How to Audit a Google Ads Account That Isn't Performing

When Google Ads results drop, suddenly or slowly, most store owners reach for the wrong fix first. They change the bid strategy, add budget, rebuild campaigns, or switch things off and on again. That rarely works, because it treats the symptom instead of finding the cause.

The better approach is a structured audit. Most performance problems have a root cause you can trace, and this guide shows where to look and what you are looking for at each stage.

Step 1: Pin Down What “Not Performing” Means

Before auditing anything, be precise about what changed and when.

Is it a volume problem (fewer sales), a value problem (the same number of sales at a lower value), an efficiency problem (the same conversions at a higher cost) or a traffic problem (fewer clicks)?

Pull 90 days of account-level data and chart the weekly trend for impressions, clicks, conversions, conversion value and cost. Find exactly when things changed. A drop that began on a specific date is far easier to diagnose than a slow decline over months, because specific dates line up with events: a campaign change, a landing page update, a feed change, or a new competitor.

Write it down: “Conversions fell about 40% in the week of [date]. Impressions were steady. Click-through rate fell. Cost per click did not change.” That level of detail tells you which checks matter most.

Step 2: Check Conversion Tracking First

Before looking at campaign structure, make sure conversion tracking still works. This is the step most often skipped, and the one that most often explains an apparent drop.

Review your conversion actions. Go to Tools, Measurement, Conversions and check each action:

• When did it last record a conversion?
• Is its status “Active” or “No recent conversions”?
• Does the count look in line with previous periods?

If an action shows no recent conversions while orders are still arriving, tracking has broken. The campaign has not.

Look for double firing. A sudden jump in conversion volume (often followed by ROAS looking worse) can come from duplicate firing, where each purchase records two or three times. Check that the Google Ads conversion count roughly matches real orders in your backend.

Check the conversion window. If the window was recently cut from 30 days to 7, conversions that used to count towards Google Ads now fall outside it. The campaign has not got worse. The measurement has changed.

Check whether a site update broke tracking. A Shopify theme update, a new checkout app, a platform migration, a GTM container publish or a change to the thank-you page URL can all break purchase tracking without warning. Compare the date of the drop with your site change history.

If tracking is broken, fix that before anything else. Campaign analysis means nothing when the measurement is wrong.

Step 3: Dig Into Search Terms

For Search and Shopping campaigns, the search terms report shows exactly which queries triggered your ads. It is one of the most useful reports in Google Ads and one of the least used.

Find it under Keywords, Search terms (Search campaigns) or Products, Search terms (Shopping campaigns).

What to look for:

Irrelevant queries eating budget. If you sell women’s clothing and the report shows “men’s [anything]”, “wholesale”, “second hand” or trade terms that point to a B2B audience, those clicks are wasted spend. Add them as negative keywords.

Queries with plenty of clicks and no conversions over a meaningful period (30+ days). Some variation is normal, but a query with 200 clicks and no conversions in 60 days is almost certainly not your buyer. Exclude it.

Queries converting efficiently. These are your most valuable traffic. Does your structure let you prioritise them? You cannot act on individual search terms in Performance Max, but in Standard Shopping and Search you can use negative keywords to route specific queries to specific campaigns or ad groups.

For PMax: there is no full search terms report, but the Insights tab shows search categories. Use them to see whether PMax is spending on brand terms, competitor terms or irrelevant categories.

Step 4: Check Product Coverage (Shopping Campaigns)

In Shopping and PMax, product coverage decides how much of your catalogue can actually show. A campaign can look fine at campaign level while quietly losing coverage at product level.

In Merchant Center, check your active product count and compare it with earlier periods. Fewer active products, caused by feed errors, disapprovals or price mismatches, means fewer Shopping ads.

In Google Ads, open Products in a Shopping campaign and filter by status. Look for products with high impressions and no conversions (candidates for negatives or bid changes), products with no impressions (possibly suppressed by feed problems or bids that are too low), and products that used to show but have disappeared.

For PMax, check the Asset Group and Product Group views and confirm the product filter includes the products you expect.

If you use product-level bid adjustments in Standard Shopping, check whether recent changes pushed bids too low on important products.

Step 5: Review Auction Insights

Auction Insights shows how your ads perform against competitors in the same auctions. For Shopping it does not name competitors (Search does), but it shows overlap rate, impression share and position data.

Open it at campaign or ad group level.

What to look for:

Impression share has fallen. That can happen because your bids dropped relative to competitors, your budget became a limit, or Quality Score or feed quality declined. Each needs a different fix.

High lost impression share (budget). You are losing auctions because the budget runs out, not because bids are uncompetitive. If the current budget is profitable, adding budget is the fix.

High lost impression share (rank). You are losing auctions because your bid or quality is too low compared with competitors. Fix it by raising bids or improving Quality Score (Search) or feed quality (Shopping).

New competitors have appeared. For Search, Auction Insights names competitor domains. A new entrant with a high overlap rate and aggressive positioning may be pushing up CPCs and cutting your impression share.

Step 6: Check the Landing Page and Site

A campaign can be set up perfectly while the real problem sits on the destination page. Landing page issues cause conversion rate drops that look like campaign problems.

Check specifically:

Page speed. A page that takes 5 seconds to load on mobile converts far worse than one that loads in 2. Run your key product and landing pages through Google PageSpeed Insights.

Checkout changes. Has a recent update changed the checkout, added steps or broken payment? A broken checkout stops conversions entirely while clicks carry on as normal.

Stock levels. If key products have sold out, conversion rate falls because visitors arrive and find nothing to buy. Check that your best sellers are in stock and listed correctly.

Price changes. A significant price rise can lower conversion rate because the offer is less competitive, not because the ads are wrong.

Step 7: Review Asset Performance (PMax and Search)

In PMax, open Asset Groups and check each asset’s performance rating. Assets rated “Low” are shown less often because Google judges them to be underperforming. Replace them with stronger options.

Common asset problems:

Generic headlines that do not stand out. “Shop Now”, “Great Deals” and “Best Quality” are weak. Specific, benefit-led headlines (“Free Delivery on Orders Over £50”, “[Brand Name] Official Store”) usually do better.

Images that are low resolution, carry promotional text overlays, or show lifestyle scenes without a clear product focus. Make sure image assets meet Google’s quality standards.

No video. Without a video asset, Google builds one automatically from your other assets, and those are usually poor. Even a simple 30 second product video can noticeably improve PMax on YouTube and Display.

For Search, check Ad Strength in the ad group view. Improve any ad rated “Average” or “Poor”: add headlines, remove pins if they over-constrain the ad, and add more varied copy.

Step 8: Check Budget and Ad Scheduling

If the budget runs out before the day ends, your ads stop during peak hours. In Google Ads, check each campaign’s budget status. A campaign marked “Limited by budget” is underdelivering.

If you use ad scheduling (dayparting), make sure the schedule still matches your current peak hours. If your best conversion times have shifted and the schedule has not, you may be lowering bids during your strongest hours.

Pulling the Audit Together

By now you should have a list of specific issues rather than a vague feeling that “something is wrong”.

Rank them by likely impact:

• Broken conversion tracking: top priority, fix immediately
• Major loss of product coverage: high priority, fix within 24 hours
• Significant wasted spend on search terms: medium priority, deal with it within a week
• Asset quality issues: lower priority, address in the next optimisation cycle

In underperforming accounts, the most common finding is not a strategy problem. It is a tracking or feed issue that distorts measurement or reduces coverage. Fix the foundations before changing strategy.

When performance recovers after a tracking or feed fix, that is not luck. It is what happens when Smart Bidding finally gets accurate inputs again.