Google Ads
Google Ads Audit: What the 10-Pillar Diagnostic Covers
You're spending $5k-$50k a month on Google Ads. The dashboard says things are running. But ROAS has drifted. Budget's going up and conversions aren't keeping pace. You've checked the obvious things - bids, budgets, recent changes - and nothing jumps out.
That's the situation most accounts are in before a structured audit. The problems aren't hidden. They're just not visible from inside the standard campaign view.
The Gap Analysis is not a quick account health check or a free review designed to pitch you into a retainer. It's a structured diagnostic that works through 10 specific pillars - delivered as a scored report with named findings and a prioritised action list.
Every pillar maps to a measurable part of account performance. Each finding is scored, named, and given a priority rating. The mockups below are drawn from a real audit, with client and brand names removed.
Whether the searches triggering your ads actually match what you sell. This uses the Search Term Performance Matrix - classifying queries across four quadrants by click-through rate and conversion rate. The output identifies which terms to keep, which to prioritise, which to rewrite copy for, and which to exclude with negative keywords.
Whether you're capturing enough of the available market. This covers impression share, impression share lost to budget, impression share lost to rank, and click volume relative to category demand. A profitable campaign running at 35% impression share isn't performing well - it's an opportunity that hasn't been realised yet.
How your ad CTR compares to benchmarks for your industry and keyword type. Low CTR depresses Quality Score, which raises the cost of every click you buy. This pillar identifies the ad groups where CTR is acting as a drag on the rest of the account - and flags the specific ads responsible.
The Quality Score tax is real. A keyword at QS 4 costs significantly more per click than the same keyword at QS 7, for the same ad position. This pillar checks the three sub-components - expected CTR, ad relevance, landing page experience - on your highest-spend keywords and identifies where the cost floor can be lowered without changing bids.
Your actual CPC vs your maximum sustainable CPC, calculated from your unit economics. If your CPCs sit above what the margin on a converted order can support, the campaign cannot be profitable at any bid level. This pillar surfaces accounts where the CPC ceiling has been breached - and where the fix is structural, not a bid adjustment.
CVR benchmarked against your account history and category. This pillar distinguishes between a Google Ads problem and a website problem - two things that look identical from inside the campaign dashboard but require completely different responses. Throwing more budget at a landing page issue makes the numbers worse, not better.
Performance vs targets, broken down by campaign, device, and time period. This pillar identifies where budget is working and where it isn't - and specifically checks whether account-level ROAS is being propped up by brand traffic in a way that masks weak acquisition performance from non-brand campaigns.
Smart Bidding health: whether campaigns have sufficient conversion data to run target-based strategies, whether tROAS or tCPA targets are calibrated against actual performance, and whether any campaigns are sitting in an unresolved learning phase that's restricting delivery. A miscalibrated tROAS target is one of the most common causes of invisible underperformance.
Every responsive search ad in the account is scored across a four-tier framework: Winner, Potential, Loser, Zombie. This pillar identifies which ads are actively dragging performance - and provides specific rewrite recommendations for the highest-priority ones, with character counts validated against Google's limits.
Campaign and keyword overlap that causes your own ads to compete against each other - inflating CPCs, splitting Quality Score signals, and confusing Smart Bidding. This is one of the most common structural problems in accounts that have been active for more than two years, and one of the least visible from inside the standard campaign view.
The deliverable is a structured HTML report - not a slide deck, not a PDF summary, not a list of recommendations without context. Each of the 10 pillars is scored. Every finding is named, written in plain English, and has a specific action attached. Findings are prioritised so you know what to address first and why the order matters - fixing a downstream problem while an upstream one remains active is wasted effort.
Available on the full-service tier. A 60-minute call to walk through the findings, answer questions, and agree on priorities. If you have an in-house team or an agency managing the account, this is where they get the context to act on the report without needing to interpret it independently. See the pricing page for what's included at each tier.
The Gap Analysis is suited to eCommerce businesses spending between $5k and $50k per month on Google Ads who meet at least one of the following:
It's not the right fit if you're spending under $3k/month - there isn't sufficient conversion data to make the diagnostic meaningful. And if what you need is ongoing campaign management rather than a standalone audit, that's a different conversation - see the About page for how I work.
The Gap Analysis starts from $997. Full details of what's included at each tier - including the debrief call option - are on the Gap Analysis pricing page.
Delivery is within five business days of receiving read-only access to your account. Enquiries take 24-48 hours to respond to. If you're working to a specific deadline, include that in your message.
Not sure if this is what you need? Send a brief note about your account - monthly spend, how long it's been running, and what you're seeing. I'll tell you whether the Gap Analysis is the right starting point or whether something else makes more sense.
10-pillar diagnostic. Scored report with named findings and a prioritised action list. Delivered within 5 business days. From $997 - see full pricing.
If the audit finds nothing actionable, you don't pay.
Enquire here →