Google Ads spending without returning? An audit checklist, in the order to look

When a Google Ads account is spending money and bringing nothing back, the problem is rarely the ads themselves. It's usually one of a handful of things around them, and the order you check them in matters, because some problems hide others. There's no point rewriting an ad while the tracking counts the wrong thing. So start with who controls the account, and work down.

There's a printable version to work through alongside this. If you'd rather start from the symptom, such as no impressions, no clicks, or clicks with nothing after them, work from why Google Ads aren't converting instead, which is set out that way.

1. Whose account is it?

Before anything else, check that the business has full control of the account it's paying for. Google Ads has five access levels, and only the top one, Admin, "can give account access, change access levels and cancel invitations from other users".

• Someone inside the business has Admin access, using a business email address.
  What good looks like

  In Google Ads, under Access and security, at least one person in the business is listed with Admin access, signed in with a business email address rather than a personal one.

  Takes ten minutes. Covered in Who owns your marketing accounts?.

• You know who else has access, and why. Remove anyone who has left.
  What good looks like

  Every name on the access list is someone you recognise with a current reason to be there, and people who have left have been removed.

  Takes ten minutes. Covered in Who owns your marketing accounts?.

• The billing is in the business's name.
  What good looks like

  The payments profile shows the business as the paying entity, with a payment method the business controls.

  Takes five minutes. Covered in Who owns your marketing accounts?.

If an agency or a freelancer set the account up under their own login, sort that out before anything else, because who owns your marketing accounts decides who can lock whom out.

2. Is conversion tracking counting the right thing?

Every automatic decision Google makes in your account, and every judgement you make about it, rests on what gets counted as a result, so check that before you trust a single number.

• A real test enquiry shows up. Send one through your own form and check it appears in Google Ads.
  What good looks like

  You sent an enquiry through your own form, and within a day it appeared once in Google Ads under the right conversion action.

  Takes fifteen minutes, then a day's wait. Covered in GA4 tells you nothing useful? Set up key events, step by step.

• The right actions are counted. Somebody looking at your contact page, or clicking a button, is not an enquiry. If you're counting something that happens before the enquiry is actually sent, the account will look better than it is.
  What good looks like

  Every conversion action marked as primary counts a completed enquiry, booking or sale, not a page view or a button click that comes before it.

  Takes twenty minutes in the conversions page. Covered in full above.

• Leads are counted once. Google's own advice is that if what matters is whether a lead came in, rather than how many sales followed, you should count one conversion per click. For a business that takes enquiries, that's the honest count.
  What good looks like

  Each enquiry conversion action is set to count one conversion per ad click.

  Takes five minutes. Covered in full above.

• If you bring results in from Analytics, check the key event underneath is sound. A key event is one of the actions you've told Google Analytics to count, and our guide to GA4 key events covers setting one up.
  What good looks like

  The GA4 key event behind any imported conversion fires only on a completed enquiry, and a test enquiry shows up in both GA4 and Google Ads.

  Takes twenty minutes. Covered in GA4 tells you nothing useful? Set up key events, step by step.

3. What changed, and who changed it?

Accounts drift, and Google keeps a record of it: change history "lists the changes made to your account, campaigns and ad groups during the past two years". Read it back to the point where the results were last acceptable.

Some of those changes may not have been made by a person at all. Google Ads can apply its own recommendations: "When you turn on 'Automatically apply recommendations', the recommendations will apply regularly." Google says the feature won't raise your budget, but it can change other things, such as your keywords.

• Read the change history back to when the results were last good.
  What good looks like

  You have read change history back to the last period when results were good and noted every change since, who made it, and whether it could explain the drop.

  Takes half an hour to an hour. Covered in full above.

• Check which recommendations, if any, are set to apply automatically, and decide whether you want each one.
  What good looks like

  The auto-apply recommendations page shows only the types you have chosen to allow, and you have switched off any you did not decide on.

  Takes fifteen minutes. Covered in full above.

4. Where are the ads actually showing?

Three settings decide where your money goes before a single keyword comes into it.

• Search partners, meaning other sites that show Google's search ads. Google says: "When you create a campaign for the Search Network, search partners are included by default." So your ads appear beyond Google's own results page, on things Google says can include site directory pages and YouTube search results. Google adds its own caution: "clicks from these sites may not always reflect highly-targeted traffic." Look at how they perform in your account, on their own, before you decide whether to keep them.
  What good looks like

  You have looked at how search partner traffic performs in your account, separately from Google Search, and kept it on or switched it off on that evidence.

  Takes twenty minutes. Covered in full above.

• Display. A Search campaign can also show your ads as banners across other websites, if the Display Network box is ticked in the campaign's network settings. Check whether it's ticked, and whether you ever meant it to be.
  What good looks like

  The Display Network box is unticked in every Search campaign's network settings, unless you chose it on purpose.

  Takes five minutes per campaign. Covered in full above.

• Location. The setting Google recommends on Search also reaches people who have shown an interest in your area, not only people who are in it. Google itself says to consider targeting by presence when "You only want to target users in specific locations and not users who may be in other locations but are still interested in your product or service". If you only serve people nearby, that's usually you.
  What good looks like

  For a business that only serves people nearby, each campaign's location option targets people in or regularly in your area, not those merely interested in it.

  Takes five minutes per campaign. Covered in full above.

5. What searches are you paying for?

• Open the search terms report for the last 30 or 90 days, sorted by cost.
  What good looks like

  You have the search terms report for the last 30 or 90 days open, sorted by cost, and you have read the top of it line by line.

  Takes half an hour. Covered in Why your Google Ads aren't working: no impressions, no clicks or no conversions.

• Mark every search that could never have become a customer, and add it as a negative keyword, which tells Google never to show your ad for it again.
  What good looks like

  Every irrelevant search in the report has been added as a negative keyword, at the right level, and you have a monthly reminder to repeat it.

  Takes half an hour, then twenty minutes a month. Covered in Why your Google Ads aren't working: no impressions, no clicks or no conversions.

• Check which match types your keywords use. Match types are how loosely Google matches a search to the words you chose, and the broadest one finds the most searches, including the most irrelevant ones.
  What good looks like

  You know which keywords use broad match, and each broad match keyword is there by choice, with its search terms watched.

  Takes twenty minutes. Covered in full above.

This is where most of the wasted money in small accounts turns up, and why Google Ads aren't converting shows you how to read the report.

6. Does the click land somewhere that sells?

• Each ad sends people to the page that answers what they searched for, not the homepage.
  What good looks like

  Every ad's final URL is the page that answers what was searched for, such as the service page, not the homepage.

  Takes twenty minutes. Covered in Landing pages that convert: the structure, section by section.

• The page says, near the top, what the ad promised.
  What good looks like

  The headline of each landing page repeats what the ad promised, in similar words, so the visitor knows at once they are in the right place.

  Takes fifteen minutes per page. Covered in Landing pages that convert: the structure, section by section.

• The page works on a phone, loads quickly, and the form or phone number is easy to reach. Our piece on landing page structure covers what it needs.
  What good looks like

  On a phone, the landing page loads quickly, reads easily, and the form or phone number is reachable without hunting.

  Takes twenty minutes. Covered in Landing pages that convert: the structure, section by section.

7. Could the sums ever work?

• Work out what an enquiry is worth to you: how many become customers, and what a customer is worth.
  What good looks like

  You have a figure for what an enquiry is worth: the share of enquiries that become customers multiplied by what a customer is worth to you in profit.

  Takes half an hour with your own figures. Covered in Is Google Ads worth it for your business? Do the break-even sum first.

• Compare that with what you're paying per enquiry now.
  What good looks like

  You have set your current cost per enquiry beside what an enquiry is worth, and you know the gap in pounds.

  Takes fifteen minutes. Covered in Is Google Ads worth it for your business? Do the break-even sum first.

• If even a well-run account couldn't close the gap, stop, and put the money somewhere else.
  What good looks like

  You have decided, with numbers written down, either that a well-run account could close the gap, or that the money is better spent elsewhere, and acted on it.

  Takes a decision, once the sums are done. Covered in How to split a small marketing budget.

To run the arithmetic with your own numbers, use the break-even sum for Google Ads, and check typical prices in what Google Ads cost.

What to bear in mind

• Google's advice serves Google too. Its help pages recommend options, such as including search partners or broader location targeting, that tend to increase how much you can spend. That doesn't make them wrong, but it does mean testing them in your own account rather than taking them on trust.
• There's no benchmark for small accounts. We found no reliable public data on what a healthy account looks like for a UK business your size, so these checks are about whether the account is set up to do what you intend, not about hitting an industry average.
• The interface changes. Google renames settings and moves them about regularly. The checks above follow Google's descriptions as they stood on 28 September 2026.

If you'd rather hand the account over altogether, our Google Ads launch takes about two weeks for a fixed £2,500, with 30 days of changes afterwards as the first data comes in.