Most unaudited PPC accounts waste 20–40% of their budget on low-intent queries. This is how you find it.
The Hidden Cost of an Unaudited PPC Account
PPC accounts do not stay clean. What begins as a well-structured, thoughtfully configured account — clear campaign architecture, tightly themed ad groups, relevant keyword sets, properly configured bidding strategies — degrades over time. Campaigns are duplicated without being deduped. Keywords are added reactively in response to performance data without checking for cannibalisation. Match types loosen. Negative keyword lists fall out of date as search behaviour evolves. Smart Bidding strategies are enabled without the data volume to run them effectively. Performance Max campaigns are left to optimise without active management, silently consuming budget that would perform better elsewhere.
The cumulative effect of these accumulated decisions — each individually justifiable, collectively corrosive — is an account that looks functional on the surface but is performing significantly below its potential. The budget is being spent. The traffic is coming. The conversions are happening. But the cost of each conversion is higher than it should be, the quality of the traffic is lower than it appears, and the return on every pound of ad spend is being suppressed by structural and strategic problems that a surface-level review will never catch.
A PPC audit is the forensic exercise that finds these problems. Not to criticise past decisions, but to create a clear, prioritised path from where the account is now to where it could be — with specific, implementable recommendations at every level of the account.
Account Structure: The Foundation of Everything
Ad groups containing dozens of loosely related keywords, preventing the algorithm from optimising relevance signals effectively.
The architecture of a PPC account determines how effectively the algorithm can optimise performance, how clearly you can read performance data, and how efficiently you can manage the account at scale. A well-structured account separates brand from non-brand traffic, segments campaigns by commercial objective, organises ad groups around tightly themed keyword sets, and maintains naming conventions that make the account readable by anyone who picks it up.
In practice, accounts that have been running for more than 12–18 months without a structural review frequently show significant architectural problems. Brand and non-brand campaigns that share budgets, making it impossible to assess the true cost of brand protection. Ad groups containing dozens of loosely related keywords, preventing the algorithm from optimising relevance signals effectively. Campaigns created for specific promotions or periods that were never paused, continuing to consume budget against objectives that no longer exist. Duplicate keywords across campaigns, creating internal auction competition that drives up CPCs without driving additional conversions.
The structural review maps every campaign and ad group against a clear architectural framework — what each campaign is for, what it should contain, and how it should interact with the rest of the account — and identifies every deviation from that framework with a specific corrective action.
Keyword and Match Type Analysis
Google’s shift toward broader match type… has made match type management significantly more complex.
Keyword strategy is where most PPC accounts waste the largest share of their budget. The primary waste mechanisms are cannibalisation — multiple keywords or campaigns competing for the same queries, inflating CPCs without increasing coverage — and match type drift, where broad and broad match modifier keywords are triggering for queries that are semantically distant from the intended target.
Google’s shift toward broader match type default behaviour, combined with the reduced visibility into search term data introduced in 2020, has made match type management significantly more complex. Accounts that were well-managed under the old search term reporting regime are frequently showing significant waste under the new model — bidding on broad match keywords that trigger for loosely related queries with low commercial intent, without the search term visibility needed to identify and exclude them.
Our keyword analysis covers the full keyword inventory, identifying cannibalisation across campaigns and ad groups, assessing match type distribution against campaign objectives, reviewing negative keyword coverage and identifying gaps, and analysing the search terms that are actually triggering your keywords — to whatever extent Google’s current reporting allows — to identify the highest-priority exclusions.
Quality Score and Landing Page Alignment
improving Quality Score reduces CPC while maintaining or improving position
Quality Score is one of the most underappreciated levers in PPC management. Google calculates Quality Score — a 1–10 rating for each keyword — based on three factors: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. A keyword with a Quality Score of 4 versus a Quality Score of 8 can result in paying more than double the cost per click for the same ad position. The reverse is also true: improving Quality Score reduces CPC while maintaining or improving position — effectively making every pound of budget go further.
The most common Quality Score issues we find in audits are misalignment between keyword themes, ad copy and landing page content; landing pages that do not deliver on the promise made in the ad — particularly where generic category pages are used as destinations for highly specific keyword queries; and ad copy that fails to include the keyword or its close variants, reducing expected CTR and ad relevance scores.
The Quality Score audit identifies every keyword below a threshold score, diagnoses the specific component (CTR, relevance or landing page) driving the low score, and provides targeted recommendations for each. For some keywords, the fix is an ad copy revision. For others, it requires a dedicated landing page. For others still, the keyword itself is the problem — it cannot achieve high Quality Score because the query intent does not align with any commercial landing page you can realistically create.
Performance Max: The Black Box Problem
Performance Max provides almost no visibility into how budget is being allocated across channels
Performance Max is the most significant structural change to Google Ads in the past five years, and it is currently the source of the most consistent and significant budget waste we identify in new account audits. Performance Max campaigns use Google’s machine learning to serve ads across all Google inventory — Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Maps — with a single budget and a single set of creative assets. The optimisation is genuine and, in well-configured accounts, effective. The problem is the opacity.
Unlike traditional campaigns, Performance Max provides almost no visibility into how budget is being allocated across channels, which creative assets are driving performance, or which audiences are converting. This opacity creates a specific and common problem: brand cannibalisation. Performance Max campaigns frequently capture branded search queries — queries from users who were already going to convert — and attribute those conversions to Performance Max, inflating the apparent ROAS of the campaign while suppressing the performance of non-brand campaigns that are reaching genuinely new customers.
Our Performance Max analysis uses every available signal — asset group performance reports, audience insights, channel breakdowns where accessible, and search term data from non-Performance Max campaigns — to assess the extent of brand cannibalisation, evaluate asset group configuration and creative quality, and provide specific recommendations for audience signal configuration, asset group structure and brand exclusion settings.
Audience Strategy and Bidding Configuration
The audience audit reviews your current audience list
Audience targeting has become as important as keyword targeting in modern PPC management. RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads), Customer Match, Similar Audiences and in-market segments allow advertisers to adjust bids and tailor messaging based on what they know about the user — not just what the user is searching for. Accounts that treat all traffic as equivalent — bidding the same amount for a new user searching a generic term as for a past purchaser searching a branded term — are leaving significant efficiency on the table.
The audience audit reviews your current audience list configuration, assesses how audiences are applied across campaigns (as targeting or bid adjustment layers), identifies gaps in audience coverage (particularly the use of first-party data via Customer Match), and provides recommendations for an audience bid strategy that reflects the commercial value of different user segments at each stage of the funnel.
Smart Bidding strategy — the choice between Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximise Conversions and Maximise Conversion Value — is reviewed against account data volume and campaign objectives. Smart Bidding strategies that are under-resourced with conversion data are a consistent source of poor performance, as the algorithm attempts to optimise toward a signal it cannot read clearly enough to make reliable decisions.
The Budget Reallocation Recommendation
Every audit concludes with a specific budget reallocation recommendation — not just a list of problems to fix, but a concrete proposal for where budget should move and why. This is based on the combined findings across all audit dimensions: the structural waste identified, the Quality Score improvements available, the Performance Max cannibalisation extent, and the audience efficiency gains accessible.
The reallocation recommendation includes an estimated ROAS impact — what improvement in return on ad spend we would expect from implementing the highest-priority changes — and a 30/60/90-day implementation roadmap that phases the changes in an order that minimises disruption to current performance while maximising the speed of improvement.
Frequently Asked Questions
What PPC platforms do you audit?
Our core audit covers Google Ads across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube and Performance Max. We can extend the scope to include Microsoft Ads (Bing) where relevant. Meta Ads and LinkedIn are covered directionally within our Competitor Analysis and PPC Strategy services rather than this audit.
Do you need full account access?
Yes — we require read-only access to the Google Ads account to complete a thorough audit. We cannot provide meaningful analysis from screenshots or exported reports alone. All access is granted via standard Google Ads user permissions and can be revoked at any time after delivery.
Can you audit an account managed by another agency?
Yes — and this is a common scenario. We audit objectively and deliver findings without commercial bias. If you are reviewing your current agency’s performance, an independent audit provides an honest baseline. The findings are yours, and what you do with them — whether that is sharing them with your agency, using them as a brief for a new agency, or taking elements in-house — is entirely your decision.
How long does the audit take?
10–15 working days for most accounts. Larger accounts with multiple markets, complex Shopping feeds or extensive Performance Max configurations may require additional time. We agree the scope and timeline before starting.
What is the difference between the PPC Audit and the PPC Strategy?
The audit diagnoses what is wrong with your current account setup and performance. The strategy builds a forward-looking plan for how your paid search should be structured, targeted and budgeted going forward. For accounts that have been running for more than 12 months, we almost always recommend the audit first — the strategy is significantly more effective when it can build on an honest diagnostic of the current state.
The Bottom Line
A PPC account that has not been audited in the past 12 months is almost certainly wasting between 20% and 40% of its budget. The waste is not obvious — it does not show up as a single line item in the campaign report. It is distributed across dozens of small inefficiencies: keywords triggering for the wrong queries, Quality Score problems inflating CPCs, Performance Max capturing branded conversions that inflate apparent ROAS, audience targeting that treats all users as equally valuable. Each individually seems manageable. Together, they represent a significant and recoverable cost.
The audit finds the waste. The prioritised action plan recovers it. And the improvement in ROAS compounds over time as the account becomes structurally sounder and the algorithm has better data to optimise against.
