PPC Audit: Find Wasted Ad Spend Across Every Account (2026)

By Kris Newlin · Updated October 27, 2026

Key Takeaways

• A PPC audit reviews a paid search account to find wasted ad spend, broken tracking and missed opportunities. PPC here means pay-per-click, not the accounting imprint.
• Check conversion tracking first, then search terms, match types, bids and budgets, ads and landing pages, and settings drift.
• At agency scale, run the same audit on every account on a schedule and report only what changed.
• An AI employee can run that loop across a client book and bring back fixes for approval.

The short answer

To conduct a PPC audit, check a paid search account for wasted spend and broken measurement: irrelevant search terms, missing negative keywords, overlapping keywords, budget-limited winners, weak ads and landing pages, and conversion tracking that counts the wrong things. Start with tracking, because every other finding depends on it. Agencies get the most value by running the same audit across every client account on a schedule and reviewing only what changed since the last run.

The rest of this guide gives the full checklist, then shows how to run it across a client book without spending a day inside each account.

What a PPC audit is (paid search, not the accounting imprint)

Search “PPC audit” and part of the results are about PPC as a Thomson Reuters imprint of accounting and audit guides for CPA firms. This page is about the other meaning: a pay-per-click advertising audit.

A PPC audit answers three questions about an ad account:

1. Where is money going that does not produce results? Clicks on irrelevant queries, budget on keywords that never convert, spend in locations or hours that do not perform.
2. Can the numbers be trusted? If conversion tracking double counts or misses sales, every bid and budget decision built on it is wrong.
3. What is being left on the table? Campaigns limited by budget while they hit target CPA or ROAS, high-intent search terms that are not yet keywords, ads with no assets.

A full audit covers tracking, structure, keywords and search terms, bidding, ads and assets, landing pages and campaign settings. A quick weekly audit covers what changes fastest: new search terms, spend spikes, pacing and tracking health.

Why one-account checklists break at agency scale

Most PPC audit checklists are written for one specialist with a free afternoon in one account. With 15, 30 or 60 client accounts, the same checklist turns into:

• Too much time. A two-hour audit across 30 clients is 60 hours.
• Audits that happen too rarely. Accounts get audited quarterly or when a client complains, and waste builds up in between.
• Inconsistent depth. Each account manager audits differently, so the same issue gets caught in one account and missed in the next.
• No memory. A one-off audit says what is wrong today, not what changed since last month.

How long a PPC audit takes per account

Time-box the passes so the audit fits the account’s size:

• 15-minute check: spend and pacing against budget, conversions vs. last week, new search terms with spend and no conversions, disapproved ads. Enough for a weekly look at a small or stable account.
• 60-minute audit: the 15-minute check plus match types, negative keyword lists, bid strategy results vs. target, lost impression share and settings drift. A sensible monthly pass for most client accounts.
• Full-day audit (4-8 hours): everything in this checklist, including tracking setup in GA4 and Google Tag Manager, landing pages, account structure and a written action plan. Use it at onboarding, for large accounts, or once or twice a year.

The recurring 15- and 60-minute passes are where automation saves the most time.

The answer is not a longer checklist. It is the same checklist run on every account on a schedule, compared against the previous run, with only the differences surfaced.

The multi-account PPC audit checklist

Run these checks in every account. Each section lists what to look at and what counts as a finding. The sections follow the outline of a typical account, but in practice verify conversion tracking first: if the data is wrong, every waste finding built on it is wrong too.

Search terms and negative keywords

The search terms report shows the actual queries that triggered your ads. It is usually where the largest share of wasted spend shows up.

• Sort search terms by cost over the last 30 days and flag terms with spend but zero conversions.
• Look for irrelevant intent: “free”, “jobs”, “salary”, “DIY”, “login”, competitor support queries, or locations you do not serve.
• Add confirmed waste as negative keywords, at campaign level or in a shared negative keyword list applied across campaigns.
• Check that negatives do not block converting terms. An overly broad negative can quietly switch off a profitable query.
• In Performance Max, review search term insights and use account-level negative keywords where available.

Match types and keyword overlap

• Review broad match keywords. Broad match can work well with Smart Bidding and good conversion data, and it can spend fast on loose queries without either. Check which match type each converting search term came from.
• Find duplicate or overlapping keywords across ad groups and campaigns, where the same query can trigger different ads and the account competes with itself.
• Promote high-converting search terms to exact or phrase match keywords so they get their own bid and ad.
• Pause keywords with meaningful spend and no conversions over a long enough window to be fair (at least 2-3 times the target CPA in spend).

Bids, budgets and pacing

• Check which bidding strategy each campaign uses and whether it has enough conversion volume to support it. Target CPA or Target ROAS on a campaign with a handful of monthly conversions tends to be unstable, and Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks can be the safer choice until data builds up.
• Judge automated bidding against the client’s margins, not just against last month. Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by gross margin: at a 40% margin the break-even ROAS is 2.5 (250%). A Target ROAS or Performance Max campaign “hitting target” below break-even is losing money on every sale.
• Compare a Smart Bidding campaign with its pre-switch Manual CPC period on CPA, conversion volume and average CPC before calling it a win.
• Compare actual CPA or ROAS against the client’s target per campaign.
• Find campaigns “limited by budget” that hit their targets. That is the clearest place to move budget toward.
• Find campaigns that spend their full budget and miss targets. That is where budget leaks.
• Check pacing against the monthly client budget so nothing overspends or stops mid-month.
• Look at lost impression share split by budget and by rank to tell a budget problem from a bid or quality problem.

Quality Score, impression share and competitors

• Pull Quality Score for the keywords that carry most of the spend. Low scores raise CPCs, so a 3/10 keyword with high spend is usually a relevance or landing page problem worth fixing before a bid problem.
• Track search impression share, top and absolute top impression rate per campaign over time. A falling share with steady budget means competitors are outbidding you or relevance is slipping.
• Use Auction insights to benchmark against competitors: overlap rate, outranking share and position above rate. A new competitor with rising overlap explains CPC jumps that look like waste.
• For brand campaigns, check how often competitors bid on the client’s brand terms and whether brand CPCs are rising.

Ads, extensions and landing pages

• Every ad group should have at least one responsive search ad with strong headlines and descriptions. Check ad strength as a hint, not a goal.
• Check assets (sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, images, call assets). Missing assets usually mean lower click-through rate.
• Look at the Quality Score components for high-spend keywords: expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience.
• Open the landing pages. Broken pages, slow mobile load, a message that does not match the ad, or a form that does not submit are all wasted clicks.
• Flag disapproved or limited ads and policy issues.

Conversion tracking and attribution

Tracking problems are the most expensive finding in any audit, because bidding algorithms optimize toward whatever the account counts as a conversion.

• Confirm which conversion actions are set as primary and used for bidding. Page views, micro-conversions or duplicated actions in the primary set inflate results.
• Check that conversion tracking is still firing: a sudden drop to zero usually means a broken conversion pixel or Google Tag Manager tag after a site change, not a bad week. Use GTM preview mode to confirm each tag fires once.
• Validate UTM parameters and auto-tagging (GCLID). Missing or inconsistent UTMs make paid traffic show up as direct or organic in GA4, and the campaign looks like it produces nothing.
• For Meta, check the Meta Pixel and Conversions API events and their match quality. For Microsoft Advertising, check the UET tag.
• Compare Google Ads conversions with the client’s CRM, Shopify or GA4 numbers. A large gap is a finding on its own.
• Check enhanced conversions and offline conversion imports where the client relies on lead quality.
• Check the attribution model and conversion window, and keep them consistent so month-over-month comparisons mean something.
• Understand how attribution changes what looks wasteful. Under last-click, upper-funnel generic keywords and prospecting campaigns often look like they produce nothing, because the sale gets credited to the brand search that came later. Data-driven attribution in Google Ads spreads credit across the path. Before pausing a “zero conversion” generic campaign, check its assisted conversions and the paths in GA4.
• Compare platforms with care: Google Ads, Meta and Microsoft Advertising each claim credit under their own windows, so their totals add up to more than the client’s real sales.

Account structure and settings drift

Settings drift is what happens after launch: a campaign gets copied, a setting changes, and nobody notices for months.

• Networks: Search campaigns opted into the Display Network or search partners without a reason.
• Locations: “Presence or interest” targeting where the client only serves people physically in the area.
• Ad schedule and devices: spend in hours or on devices that never convert.
• Auto-applied recommendations: check which Google recommendations are set to apply automatically. Some add broad match keywords or raise budgets without anyone approving.
• Change history: review who changed what since the last audit, and whether results moved after.
• Naming and structure: campaigns that mix brand and non-brand terms, or ad groups with dozens of unrelated keywords, make every other check harder.

Doing this by hand in one account is manageable. Doing it in 30 accounts every month is where agencies lose the week. If that is your situation, let Viktor run the checklist across every client account.

Running the audit across a client book

The process below turns the checklist into a recurring audit. It works whether a person, a script or an AI employee runs it.

Step 1: Connect every account

Put every client account in one place: a Google Ads manager account (MCC), plus Microsoft Advertising, Meta and each client’s analytics, so platform conversions can be checked against real outcomes. Keep one list with client, owner and monthly budget.

Step 2: Set the baseline per client

A finding only means something against a baseline. For each client, record:

• Target CPA or ROAS and monthly budget.
• Normal ranges for spend, clicks, conversions and CPA over the last 30-90 days.
• Primary conversion actions and the business source of truth (CRM, store, GA4).
• Brand terms, locations served, client rules and a snapshot of current settings.

Step 3: Schedule the audit weekly or monthly

Split the checklist by how fast each area changes:

• Weekly quick audit: new search terms with spend and no conversions, spend and pacing against budget, conversion tracking health, campaigns newly limited by budget, disapproved ads.
• Monthly full audit: match types and keyword overlap, bid strategy fit, assets and landing pages, Quality Score trends, settings drift, change history.

Step 4: Surface only what changed

This is the step one-account checklists skip. Compare each run with the previous one and report only the differences: new wasted search terms, a setting that changed, a tracking drop, a campaign that started hitting its budget cap. An account with nothing new gets one line. That turns a 30-account audit into a short list of accounts that actually need attention this week.

Step 5: Turn findings into approved fixes

Each finding should arrive with a proposed fix and its estimated impact, for example “add these 14 negatives, which cost $620 last month with zero conversions.” The account manager approves, edits or rejects. Approved changes get applied and logged, so the next audit can check whether they worked. Nothing changes in a client account without a human saying yes.

Where the wasted spend usually hides (table)

A worked example

Here is how the numbers look in a typical monthly audit of a home services client spending $12,000 a month with a $60 target CPA (an illustrative example, not client data):

• Search terms: 38 terms such as “plumber jobs”, “plumbing course” and “free plumbing estimate template” spent $740 with zero conversions. Fix: add them as negatives and add “jobs”, “course” and “template” to the shared negative list.
• Settings: the Search campaign was opted into search partners and the Display Network after a copy, spending $520 at a $210 CPA. Fix: turn both off.
• Ad schedule: 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. took $430 for one conversion. Fix: exclude those hours in the ad schedule.
• Budget: the emergency repair campaign hit its $45 CPA but lost 30% impression share to budget. Fix: move the $1,690 saved above into it.

Total: about $1,690 a month moved from waste to a campaign that converts below target, from one 60-minute pass.

Microsoft Advertising and Meta differences

• Microsoft Advertising: most of the Google checklist applies, and many accounts are imported from Google. Check that imports did not overwrite Microsoft-specific negatives or bids, review the Microsoft Audience Network setting, and check that the UET tag records conversions.
• Meta Ads: there are no keywords, so the audit shifts to audiences, placements, frequency and creative fatigue. Check Advantage+ placements spend, frequency by ad set, overlapping audiences, and Pixel plus Conversions API health.

Tools for running a PPC audit

Google’s optimization score is a list of ideas, not a measure of waste. Google Ads scripts can automate single checks across an MCC, but someone has to maintain them.

Doing it with an AI employee

Viktor is an AI employee who lives in Slack and Microsoft Teams, connects to 9,800+ tools (most through one-click OAuth) and does the work. If the category is new, here is what an AI employee is.

For a PPC audit, Viktor connects to Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Meta Ads and GA4 through the integrations directory, then runs the recurring audit from this guide as a scheduled task. A typical setup in Slack looks like this:

@Viktor every Monday at 8 a.m., audit all client Google Ads accounts in our MCC. Flag new search terms with spend and no conversions, campaigns limited by budget that hit target CPA, tracking drops, and any settings changed since last week. Post one summary per client in #ppc-audits and propose fixes. Do not change anything without approval.

Viktor keeps a baseline per client, so his Monday summary covers what changed. When he finds waste, he brings the evidence and a proposed fix. He also pushes back: asked to pause every keyword with no conversions this week, he checks spend against target CPA first and points out keywords that have not had a fair test.

Viktor waits for approval before he changes an account. Admins can mark tools as requiring approval, so a negative keyword list or a budget move waits on an approval card in Slack or Microsoft Teams, and a rejected action never runs. For running a single account day to day, see the guide to AI Google Ads management. This page is about auditing across many accounts.

Plans are listed on viktor.com/pricing. Set up your first weekly PPC audit with Viktor.

FAQ

What is a PPC audit?

A PPC audit is a review of a pay-per-click advertising account to find wasted spend, broken conversion tracking and missed opportunities. It covers search terms and negative keywords, match types, bids and budgets, ads and landing pages, tracking, and campaign settings. In accounting, PPC is also the name of a Thomson Reuters imprint of audit guides, which is a different topic.

How often should an agency run a PPC audit?

Run a quick audit weekly and a full audit monthly, with a structural review each quarter. Weekly checks catch new wasted search terms, pacing problems and tracking breaks before they cost a month of budget. A one-off deep audit still makes sense at client onboarding.

Can AI run a PPC audit across many accounts?

Yes. An AI employee like Viktor can connect to every client account, run the same checklist on a schedule, compare results with the last run and report only what changed, with proposed fixes. The account manager stays in control: Viktor applies changes only after approval. Try it on your client book.