Is Your Google Ads Account Actually Healthy? A Founder's Self-Audit

By Dr. Linda Orr, PhD | Orr Consulting

Most founders I talk to have one of two problems with their Google Ads account.

Either they've handed it to an agency and genuinely have no idea what's happening in there — they see a dashboard full of green arrows and assume things are fine. Or they're running it themselves, spending real money every month, and quietly unsure whether any of it is actually working.

Both situations have the same underlying issue: no one has looked at the fundamentals recently. And in Google Ads, the fundamentals drift fast.

This is a guide you can use right now — no agency required, no technical expertise needed — to assess whether your account is working the way it should. I'll tell you what to look at, what healthy looks like, and what the warning signs are.

Start here: the five questions that matter most

Before you open the account, answer these five questions honestly. If you can't answer them with confidence, that's the finding.

1. Are your conversions accurate and meaningful? Not "do we have conversions set up" — but are the things being counted as conversions actually valuable actions? A lot of accounts are counting page views, session starts, or scroll depth as conversions and feeding that signal into Google's bidding. Google then optimizes toward people who scroll — not people who buy or call.

2. Is brand traffic separated from non-brand? When someone searches your company name and clicks your ad, that's not the same as winning a new customer. It's a different kind of click at a different cost, and mixing them together inflates your ROAS and hides what non-brand traffic is actually doing. And side note, don't pay for branded ads unless you are so big that competitors are bidding for your brand name!

3. Are search terms reviewed regularly? Google is constantly matching your ads to queries you didn't choose. Some of those are fine. Many are irrelevant. Without regular negative keyword maintenance, you're paying for traffic that will never convert.

4. Is Performance Max intentional? PMax is Google's black box — it can work well, or it can cannibalize your best search traffic and claim credit for conversions that would have happened anyway. The question isn't whether you're running it. It's whether you made a deliberate choice to run it, with clean conversion signals, and have a way to evaluate whether it's adding incremental value. Recently, PMax significantly out performs search, but you do have to know what you are doing to use it. Many agencies don't know it's intricacies.

5. Can you tie spend to qualified outcomes? Not clicks. Not leads. Qualified outcomes — people who actually became customers, booked calls that showed up, or advanced meaningfully in your sales process. If the answer is no, you're flying blind regardless of what the dashboard says.

If you answered "I'm not sure" to two or more of those, stop reading and fix those first. Everything else is secondary.

Now go into the account

Here's what to look at and what you're looking for.

Conversion setup

Go to Tools → Conversions. Look at every conversion action being tracked.

Healthy: You have one or two primary conversions that represent real business value — a purchase, a form submit that leads to a sales conversation, a call that meets a minimum duration threshold. Everything else is either a secondary action (tracked for insight, not bidding) or not tracked at all.

Warning sign: You have five or more conversion actions, several of which are "optimized for bidding." Page views, button clicks, and time-on-site counted as conversions mean Google is optimizing for the wrong thing. This is one of the most common — and most damaging — mistakes in B2B and service business accounts.

Campaign structure

Look at your campaign list. Ask yourself: can I tell immediately what each campaign is trying to do and who it's trying to reach?

Healthy: Campaigns are separated by intent. Brand search is its own campaign. Non-brand search is broken out by service or product category. You know what each one is supposed to do and what success looks like.

Warning sign: One or two campaigns doing everything. Brand and non-brand mixed together. No clear logic to the structure. This makes optimization impossible because you can't tell which part of the account is working.

Search terms report

Go to any search campaign → Keywords → Search Terms. Filter for the last 30 days. Sort by cost, high to low.

Look at the top 20–30 queries your ads actually showed for. For each one, ask: would I want to pay for this click?

Healthy: The majority of high-spend queries are clearly relevant — people searching for what you actually sell, with commercial intent. You have a consistent negative keyword list being maintained.

Warning sign: You're showing up for competitor brand names, job searches ("Google Ads jobs"), informational queries ("what is fractional CMO"), or completely irrelevant terms. If the top-spend queries look random, the account has been left alone too long.

Performance Max (if you're running it)

Go to your PMax campaigns. Look at asset group performance. Look at the "Insights" tab. Try to find the search categories it's targeting.

Healthy: You can see roughly what kinds of searches PMax is capturing. It's not duplicating your brand search traffic. Your best-performing search campaigns haven't declined since PMax launched.

Warning sign: You can't tell what PMax is doing. Your brand search impression share has dropped since PMax started. Overall conversions look flat or up but revenue hasn't moved.

This is the "PMax is stealing credit" pattern and it's extremely common.

Budget and bidding

Look at your campaigns. Check the bidding strategy on each one.

Healthy: Bidding strategy matches the conversion volume. Target CPA or Target ROAS only makes sense when you have enough conversions for Google to learn from — typically 30–50 per month per campaign minimum. Campaigns with lower volume are on Maximize Conversions or manual CPC until they build data.

Warning sign: Target ROAS set at an aggressive level on a campaign getting 5 conversions a month. Google can't learn on that volume. The algorithm is guessing. A surprisingly large number of accounts with "smart" bidding strategies are actually in permanent learning mode, which means they never optimize properly.

What to do with what you find

If you find two or three of the warning signs above, you don't have an ads problem — you have a fundamentals problem. The creative, the landing pages, the budget level — none of that matters until the fundamentals are right.

The order of operations:

Fix tracking first. Always. You cannot make good decisions on bad data. If your conversions are measuring the wrong things, every optimization you make is based on a lie.

Fix structure second. Separate brand from non-brand. Create logical campaign separation. Give yourself the ability to see what's working.

Clean up search terms third. Add negatives for the irrelevant queries. This is often the fastest way to reduce wasted spend.

Evaluate PMax fourth. If it's running, run an experiment — pause it for 2–4 weeks and see what happens to your real conversion metrics. If they stay flat or improve, PMax was cannibalizing.

Then optimize. Once the foundation is solid, you have something to actually optimize.

The honest reality

A Google Ads account that's been running for six months without a systematic review almost always has at least two or three of these issues. That's not an indictment of the people running it — Google's platform actively makes it harder to maintain clean accounts, with automated recommendations that frequently make things worse and bidding strategies that require active oversight to work properly.

The question isn't whether your account has problems. It's whether you know what they are.

If you go through this audit and find things you're not sure how to fix — or if you'd rather have someone do this properly and give you a prioritized action plan — that's exactly what a PPC audit is for. We typically find 3–5 significant issues in the first review, and the fixes almost always pay for themselves within the first 60 days.

Dr. Linda Orr, PhD is the founder of Orr Consulting, a fractional CMO and paid media strategy firm working with growth-stage brands in healthcare, DTC, and B2B. She has managed over $88M in marketing budgets and is a Top 1% Upwork freelancer with 100+ clients and 100% five-star reviews.

Interested in a Google Ads audit? Book a free 30-minute call →