What a Google Ads Audit Reveals About a London SME Campaign

A Google Ads audit shows where spend is going to waste, and in the accounts we audit, we typically find 30 to 60 percent of spend going to waste. This is our audit experience, not a universal statistic. The causes are often the same: broken or duplicated conversion tracking, broad match keywords without negative keyword lists spending on irrelevant searches, and campaigns whose budgets are too fragmented to collect enough conversion data for Smart Bidding to learn.

Many London SME Google Ads accounts underperform because they were set up by non-specialists or overloaded generalists, and Google's default settings can push accounts toward configurations that generate clicks and spend rather than profitable conversions. Broad match keywords without negative lists can spend a large share of budget on irrelevant searches.

Many London SME Google Ads accounts are set up either by someone without specialist training or by a generalist with too many accounts to manage carefully. Google earns revenue from ad spend, and its default settings, recommended settings and automated suggestions often favour more clicks and spend, which is not always the same as more profitable conversions. A Google Ads agency in London that audits accounts regularly often sees the same structural problems in the campaigns it inherits.

The result is predictable. Broad match keywords match searches that have nothing to do with the business. Search and Display campaigns are combined, muddying the data from both. Conversion tracking fires on page views instead of form completions, making the algorithm optimise for people who looked at the thank-you page URL rather than people who submitted a form. Smart Bidding, which depends on conversion data to function, has nothing reliable to optimise towards.

An audit checks conversion tracking accuracy, match type distribution, campaign structure, budget concentration, and Quality Score first, in that order of priority. A misconfigured conversion event is a common finding, and it corrupts every optimisation decision built on top of it.

That campaign-structure problem, Search and Display mixed together, is a frequent finding in audits like this, and it often traces back to picking the wrong campaign type at setup rather than a deliberate choice. See our plain-English guide to Google Ads campaign types if you're not certain which type your account is running.

Wasted spend in a Google Ads account is not abstract. It is money paid for clicks from searches that could never produce a conversion, or clicks that produced a conversion signal but not an actual lead or sale. Take an illustrative London professional services account spending £3,000 per month (an assumption, not a specific client result). At 30 percent waste, £900 per month is going to searches that will never produce business. At 60 percent, it is £1,800 per month.

The Search Terms report shows this with precision. Every week, this report reveals what actual user searches triggered your ads. A solicitor running ads for 'employment law advice' can see part of their budget consumed by searches like 'employment law courses', 'employment law books', and 'employment law Wikipedia'. Each of those is a search from someone with no intent to hire a solicitor. Each one was paid for. A thorough negative keyword list added in week one can cut a meaningful share of this waste before any other change is made.

Our audits recommend fixing conversion tracking first, then negative keywords, then campaign structure, then bidding strategy, in that order. Cutting wasted spend through negative keywords is usually the cheapest early gain and can lower cost per qualified lead before any structural change is made, though results vary by account.

The priority order in every audit is: fix tracking first, then fix negatives, then fix structure, then fix bidding strategy. Changing bids before tracking is fixed means changing bids based on wrong data. Adding more budget before structural problems are resolved means spending more on the same inefficiencies. Tracking comes first. This applies equally to standalone paid advertising campaigns and to accounts running alongside an SEO programme.

Audit pricing varies by provider and account size, and some agencies offer an initial review as part of a management pitch. For an account spending more than £1,000 per month, an audit can pay for itself if it finds meaningful waste, but the size of the saving depends on the account.

The maths is straightforward. Take an illustrative account spending £2,000 per month where 30 percent is wasted: that is £600 every month going to searches that were never going to convert, or £1,200 at 60 percent. Recovering that money repeats every month, because a negative keyword list keeps working after it is built. Actual figures depend on the account.

Some business owners assume an audit only makes sense for larger accounts. The opposite is usually true. Smaller accounts, those spending £500-£1,500 per month, may be more likely to have been set up without specialist input and are more sensitive to wasted spend as a proportion of total budget, because there is no volume to absorb the inefficiency. A £150 wasted-spend problem on a £5,000 budget is a rounding error. The same £150 on a £600 budget is a quarter of the account.

A business owner with a few hours and access to Google Ads and Google Tag Manager can complete a basic self-audit covering conversion tracking and match types. A full structural audit, including Quality Score diagnosis, campaign architecture review, and a prioritised fix plan, benefits from specialist eyes because the patterns become much easier to spot with experience of many accounts.

The self-audit checklist is short: check that conversion actions fire on the right event, check the Search Terms report for irrelevant matches, and check whether Search and Display campaigns are combined. Any business owner can do this in an afternoon and will likely find at least one meaningful issue. What a self-audit typically misses is the interaction between problems: a Quality Score issue caused by ad relevance, made worse by a landing page mismatch, compounded by a bidding strategy that cannot function without clean conversion data. Untangling that interaction is where specialist experience earns its cost.

A thorough audit of a standard SME account, one to five campaigns across Search and Display or Shopping, is reviewed against a fixed checklist. Audit time depends on account size and complexity, and we confirm it before we start. It covers tracking verification, campaign structure, keyword analysis, ad copy review, Quality Score assessment, and wasted spend quantification. We deliver the audit as a prioritised action plan, not just a list of issues.

Preserve the account in almost all cases. Account history, Quality Scores, and conversion data accumulated over time have value. Even a poorly structured account has historical data that informs better decisions if you know how to read it. Starting fresh loses that data and extends the learning phase for new campaigns. The exception is an account with a history of invalid clicks, manual penalties, or systematically corrupted conversion data where the history itself is the problem.

Cutting wasted spend can improve cost per qualified lead without any additional budget, and structural fixes to campaign architecture and Quality Scores tend to add further gains over the following months. We cannot promise a specific figure: the outcome depends on your sector, keyword competition, landing page quality and how poor the starting point was.

No. An audit is a diagnostic exercise conducted with read-only or view access to your account. Nothing is paused, changed, or restructured until you have seen the findings and agreed to a fix plan. Campaigns continue running exactly as they were throughout the audit period. The only exception is if the audit uncovers something urgent, such as a conversion event that has been broken for weeks, in which case we flag it straight away rather than waiting for the full report, but even then no change is made without your sign-off first.

Book a call to talk through your goals and where your Google Ads account may be losing spend.

An account audit is also a useful window into how a prospective agency works; see our guide on what to look for in a Google Ads agency or manager for the specific signals of competent management.