Bigeye's Retail Disrupted study of 1,501 US shoppers found that 44% prefer to shop in stores and 21% prefer online. A Google Ads audit for a consumer brand has to start by checking that the account counts the sales the business actually makes, wherever they happen, before it judges a single campaign. Bigeye, the Orlando agency for consumer brands, runs these audits through its paid media and performance marketing practice.

This checklist has eight parts, in the order Bigeye works through an account, with the numbers behind each one.

Key takeaways

• Bigeye found that 44% of US shoppers prefer stores and 21% prefer online. An audit that only counts website orders will undervalue every campaign for a brand sold at retail.

• Bigeye found that 89% of shoppers say visual appeal matters to which brand they choose, which makes product images a first-order audit item for Shopping and Performance Max.

• Google says consent mode modeling recovers more than half of the ad-click-to-conversion journeys lost when people decline cookies.

• Optmyzr found Performance Max serving on queries that exactly matched a Search keyword in 91.45% of the 503 accounts it studied.

• Seer Interactive measured a 68% drop in paid click-through rate on queries that show an AI Overview, between June 2024 and September 2025.

What is a Google Ads audit?

A Google Ads audit is a structured review of an advertising account that checks whether it measures the right results, spends on the right searches, and is set up to improve over time. A good audit ends with a ranked list of fixes, each tied to money: wasted spend to cut, or demand left unbought.

Most audits start with keywords and bids. That's backwards. If the conversion setup is wrong, every bid decision the account has made is built on a bad number, and fixing bids first just makes the wrong number arrive faster.

The numbers to plan around

Step 1: Confirm access, ownership and the goal

Check who owns the account, who can see the billing, and what the business wants the account to do. The brand should own its Google Ads account, Merchant Center and Analytics property outright, with the agency added as a user. If the agency owns any of them, fix that first.

Then write the goal down in business terms. New customers at a set cost. Profit at a set margin. Total revenue across direct and retail. Each goal leads to a different account setup, and most underperforming accounts were never given one clearly.

Last, collect the numbers the audit needs from outside the platform: margin by product, average order value, repeat rate and the share of sales that happen at retail. Google can't see any of those, and the bidding can't use what it can't see.

Step 2: Audit conversion tracking first

List every conversion action and check which ones count toward bidding. Only real business outcomes should be primary: purchases with accurate values, and maybe a qualified lead. Page views, add-to-carts and video plays can be tracked, but set to secondary so the bidding doesn't chase them.

Next, check the plumbing. Is enhanced conversions on? Is consent mode set up for regions that need it? Google says consent mode modeling recovers more than half of the ad-click-to-conversion journeys lost when people decline cookies. Do purchase values match the order system? Are there duplicate tags firing twice on the thank-you page?

Then ask what the account can't see. Bigeye found 44% of shoppers prefer stores and 21% prefer online, so for a brand sold at retail, the tag misses a large share of what ads drive. In Bigeye's In Clear Focus episode on AI-driven marketing attribution, Jeff Greenfield, co-founder and CEO of Provalytics, explains why click-based tracking alone undercounts channels people don't click.

Step 3: Check structure and the branded split

Map every campaign to a job, and make sure brand and non-brand traffic are reported apart. Brand searches convert well because the shopper already chose you. Mixed into the same campaign, they make weak non-brand keywords look profitable. Optmyzr found Performance Max overlapping exact Search keywords in 91.45% of the 503 accounts it studied.

Red flags here are easy to spot. Brand terms inside generic campaigns. Several campaigns bidding on the same keywords. Performance Max running without brand exclusions. Campaigns named in ways nobody on the current team can explain.

Fix the brand split before anything else in this step. Move brand terms into one campaign, add them as negatives elsewhere, and apply brand exclusions to Performance Max. This guide on Google Ads match types covers how each match type pulls traffic.

Step 4: Read the search terms and fix the negatives

Pull 90 days of search terms for every Search and Performance Max campaign, sort by cost, and read the top of the list yourself. This is where wasted spend shows up first: searches for competitors you don't want, jobs, free versions, wrong product types, and how-to questions that never buy.

Turn what you find into shared negative keyword lists, organized by theme, and apply them across campaigns. Google allows up to 10,000 negative keywords per campaign and now lets you apply negative keyword lists to Performance Max. Check for the opposite problem too: a stray negative blocking a search you want.

Look at match types last. Broad match with smart bidding can work, but only on an account with clean conversion data and a strong negative list. If Step 2 failed, broad match will spend on the wrong searches faster than any other setting.

Step 5: Audit Performance Max separately

Open every Performance Max campaign and check where its money goes. The channel performance report shows spend across Search, Shopping, YouTube and Display. The search terms report, available for all Performance Max campaigns since August 2025, shows what people typed. Together they tell you whether the campaign is finding new customers or harvesting old ones.

Then check the settings. Are brand exclusions applied? Is the final URL expansion setting sending traffic to pages you didn't choose? Are asset groups split by product line, with search themes filled in? Google raised the limit to 50 search themes per asset group in August 2025.

If most of the spend went to brand queries or remarketing audiences, the campaign's reported return is mostly borrowed from demand you already had. For when Performance Max belongs at all, see PMax vs. Search: where consumer brands should put spend.

Step 6: Check the product feed and Merchant Center

Open Merchant Center and review disapprovals, warnings, and the quality of titles and images for your top sellers. Shopping ads and Performance Max build ads from the feed, so feed problems become ad problems. Bigeye found 89% of shoppers say visual appeal matters to which brand they choose.

Check four things on your top 20 products by revenue. Titles lead with brand, product type and the attribute shoppers search for. Main images read clearly at thumbnail size. Prices and availability match the site. Product categories and GTINs are filled in.

Then check coverage. Products missing from the feed, products disapproved for policy reasons, and products with zero impressions for 30 days all deserve a line on the fix list. A disapproved best seller is the cheapest problem in any audit to find, and one of the most expensive to miss.

Step 7: Review bids, budgets and targets

Check that each campaign's bid strategy and target matches the goal from Step 1. Target ROAS should come from margin, not a round number someone picked. Look for campaigns limited by budget while hitting their target, and campaigns spending freely while missing it. Moving money between them is often the fastest win in the audit.

Compare results to your own history before you compare them to anyone else's. WordStream's 2026 benchmarks put the average Google Ads click-through rate at 6.64% and the average cost per click at $5.42 across industries. Use those numbers as a sanity check only. Your category and margins set your real ceiling.

Note the changes history too. An account where targets change every few days never gets out of the learning period. Bigeye's guide to Google Ads bid adjustments in 2026 covers which manual levers still help under smart bidding.

Step 8: Audit ads, landing pages and AI Overview exposure

Check ad relevance, extensions and the pages ads send people to. Every active ad group should have current responsive search ads with headlines that match the queries, plus sitelinks, callouts, price and promotion extensions where they fit. Landing pages should load fast on mobile and show the product the ad promised.

Then check how AI Overviews are changing your traffic. Seer Interactive measured a 68% drop in paid click-through rate on queries that show an AI Overview between June 2024 and September 2025. Split your search terms into informational and product queries and compare click-through rates over time. If informational queries are fading, move that budget toward searches closer to purchase.

This guide on common Quality Score issues covers ad relevance and landing page experience in detail. For the organic side of AI answers, see Bigeye's AI SEO and GEO work.

The audit scorecard

What it looks like in practice

The National Mango Board shows why the measurement and research steps come first. Bigeye ran bilingual audience research, rebuilt the brand around what shoppers didn't know, and then ran integrated digital media. Website visits rose 23%, and the case study reports paid social up 275% and display up 647%.

Florida Crystals shows what tracking the right action looks like. Bigeye measured outcomes from "Get Ingredient" clicks through add-to-cart actions, across digital, social and retail media networks. The case study reports triple-digit growth as the brand moved from regional favorite to national contender.

Bigeye's read

Bigeye's view is that the most expensive problem in most Google Ads accounts is the conversion setup, and it's the last thing most teams check.

The pattern is common. An add-to-cart or a page view gets set as a primary conversion during setup. Smart bidding does exactly what it's told and finds people who add to cart and leave. The reported cost per conversion looks great. Sales don't move. Months later, someone starts cutting keywords to fix a problem the keywords didn't cause.

That's why this checklist puts tracking second, right after the goal. Fix what the account counts, give it a few weeks of clean data, and then judge the campaigns. Cheaper to do in that order, too.

Frequently asked questions

How often should you audit a Google Ads account?

Run a full audit once or twice a year, and after any major change such as a site rebuild, a new agency, or a switch in bid strategy. Check search terms and negatives every week and the conversion setup every month. Most expensive problems start small and grow between full audits.

What should a Google Ads audit include?

Ownership and goals, conversion tracking, account structure and the branded split, search terms and negatives, Performance Max, the product feed, bids and budgets, and ads and landing pages. Each finding should come with a dollar estimate and a priority, so the fixes happen in order of value rather than order of discovery.

Why does in-store and retail data matter in a Google Ads audit?

Because ads drive sales the conversion tag can't see. Bigeye's Retail Disrupted study of 1,501 US shoppers found 44% prefer stores and 21% prefer online. For brands sold at retail, judge campaigns on total sales using geo tests, or the audit will recommend cutting spend that works.

Can you audit your own Google Ads account?

Yes, with this checklist and a few hours. The hard part is objectivity: the team that built the account tends to miss its own assumptions. An outside audit is worth it when results have stalled, spend has grown faster than sales, or nobody can explain why a campaign is set up the way it is.

What is Bigeye's Blind Spot Audit?

It's Bigeye's free Google Ads review for consumer brands, covering tracking, structure, search terms, Performance Max and the feed, with a ranked fix list. Bigeye has 23 certified platform partnerships and has worked with consumer brands since 2002. You don't need to leave your current agency to get one.

Get a second set of eyes

If you'd rather have someone else run this checklist, start with Bigeye's free Blind Spot Audit. For ongoing management, Bigeye's paid media team runs Google Ads for consumer brands. Start the conversation.

Sources: Bigeye, Retail Disrupted (2021); Bigeye, In Clear Focus podcast (Feb 2025); Google Ads Help Center (2025 and 2026); WordStream (Sep 2026); Optmyzr (Jul 2025); Seer Interactive (Nov 2025); IAB and PwC (Apr 2026).