How To Run A PPC Audit

PPC & Paid Advertising

This guide covers everything you need to conduct a comprehensive PPC audit in 2026, from the frameworks that work to the specific checkpoints you can't afford to miss. Whether you're running your first PPC audit or updating your process for the AI era, you'll find actionable insights here.

The Complete Guide to PPC Auditing in 2026

Effective PPC audits in 2026 require balancing automation oversight with strategic manual control—because Google's AI is only as good as the data you feed it.

The PPC landscape has transformed dramatically since 2019. AI-powered automation, privacy regulations, and Performance Max campaigns have fundamentally changed how advertisers manage and audit their Google Ads accounts. Modern PPC audits must now evaluate Smart Bidding strategies, audit AI-generated assets, verify Consent Mode v2 compliance, and assess first-party data infrastructure—none of which existed when most audit frameworks were originally developed.

Google's shift toward AI means advertisers must audit not just what their campaigns are doing, but what Google's algorithms are doing on their behalf. Average CPCs have risen 39% cumulatively since 2020, making efficient spend management more critical than ever. The good news? Conversion rates have actually improved to 7.52% average thanks to better targeting and automation—for those who know how to harness it properly.

Modern audit frameworks prioritise value over vanity metrics

The most significant shift in PPC audit methodology since 2019 is the move from volume-based metrics to value-based outcomes. Expert consensus now positions profit and revenue contribution as primary KPIs, with traditional metrics like click-through rate serving purely diagnostic purposes.

A comprehensive 2026 PPC audit framework typically encompasses 60 or more checkpoints organised into distinct phases:

• Governance and security verification – Account access, billing, user permissions
• Tracking and attribution validation – Conversion setup, GA4 linking, Enhanced Conversions
• Campaign structure analysis – Account organisation, naming conventions, budget allocation
• Keyword and audience optimisation – Search terms, match types, audience signals
• Creative assessment – RSA performance, asset quality, landing pages
• Competitive benchmarking – Auction Insights, impression share, market position

The recommended approach begins with conversion tracking verification—the foundation of all Smart Bidding—progresses through account structure review, and culminates in landing page assessment.

The ICE scoring method (Impact × Confidence × Ease) has emerged as the preferred prioritisation framework for audit findings. Score each finding from 1-10 on all three dimensions, then multiply to get a total priority score. This enables teams to focus on high-impact, high-confidence changes that can be implemented quickly rather than getting overwhelmed by lengthy recommendation lists.

Performance Max and Smart Bidding require new audit approaches

Performance Max campaigns, launched in 2021 and now dominant in ecommerce, present unique audit challenges due to their "black box" nature. However, 2025 has delivered significantly improved transparency—channel-level performance reporting now shows breakdowns across Search, YouTube, Display, and Shopping, whilst asset-level metrics enable proper creative testing for the first time.

A robust PMax audit verifies several critical elements:

• Audience signals accurately represent ideal customers (rather than leaving Google to find audiences independently)
• Conversion tracking captures actual business value (not just form submissions)
• Asset groups contain diverse creative formats across all required dimensions
• Search theme "usefulness" indicators show themes generating incremental traffic
• Campaign-level negative keywords are utilised (enabled January 2025)

Smart Bidding evaluation centres on data volume thresholds. Target CPA requires a minimum of 30 conversions monthly, whilst Target ROAS needs 100 or more conversions for reliable optimisation. Research from Smarter Ecommerce analysing 3,000+ PMax campaigns found 78.2% use Target ROAS bidding, with 84% meeting or exceeding their targets.

Your audit should also verify that Enhanced CPC is being phased out—it was deprecated for new campaigns in October 2024, with full transition required by March 2025. If you're still running campaigns on ECPC, now is the time to transition to conversion-based bidding strategies.

Consent Mode v2 and GA4 integration are now mandatory checkpoints

The technical tracking landscape has undergone fundamental changes. Consent Mode v2 became mandatory for all Google Ads users targeting UK and EEA audiences in March 2024, requiring two new consent signals: ad_user_data and ad_personalization. Non-compliance from July 2025 results in disabled conversion tracking and loss of remarketing capabilities.

A critical update: Google reversed its third-party cookie deprecation plans in July 2024, opting instead for a user-choice model. However, Safari and Firefox already block third-party cookies (affecting approximately 30% of users), making first-party data strategies essential regardless of Chrome's policy. Server-side tracking implementations are reporting 10-30% conversion uplift by capturing data that client-side tracking misses.

GA4 integration audits should verify:

• Proper linking between Google Ads and Analytics
• Correct conversion action imports with appropriate attribution models
• Enhanced Conversions setup and verification status
• Data consistency between platforms (check for significant discrepancies)

The Enhanced Conversions diagnostics report (found via Tools & Settings → Conversions → Go to Diagnostics) provides verification status. Common issues include incorrect email formatting (must include @ symbol), missing country codes on phone numbers, and incomplete address fields. Google launched a Chrome extension specifically for Enhanced Conversions troubleshooting in July 2024.

For deeper guidance on connecting your marketing data across platforms, our guide to marketing attribution that actually works covers the full measurement stack.

Search campaigns and RSAs demand granular creative evaluation

Responsive Search Ads now represent 92% of advertiser usage, with expanded functionality in 2025 including single-headline ad serving, headline positioning in description lines, and campaign-level asset application. However, Google confirmed in April 2024 that Ad Strength is not used in Ad Rank calculation—meaning "Poor" rated ads can still perform well, and optimising for Ad Strength alone is misguided.

The RSA audit should evaluate individual asset performance labels (Best, Good, Low), requiring 500 or more impressions for meaningful evaluation. Pin strategies should be used sparingly—only for brand name requirements, legal disclaimers, or assets with strong historical performance—as over-pinning reduces the system's optimisation flexibility.

Match type strategy has evolved significantly. Current data shows phrase match delivers 23% higher CPA than exact or broad match combined with Smart Bidding. The broad match plus Smart Bidding combination, heavily promoted by Google, shows mixed results—an Optmyzr study found exact match outperformed broad match in CPC, CTR, CPA, and ROAS for the majority of accounts tested, though broad match can unlock additional reach when properly managed.

Search term audits remain essential despite automation, with companies wasting an estimated 15% of budget on irrelevant keywords on average. The n-gram analysis approach—identifying patterns in non-converting terms with 150+ clicks over 90 days—enables efficient negative keyword discovery at scale.

Budget allocation and wasted spend identification techniques

Budget optimisation audits should verify daily budgets are set at 2-3× target CPA for conversion-focused strategies, check for "Limited by Budget" status indicators, and analyse Search Lost Impression Share (Budget) to quantify missed opportunities.

Wasted spend identification follows a systematic approach:

1. Filter search terms by zero conversion rate over a meaningful time period
2. Sum costs of non-converting terms to quantify waste
3. Analyse performance by device, location, and time segments
4. Identify "dead weight" elements—anything with no conversions or performance more than 100% worse than campaign goals

Common waste sources include keywords with zero conversions over 12 months, negative-ROI products masked by aggregate performance, and non-converting time periods (such as early morning Display ads on mobile).

Portfolio bidding strategies have demonstrated 19-27% ROAS improvement through dynamic reallocation across campaigns. When switching from Target CPA to Target ROAS, advertisers typically gain 14% more conversion value. The decision between ROAS and CPA targeting depends on conversion value variation: Target CPA suits lead generation where all conversions have similar value, whilst Target ROAS benefits ecommerce with varied average order values.

Quality Score remains diagnostic, not deterministic

Quality Score in 2025 comprises three components: expected CTR (historical click likelihood), ad relevance (alignment with search intent), and landing page experience (relevance, speed, mobile-friendliness). The critical distinction for modern audits: Quality Score is a diagnostic tool, not an auction input. Optimising purely for QS scores is counterproductive; instead, use low scores to identify specific problem areas.

Landing page audits should verify:

• Load times under 3 seconds – Slower pages hurt both QS and conversion rates
• Mobile responsiveness – With 82.9% of landing page traffic from mobile, this is non-negotiable
• Message match – Alignment between ad copy and page headlines
• Clear above-fold calls-to-action – Users shouldn't have to scroll to convert

A/B testing landing page variants should be continuous, with performance segmented by device type. For comprehensive landing page optimisation strategies, see our guide to optimising your website for conversions.

Competitive analysis through Auction Insights provides six key metrics for Search campaigns: Impression Share, Overlap Rate, Position Above Rate, Top of Page Rate, Absolute Top of Page Rate, and Outranking Share. Note that Auction Insights was removed from Looker Studio in August-September 2024—auditors must now use the Google Ads interface directly.

Industry benchmarks reveal rising costs but improving efficiency

The 2025 WordStream benchmarks, analysing 16,446 campaigns from April 2024 to March 2025, show significant shifts from previous years. Understanding where your industry sits helps contextualise audit findings.

Industry-specific variations are substantial. Arts & Entertainment achieves 13.10% CTR with just £1.30 CPC, whilst Attorneys & Legal Services faces £6.85 CPC with only 5.97% CTR. Conversion rates range from 14.67% in Automotive Repair to 2.55% in Finance & Insurance.

The UK has the highest Google Ads search CPC globally at approximately £0.97 average across all industries—making efficient audit practices particularly valuable for UK advertisers.

Mobile now accounts for 52-62% of all Google Ads clicks, with 70%+ of PPC spend projected to be mobile by end of 2025. However, mobile typically shows lower conversion rates than desktop despite higher traffic volume—a critical segmentation factor for audits.

Audit tools range from free graders to enterprise platforms

The audit tool landscape in 2026 offers solutions for every budget level. Third-party tools provide independent analysis without platform bias, cross-platform comparison capabilities, proper statistical significance for A/B testing, and more sophisticated negative keyword discovery algorithms.

Google's native tools—Ads Editor for bulk changes, Recommendations tab for suggestions, and Performance Planner for forecasting—provide useful functionality but should be used with caution. Google's recommendations often favour platform revenue over advertiser ROI, with 24 auto-apply recommendation types now available.

Your audit should verify which auto-apply settings are enabled and review the History tab for recent automatic changes. Many accounts unknowingly have auto-apply enabled, which can make significant changes without advertiser approval.

The AI Max era requires renewed manual oversight

The 2025 announcement of AI Max for Search Campaigns represents Google's latest push toward full automation—expanding keywords automatically, scanning landing pages to create assets, and matching queries without traditional keyword constraints. Combined with Performance Max and Demand Gen, Google's "Power Pack" vision positions AI at the centre of campaign management.

However, research consistently shows that successful accounts combine automation power with strategic manual control. The recommended balance is approximately 70% automation and 30% human oversight, with manual control retained over:

• Negative keyword management
• Creative direction and brand messaging
• Strategic account structure
• Conversion definitions and value assignments
• Budget allocation between campaigns

The conversation has shifted from "fear of automation" to "how to direct AI systems with clearer insight, smarter testing, and more intentional creative work." For agencies updating their PPC audit processes, this means auditing not just campaign performance, but the quality of signals feeding Google's algorithms.

Because here's the truth: automated bidding is only as good as the data you provide. Poor conversion tracking, wrong optimisation events, and messy campaign structures simply mean algorithms make bad decisions more efficiently. Your audit's job is to ensure the machine has what it needs to succeed.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

PPC auditing in 2025 demands a fundamentally different approach than even a few years ago. The shift from manual bidding to Smart Bidding, from keyword targeting to audience signals, and from third-party cookies to first-party data has transformed what auditors must evaluate.

The most critical checkpoints for any audit include: mandatory Consent Mode v2 compliance, Performance Max transparency settings, the deprecation of Enhanced CPC, GA4 conversion tracking requirements, and the rising importance of profit-based KPIs over volume metrics.

The tools and benchmarks have evolved significantly—CPCs are up 39% since 2020, but conversion rates have improved to offset costs for well-managed accounts. UK advertisers face the highest global search CPCs, making efficient audit practices particularly valuable. The quarterly comprehensive audit remains the gold standard, supplemented by weekly search term reviews and daily spend monitoring.

If you're looking for expert support with your PPC management or need help making sense of your Google Ads performance, we're here to help. As a HubSpot Diamond Partner, we specialise in connecting the dots between your paid advertising and the rest of your marketing stack.

References & Citations

1. WordStream by LocaliQ (2025). Google Ads Benchmarks 2025: Competitive Data & Insights for Every Industry. wordstream.com/blog/2025-google-ads-benchmarks
2. Google Support (2024). Updates to consent mode for traffic in European Economic Area. support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/13695607
3. LocaliQ (2025). Search Advertising Benchmarks for Every Industry: 2025 Data. localiq.com/blog/search-advertising-benchmarks
4. Search Engine Journal (2025). What Are Good Google Ads Benchmarks In 2025? searchenginejournal.com/what-is-a-good-ctr-for-google-ads
5. Cookiebot (2024). Google's March Deadline for Consent Mode & Ads Privacy. cookiebot.com/en/googles-consent-mode-deadline-ads-privacy-compliance
6. Information Commissioner's Office (2024). Cookie Compliance Guidance. ico.org.uk/for-organisations/cookies-guidance

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