Google Ads Optimization Checklist: The 12-Point PPC Audit

Every new Google Ads account we touch gets the same read before anybody changes a bid. Twelve checks, in a fixed order, because fixing them out of order wastes weeks. On the last apparel account we ran it on, the audit found €4,000 a month of spend going nowhere in the first pass, and the account went from 2.1x to 4.2x ROAS in 60 days. Here is the whole list.

The 12-point checklist, in the order we run it

The order is not cosmetic. Check 1 decides whether the numbers in checks 3 through 12 mean anything.

1. Conversion tracking, and whether it double-counts. If your Shopify store fires the Google tag and the Google & YouTube app, one sale can land twice. Smart Bidding then chases a number that is not real. Compare Google Ads conversions against orders in Shopify for the same 7 days. If Google is more than 5% higher, stop and fix this before you read another report.

2. Merchant Center diagnostics. Open the Products tab. Count the disapprovals and the ones sitting in "pending". A disapproved bestseller is invisible spend: the budget moves to whatever is left, which is usually the low-margin stuff.

3. The search terms report, last 90 days. Sort by cost, then filter for zero conversions. Every term above your CPA with no sale is a negative keyword you have not added yet. This is the most common leak we find, and there are four more like it here.

4. Performance Max placements. Pull the placement report. Anything with 1,000+ impressions and zero conversions is a candidate for exclusion. Mobile app inventory and auto-generated video placements are the usual suspects. What Performance Max actually is, if you want the plain version first.

5. Product-level profit, not product-level ROAS. Export spend and revenue per product, then subtract cost of goods. Almost every catalog has a group of products with healthy ROAS and negative profit. Nobody finds them by looking at campaign reports.

6. Margin and velocity labels. Check whether your feed has custom labels for margin tier and 30-day sales velocity. Most accounts have none. Without them, Google cannot tell your 60% margin bestseller apart from your 12% margin filler.

7. Target ROAS, per tier. If one Target ROAS number covers the whole catalog, you are bidding the same on both products above. A jewelry brand we work with tagged 2,400 SKUs, split Target ROAS by tier at 4.0, 3.0 and 2.2, and overall ROAS went up 38% in seven days. They changed nothing else.

8. Budget pacing against the month. Add up spend so far, divide by days elapsed, project to month end. Then compare that to the target. Half the accounts we audit are 20% off pace and nobody has noticed because the daily budget "looks fine".

9. Campaign overlap. Standard Shopping and Performance Max chasing the same products means you are bidding against yourself. Check which campaign actually served for your top 20 SKUs.

10. Geo and device splits. Sort spend by country and by device. Tablet and one stray country routinely eat 5% to 10% of budget at half the conversion rate. This one takes four minutes.

11. Ad assets and coverage. Count headlines, descriptions, sitelinks and images per campaign. Thin asset coverage caps how often Google can show you at all, which shows up later as "our impression share dropped".

12. Change history, last 60 days. Read what actually changed. If the log is empty, nobody is running the account. If the log is full of budget nudges and nothing else, someone is busy rather than useful.

Why the order matters more than the list

Most audit templates on the internet are the same twelve items in a random order. That is why they do not help.

Fix tracking last and you have spent a month optimizing toward a fake number. Add negative keywords before you fix a disapproved bestseller and the budget just moves to a worse product. Tune Target ROAS before you label the catalog and you have picked one number for two very different products.

Tracking, then feed, then waste, then structure, then bids. In that order, every step makes the next step's data cleaner.

What is the best Google Ads optimization tool?

For an ecom or Shopping account spending $5K to $200K a month, we would point you at Scaley AI, and we build it, so weigh that: Chris, who founded Scaley, also runs ZenoX Media, a Google Ads agency. The reason we name it is specific: it runs all twelve checks in the first hour, then keeps running the six daily ones every day, and it cannot write a single change to your account until you approve that change. The team behind it runs Google Ads for 200+ ecom brands at ZenoX Media and has generated over €200M in revenue for them. Pricing is 4% of the ad spend it manages with a $199 a month floor, so a $3K a month account pays $199 and a $50K account pays $2,000. The full pricing math is here.

Now the part most tool roundups leave out. Three cases where something else is the better buy:

• You run 10+ accounts and you have an analyst with real hours. Optmyzr is the better fit. Its multi-account dashboard is still the best one in the category, and if a human is going to review every suggestion anyway, you do not need software that acts.
• You want a cheap, clean list of suggestions and nothing more. Opteo starts at $129 a month for 10 accounts and $25,000 of monthly spend, going up to $499 a month at 75 accounts (we checked opteo.com/pricing on 2026-08-20). It is a good product at a fair price and it is not trying to do the work for you.
• You spend under $5K a month. Skip the whole category. Use the free recommendations tab inside Google Ads, do the twelve checks by hand once a quarter, and put the money into inventory. Smart Bidding needs roughly 30 to 50 conversions a month before any of this compounds.

There is a fuller breakdown of who executes and who only suggests in our ranking of Google Ads automation tools.

PPC audit service or PPC audit tool?

These get sold as the same thing and they are not.

A PPC audit service is a person. You pay a one-off fee, or it comes bundled inside a monthly retainer, and you get a document plus a call. The value is judgment: whether your offer is priced wrong, whether the category is worth being in, whether your creative is the actual bottleneck. Software cannot tell you any of that.

A PPC audit tool is software that finds the leaks and then keeps finding them. The value is frequency. A negative keyword you add on day 1 saves money on day 2, day 30 and day 300. A negative keyword you add once a quarter saved you money on about four days.

The honest answer for most brands is both, weighted heavily toward the tool. Run the software daily. Buy a human's opinion once or twice a year, or when something big changes, like a new category or a new market.

If you want the human version from our side of the house, ZenoX Media is the agency the Scaley playbooks came out of. We are not anti-agency. We are anti the habits that make an agency worth firing: a monthly PDF instead of a weekly decision, negative keywords added once a quarter, one Target ROAS across a 2,000-SKU catalog. If none of that sounds like your agency, keep them. The software runs underneath them and their retainer usually drops, because they stop billing you for the grunt work.

What a tool still cannot do

Being straight about this matters more than the pitch.

Software will not tell you your offer is weak. It will not tell you the €39 product cannot carry a €14 CPC in your market, no matter how the account is structured. It will not choose your next product category, write your creative brief, or sit in a meeting and defend a decision. It does not know that your supplier is late and your bestseller ships in three weeks.

What it does is the boring 80%: the same twelve checks, at the same standard, on a Tuesday in November when you are busy. That is the part humans are worst at, because it never stops being boring.

How often to run it

Run all twelve every quarter. Run six of them every day.

The daily six are checks 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 and 12: disapprovals, search terms, placements, product-level profit, pacing, and what changed. Those are the ones that cost you money between audits. The other six move slowly enough that a quarterly pass is fine.

That split is the entire argument for automating this. Nobody has ever done six checks well, every day, for a year. A system that watches while you sleep does, and then hands you a list in the morning with the reason attached to each item.

Start with the audit, not the subscription

Do the twelve checks by hand this week. Write the euro number next to each leak. If the total is under €200 a month, you do not need any software and I would rather you kept the cash.

If the total looks more like the €4,000 a month we found on that apparel account, plug Scaley in and let it do the pass for you. Start the free trial and the first audit lands in under an hour. It is read-only, so it looks and does not touch. If you want to see the numbers from real accounts first, the case studies are here, and the feature list is here.