot big structural changes, panicked budget shifts, and bidding strategy tests right here. It's the first place I look to get an unfiltered view of the account's past.

2. Unpack the Campaign Structure

A messy campaign structure is a direct window into the mind of the previous manager. Chaos here leads to poor performance, budget inefficiencies, and painful reporting.

I often see the dreaded 'one campaign to rule them all'. This is where every service and keyword for a business is dumped into one giant bucket. It's a classic sign of a lazy setup. A builder might have 'New Home Builds', 'Granny Flats', and 'Kitchen Renovations' all fighting for the same budget in one campaign. It's impossible to manage.

A good structure looks like:

• Separation by Service or Product: A plumbing company must have separate campaigns for 'Blocked Drains', 'Hot Water Systems', and 'Emergency Plumbing'. This allows you to allocate budget specifically to the most profitable services.
• Separation by Intent: A campaign for bottom-of-funnel keywords like 'emergency plumber sydney price' should be separate from a mid-funnel campaign targeting 'how to fix a leaking tap'. The intent, user, and expected outcome are completely different.
• Branded vs. Non-Branded: You must have a separate campaign for the client's own brand name. Clicks here are cheap, and the conversion rate is sky-high. If you lump it in with generic terms, it will artificially inflate the account's overall performance and hide serious problems in your non-brand campaigns.

3. Follow the Money: Budget and Bidding

Is the budget being spent in the right places? Sort the campaign list by 'Cost'. Is the highest-spending campaign also the one generating the most valuable conversions? If a 'General Info' campaign is chewing up 60% of the budget with a $300 cost per conversion, while the 'Emergency 24/7' campaign is limited by budget at a $40 cost per conversion, you've found an immediate and easy fix.

Next, look at the bidding strategy. Is it appropriate for the campaign's goals and data maturity?

• Manual CPC: Gives ultimate control but is extremely labour-intensive. Sometimes useful for starting a brand new campaign with zero conversion data, but it's mostly a relic of the past.
• Maximise Clicks: Often the default and almost always a terrible choice. The algorithm will do exactly what you ask: get the most clicks possible for your budget. It has no regard for quality, relevance, or conversion potential. You'll get a lot of cheap, useless traffic.
• Maximise Conversions / tCPA: This is the workhorse for lead generation. But it needs data. If a campaign has fewer than 15-20 conversions a month, the algorithm will struggle. Check if a target CPA has been set. If not, the system can get very expensive, very fast.
• Maximise Conversion Value / tROAS: The gold standard for e-commerce or any business where you can assign different values to different conversions. This tells Google to focus on high-value customers, not just the easiest conversions.

4. Dissect Ad Group Theming

Drill down from campaigns into the ad groups. Each ad group should be built around a tiny, ultra-specific theme. If you open an ad group and see 30 keywords ranging from 'plumber near me' to 'how to install toilet', you have a problem.

This lack of focus destroys your Quality Score. Google can't match your ad and landing page to such a broad range of keywords, so your relevance score plummets, your cost-per-click goes up, and your ad rank goes down. Tightly themed ad groups are non-negotiable. An ad group for 'Emergency Plumber' should only contain keywords about emergency plumbing, nothing else.

5. Audit Keyword Quality & Match Types

The Search Terms report is the most important report in Google Ads. It shows you what people actually typed into Google before clicking your ad. This is where the truth lives. I've audited accounts spending thousands of dollars a month on ridiculously irrelevant terms. An electrician was paying for clicks on 'electrician jobs melbourne' and 'free electrician course online'. That's pure waste.

Scour this report for money-sucking queries and add them as negative keywords. Also, review the match types in use. Over-reliance on Broad Match without a robust negative keyword list is a recipe for disaster. While Broad Match has improved, it still needs to be handled with care, usually paired with a smart bidding strategy. A healthy account has a strategic mix of Phrase and Exact match to control traffic, with Broad Match used carefully for expansion.

6. Evaluate the Negative Keyword Strategy

This flows directly from the last point but deserves its own focus. A weak or non-existent negative keyword list is a guarantee that you're wasting money. Check for negative keyword lists at the account, campaign, and ad group levels.

• Account-level lists: Should contain universal negatives like 'jobs', 'free', 'pictures', 'DIY', 'YouTube', 'how to'.
• Campaign-level lists: Used for cross-campaign negation. For example, in a 'Hot Water Repair' campaign, you might add 'new installation' as a negative to force that traffic to the correct campaign.
• Ad group-level negatives: Used for hyper-targeting. Not as common anymore with tighter ad group themes, but still useful in some cases.

A mature account should have hundreds, if not thousands, of negative keywords. If you see fewer than 50, you know the previous manager wasn't paying attention.

7. Review Ad Copy & Assets

Are the ads actually any good? Do they speak to the user's search query? A good responsive search ad (RSA) should have a mix of benefit-driven headlines ('24/7 Emergency Service') and feature-driven headlines ('Licensed & Insured').

More importantly, check the 'Assets' tab. Are they using everything available? * Sitelinks: Are they deep-linking to important pages like 'About Us', 'Pricing', or specific service pages? * Callouts: Are they highlighting key selling points like 'Free Quotes', '10 Year Warranty', or 'Family Owned'? * Image Assets: These are crucial. They make your search ad stand out and can dramatically improve click-through rates. Are they even enabled? * Structured Snippets & Price Assets: Are they providing extra, structured information to qualify clicks?

Look at the performance rating for each asset (headline or description). Anything marked as 'Poor' should be swapped out immediately. It's dragging down the performance of the entire ad.

8. Analyse the Landing Page Experience

The ad is just the promise; the landing page is the fulfilment. Click on the ads and experience the journey yourself. Does the landing page load quickly? Is the headline on the page a perfect match for the ad copy? Is the call-to-action brutally obvious?

I audited an account for a dentist where an ad for 'Invisalign cost' led to the general homepage. That's a classic user experience fail. The user has to hunt for the information they want, and most won't bother. They'll just hit the back button. This hurts your conversion rate and your Quality Score, as Google tracks this behaviour. A dedicated, relevant landing page for each ad group is always the goal.

9. Check Audience & Remarketing Lists

What's the plan for people who don't convert on the first visit? That's most of them. A solid Google Ads strategy must include remarketing.

Check the Audience Manager. Are they collecting audiences from website visitors? Are these lists being used? You should see specific remarketing campaigns (for Display or Video) or audiences applied to search campaigns in 'Observation' mode. This allows you to bid more aggressively for users who have already shown interest in the business. Check the list sizes. A remarketing list with 50 people is useless for most targeting types. If no audiences are set up, it's a huge missed opportunity.

10. Conduct a Reporting & Sanity Check

Finally, take a step back and look at the big picture. Set the date range to the last 3-6 months and look at the trends. Is the cost per conversion climbing? Is the conversion rate dropping?

Then, and this is the most important part, ask the client for their numbers. The Google Ads interface might say '50 leads last month', but the client might say 'we only got 5 good jobs from it'. This disconnect is where your true value as an agency owner comes in. It helps you identify lead quality issues or tracking problems, like counting a single user who fills out a form three times as three separate conversions. This final check grounds your entire audit in real-world business results, not just platform metrics.

Once you have this 10-point analysis complete, you're no longer guessing. You have a clear, prioritised roadmap of fixes and opportunities. You can walk into your first strategy meeting with the new client and show them, with absolute certainty, exactly how you're going to make their investment work harder.