Google Ads Audit Checklist for Lead-Gen Businesses

Almost every Google Ads audit checklist on page one was written for an e-commerce store. It obsesses over ROAS, product feeds, and shopping campaigns. You sell furnace repairs or personal injury representation. You do not have a ROAS. You have booked jobs.

The other kind of checklist is the 200-item dump that nobody finishes. So here are twelve checks, ordered by dollars recovered per minute of your time. Each one names the exact screen, the number that means trouble, and the fix.

What should a Google Ads audit for a lead-gen business check first?

Check your conversion actions first, and spend the first 20 minutes there. Every other number in the account — cost per conversion, target CPA, optimization score, the agency's monthly report — is computed on top of whatever you told Google counts as a conversion. Get that wrong and you are optimizing a fantasy at speed.

After tracking, work down the list by money at stake. Network settings and brand spend move more dollars than ad copy does. Ad copy is where most audits start because it is easy to have an opinion about.

Are you counting page views as conversions?

This is the single most common way a lead-gen account lies to its owner: a thank-you-page view, a 'contact us' page visit, or a click on a phone-number link gets marked Primary, and Smart Bidding starts buying more of it.

Google's documentation is explicit about what the two settings do. Primary actions are reported in the Conversions column and, in Google's words, are 'used for bidding as long as the standard goal they are part of is used for bidding.' Secondary actions are the opposite: 'These conversion actions are for observation only... but not for bidding, even if the goal they are included in is used for bidding' (Google Ads Help, About primary and secondary conversion actions).

So the Primary list is your bid strategy's definition of success. Open Goals > Summary and read it out loud. If a soft action is on that list, the algorithm has been spending your money chasing people who look at pages, not people who call.

One trap worth knowing: conversions created from Google Analytics arrive as Secondary by default, and Google says they 'can only be updated to primary in Google Ads.' Plenty of accounts have a perfectly good form-fill conversion sitting in the Secondary column, doing nothing for bidding, because nobody promoted it.

Is Search Partners quietly spending your budget?

Search partners are switched on by default on every new Search campaign — Google states plainly: 'When you create a campaign for the Search Network, search partners are included by default.' Nobody chose it. It was there when you arrived.

Two facts from that same page decide whether you keep it. First, you cannot see where the money went: 'Google Ads doesn't provide information detailing the website where your ad was shown on the Search Network, unless you are running a Performance Max campaign.' Second, Google itself warns that ads can appear on search partner sites that display and link to products for sale, and that 'clicks from these sites may not always reflect highly targeted traffic' (Google Ads Help, About the Google Search Network).

Do not argue about it. Measure it. Segment your Search campaigns by network in the reporting table, and compare cost per conversion for Google Search versus Search Partners over the last 90 days. If partner traffic converts at half the rate and twice the cost, uncheck the box in campaign settings and move on.

Note the asymmetry Google admits to: clickthrough rate on partner sites does not affect your Quality Score on Google. So partner clicks can be junk without ever showing up as a Quality Score problem in the account.

Is brand traffic inflating your results?

If people searching your business name are counted in the same campaign as people searching 'emergency plumber near me,' your blended cost per lead is fiction — brand clicks are cheap and convert well because those people already decided to call you.

This is the oldest trick in agency reporting, and it usually is not even deliberate. It is just sloppy campaign structure. Split brand into its own campaign, then look at non-brand cost per lead on its own. That number is the one that tells you whether paid search is actually buying you new customers. We go deeper on the reporting side in branded vs non-branded keyword reporting.

Performance Max makes this worse, and Google says so: 'Your Performance Max campaign may sometimes show for branded keywords in your Search campaign, even if those keywords are set to exact match' (Google Ads Help, About Performance Max campaigns). The fix Google names is brand exclusions or negative keywords inside the PMax campaign. Until you apply one of them, PMax can quietly bill you for people typing your own name.

If you are still deciding whether PMax belongs in a service business at all, read our take on Performance Max for service businesses before you hand it more budget.

Are your phone calls being counted as conversions at all?

For most home-service and legal accounts, calls are 60% to 90% of the leads — and they are the first thing a bad setup drops. There are two failures to look for, and they are different.

The first is a missing or misconfigured 'Calls from ads' action. Google's rule is simple: 'You set a minimum call length, and every call that lasts at least that long is counted as a conversion.' And on the same page: 'calls shorter than this duration won't be counted' (Google Ads Help, About phone call conversion tracking). If someone set the threshold high, real leads are vanishing from the report. Check actual durations in the Call details report before you pick a number.

The second failure is subtler. If your account tracks 'clicks on a number on your mobile website,' Google is clear that 'we can only track these clicks, not the phone calls themselves.' That is a tap, not a conversation. Counting taps as calls inflates your lead count and teaches Smart Bidding to buy tappers.

Imported call conversions are the honest end state: you decide which calls counted, based on what happened on the phone. That is the same principle behind proper paid-ads attribution for service businesses — count booked work, not activity.

Has Google auto-applied changes you never approved?

Open Recommendations > Auto-apply settings. This one screen can be editing your account daily, and Google's own list of what can be applied automatically includes 'Add broad match keywords,' 'Expand your reach with Google search partners,' 'Use Display expansion,' and 'Use targeting expansion' (Google Ads Help, About applying recommendations automatically).

Read that list again. Three of those four widen your targeting. In a lead-gen account with a tight service area and a narrow set of money keywords, wider is usually just more expensive.

To be fair to Google: auto-apply cannot raise your budget. The documentation says 'Auto-applying recommendations won't increase your budget' and 'Budget raising isn't included in this iteration of auto-apply recommendations.' It can still spend the budget you have on much worse traffic. If broad match is being added for you, your negative keyword list is now doing double duty — see negative keywords strategy for service businesses.

Our position: auto-apply stays off in a lead-gen account, and recommendations get applied deliberately, one at a time, after checking the search terms they would let in. Optimization score is a suggestion, not a scoreboard — here is what that score is really measuring.

Is your location targeting sending ads outside your service area?

The default location setting reaches people who are in your area OR who have merely shown interest in it — Google calls 'Presence or Interest' the 'default and recommended option' that lets you reach 'people who are likely to be in or regularly present in your targeted location, as well as people who have shown interest in your targeted locations' (Google Ads Help, About advanced location options).

For a bakery advertising to tourists, that is fine. For a plumber who cannot drive 300 miles, it means paying for someone in another state who searched about your city. Google's own warning is the tell: 'Most campaigns will notice a decrease in impressions when switching away from the default targeting option.' Fewer impressions is the point.

Switch to Presence, then watch cost per lead for 30 days before you judge it. The mechanics, and when Presence is the wrong call, are in presence vs interest location targeting.

What does the change history tell you about the last agency?

Change history stores two years of edits, and it is the closest thing you have to a receipt. Google: 'Change history is a tool that lists the changes made to your account, campaigns, and ad groups during the past 2 years' (Google Ads Help, About change history).

Read three things. Who: the User column shows the email of whoever made each change through the interface, and edits made through the API show up as 'Google Ads API' or a tool name. When: long silent stretches mean nobody touched the account between invoices. What: budget changes, bid strategy swaps, and conversion action edits are the ones that move money.

Pair change history with the performance timeline it plots against. If cost per lead doubled in March and the only March entry is a bid strategy change, you have your answer without a meeting. If daily spend looks erratic, read how Google Ads daily budgets actually pace before blaming anyone — Google caps you at twice your average daily budget on a given day and 30.4 times it in a month, so the daily number was never a hard ceiling.

What do you fix first when the audit is done?

Fix tracking, then targeting, then bidding, in that order — and change one thing at a time so you can still read the result. Bid strategies need clean conversion data to learn from, so repairing tracking before touching Target CPA is not a preference, it is a sequence.

• Day 1: demote soft conversions to Secondary, promote real form fills and qualified calls to Primary
• Day 1: turn off auto-apply recommendations and Search Partners; both take under two minutes
• Week 1: split brand into its own campaign; add brand exclusions to Performance Max
• Week 1: set location targeting to Presence if you serve a defined area
• Week 2-4: let the bid strategy relearn on correct data before you change targets
• Ongoing: search terms report every week, negatives added the same day

One warning about ads not showing at all: an account that has been audited hard can go quiet for boring reasons — disapprovals, budget, or a paused conversion action starving the bid strategy. Why your Google Ads are not showing covers the usual suspects.

This whole checklist takes about two hours and costs nothing but honesty. If you would rather have someone else do it and tell you plainly what they found, that is what our paid ads service is built around — no lock-in, and you keep the account either way. Get my free audit.