Google Ads Audit: AI Google Ads Account Audit and PPC Audit Tool

A basic Google Ads audit for a small local account typically costs $400 to $800 in 2026. A standard audit for a mid-size advertiser, covering search terms, ad testing history, and audience targeting in depth, runs $750 to $2,500. Enterprise accounts spending $50,000 a month or more, with large shopping feeds and multi-location targeting, pay $2,500 to $5,000 and up. Independent PPC consultants who audit hourly bill roughly $75 to $250 per hour.

Free audits exist, and they are almost always automated script-based reviews built to funnel you into a management contract. They are useful for a fast sanity check and thin on anything that requires judgment. The more useful comparison is not audit price against audit price, it is audit price against what the audit finds: on a $10,000 monthly budget with 30% waste, the leak is $3,000 a month, which dwarfs the cost of any audit on this list. See how the ongoing management side prices out on our Google Ads management page.

Run a full structured audit at least quarterly. Accounts spending roughly $5,000 a month or more should add a lighter monthly review on top of the deep quarterly one. Search terms and negative keywords need attention weekly on any active account, regardless of audit cadence, because that is where waste accumulates fastest. Audit immediately after any major change too: a new bid strategy, a site migration, a tracking update, or a new campaign type.

The quarterly rhythm is a compromise with human availability, not an ideal. Nothing about an ad account waits three months to break. Budgets shift, competitors enter the auction, a landing page 404s, a conversion tag stops firing after a deploy. Continuous checking is the actual answer, which is what AdBot is built to do and what our AI PPC software page covers in more depth.

A complete audit covers ten areas in this order: conversion tracking accuracy, account and campaign structure, keywords and match types, negative keyword coverage, the search terms report sorted by cost, Quality Score on your top-spending keywords, bid strategy status and targets, ad copy and responsive search ad asset performance, landing page relevance and speed, and budget allocation against results. Performance Max deserves its own pass, checking brand exclusions, account-level negatives, and asset group discipline.

Two health checks tie it together. Compare each campaign's share of spend to its share of conversions to find the budget that is in the wrong place, and check impression share lost to budget against impression share lost to rank to know whether you are constrained by money or by relevance. For context on the numbers an audit should be measured against, 2026 benchmarks put a healthy search CTR at 3% to 5%, conversion rate at 3% to 5%, Quality Score at 5 to 7, and impression share at 60% to 80%. Run your own targets through the ROAS calculator and the CPA calculator before you judge any of them.