Google Ads audit: where the money actually bleeds.
Senior Google Ads operator with 8+ years of experience, spent the last years almost entirely inside DTC eCommerce accounts. Small number of accounts, no juniors, no handoffs.
- Money almost never leaks from one obvious mistake. It leaks from five specific places.
- The five are checked in order, because each one depends on the one before it.
- Most accounts have at least two of these active at the same time, without anyone noticing.
Search for a free Google Ads audit and you get the same thing over and over: a long checklist that is really a sales document dressed up as help. It is weighted on purpose, so that enough boxes come back red that you book the call at the bottom of the page.
This is the opposite. It is the actual framework I use in every written account diagnosis, the same five categories, in the same order. You can check your own account against it first, no sales pitch required, and see where you stand before you decide whether anyone needs to look at it for you.
The dashboard says one thing, the bank account says another
ROAS is the number every platform leads with. It means return on ad spend: for every dollar in, how many dollars of revenue came back. The problem is that the platform does not know your margins, your shipping costs, your returns, or your cost of goods. It counts revenue as reported, not profit as deposited.
So the dashboard can show a healthy 3.8x while the account is quietly unprofitable, or the reverse. The check is simple: pull last month's actual bank deposits that came from this channel and compare them to what the ad platform reports as conversion value. If the two numbers are wildly different, something downstream is broken and no amount of campaign optimization will fix it.
Google doesn't know what a sale is worth
A conversion action is any event you tell Google to count as a win: a purchase, an add to cart, a signup. Google optimizes toward whatever you mark as the main one. Two mistakes are extremely common. The first: accounts count "add to cart" or "begin checkout" as if it were a purchase, so the bidding system spends your budget chasing people who browse and never buy. The second: purchases are counted with no dollar value attached, so the system cannot tell a $200 order from a $20 one.
Either mistake means the machine is optimizing for the wrong outcome, confidently and at full spend. The check: in the conversions column of the ads platform, look at what is marked as the primary conversion action, and what each one is worth.
Brand and non-brand are fighting each other
Brand searches are people typing your company's name. They already know you, they are about to buy, and they would convert almost regardless of what the ads do. Non-brand searches are cold: someone searching for a product category with no idea who you are.
When the two are not separated into their own campaigns, budget and bidding data get muddied. The brand searches make the whole account look far more profitable than the cold traffic is, and the bidding system keeps raising budgets based on performance that brand searches were always going to deliver anyway. The check: search your own brand name and see whether a campaign is bidding on it specifically, separate from everything else. Separating them is usually done with negative keywords, which have their own post because most accounts get them wrong.
The bidding strategy is optimizing for the wrong number
Target ROAS is a bidding setting where you tell Google the return to aim for, and it adjusts bids in real time to hit it. Set it too low and you cap growth for no reason. Set it too high and good campaigns get starved of budget because the target is impossible to hit at scale.
Most accounts set this number based on what looks achievable, or what an agency template suggested, not on actual breakeven math. Breakeven is the return at which ad spend stops losing money once margins and costs are counted, and you can calculate your own breakeven ROAS here in about a minute. A target set without that number either starves campaigns that were working or protects a margin nobody has.
The feed is quietly capping what can even show
This one is specific to ecommerce accounts running Shopping ads. Your product feed is the data file that tells Google what you sell. When Merchant Center disapprovals pile up, when misrepresentation flags hit the account, or when required attributes are missing, those products simply never enter the auction at all. No campaign strategy can spend budget on products Google will not show.
This is the least visible bleed, because the account looks normal. The campaigns spend, the dashboard shows numbers, and nobody notices that a third of the catalog is not even competing. The full Shopping ads guide breaks down the feed attributes that block approval and how each one fails.
- Compared last month's actual revenue to reported conversion value
- Checked which conversion action is marked Primary
- Confirmed brand and non-brand searches run in separate campaigns
- Checked Target ROAS against actual breakeven math
- Checked Merchant Center for disapprovals or warnings (if running Shopping)
Checking these five yourself takes an afternoon and gets you most of the way. Getting all five checked, ranked by how much each one costs you per month, and turned into a step-by-step fix list is exactly what a Written Account Diagnosis is.
Get all five checked, ranked, and turned into a fix list.
A 30 to 40 page written diagnosis, $1,500 flat, delivered in 7 days. Yours to keep either way.
Senior Google Ads operator with 8+ years of experience, spent the last years almost entirely inside DTC eCommerce accounts. Small number of accounts, no juniors, no handoffs.