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If you manage a Google AdWords account to supplement your efforts, you know there are plenty of metrics available to track and analyze. Narrowing down the key metrics that provide meaningful insight into what’s working and what isn’t in your is smart in an age of limited bandwidth.

Before we dive into the key metrics to track, let’s review a checklist to look over when you’re auditing your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

Table of Contents

• PPC Audit Checklist
• PPC Metrics
• Frequently Asked Questions About PPC Audits

TL;DR: A PPC audit finds weak points and improves ROI

A PPC audit is a step-by-step review of your paid search campaigns to find wasted spend, targeting issues, weak keyword strategy, poor ad-to-landing-page alignment, and measurement gaps. This guide explains how to audit location settings, landing pages, ad extensions, keywords, and analytics, and then track key metrics like Quality Score, click-through rate, conversion rate, and cost per conversion to improve ROI.

PPC Audit Checklist

1. Check your location and target settings.
2. Evaluate your ad compared to your landing page.
3. Use ad extensions.
4. Assess your keywords.
5. Measure your success with analytics.

1. Check your location and target settings.

When you’re auditing your PPC campaigns, the first step should be to check your location targeting settings. To do this, ensure that you’ve properly set up the regions that your business serves. Keep in mind that you can also exclude locations where your company doesn’t have stores or can’t deliver to.

Additionally, you can review geo-reports to see what locations perform best. By doing this, you can prioritize your ad budget by location.

2. Evaluate your ad compared to your landing page.

After reviewing your analytics, you might realize that your PPC ads aren’t converting. When this happens, it’s time to look at your ads and see if your landing page follows through on expectations.

For example, if an ad markets a “Free CMS,” but your landing page is focused on an inbound marketing certification, there’s going to be a disconnect. To avoid this, ensure that your headlines and ad copy match the landing page you’re linking to.

3. Use ad extensions.

Ad extensions let you add more useful information to your ad at no additional cost. Common examples include:

• Phone numbers
• Additional site links
• Ratings

These additions can make your ad more visible and more helpful to searchers. If you don’t have these set up for your PPC campaigns, it might be time to see how they can enhance your ads.

4. Assess your keywords.

When you assess keywords in a PPC audit, focus on a few factors that directly affect traffic quality and spend:

• Search volume. Prioritize keywords with enough volume to drive meaningful traffic.
• Match type. Broad match can expand reach, while phrase and exact match can improve control.
• Negative keywords. Add negatives to block irrelevant searches and reduce wasted spend.

In most cases, a balanced approach works best. Use broad match where it makes sense, then refine with negative keywords to improve conversion rate.

5. Measure your success with analytics.

When you want to audit your PPC campaigns, you have to look at your analytics. These analytics will let you know which campaigns have been successful and which haven’t. When a campaign hasn’t been successful, then you can troubleshoot and figure out why.

Now, you might be wondering, “What PPC metrics should I be looking at?” Below are five PPC metrics that give you a strong picture of campaign health:

• Quality Score
• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate
• Cost per conversion
• Wasted spend

Together, these metrics help you spot relevance issues, conversion problems, and budget leaks.

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PPC Metrics

If you have limited time, tracking these five metrics will give you a great overview of your performance and provide a solid measure of your success.

1. Quality Score

Quality Score measures how relevant your keywords, ads, and landing pages are to searchers. In a PPC audit, review these factors closely.

• Keyword CTR: The click-through rate of the keyword and its corresponding ad
• Keyword and ad relevance: The relevance of the keyword and ad to the search query
• Ad group relevance: The relevance of the keyword to its ad group
• Display URL CTR: The CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• Landing page quality: The quality of your landing page

These signals affect both ad rank and cost per click, so they’re worth checking early in your audit.

Even if you think you’ve dotted your i’s and crossed your t’s when it comes to , campaign structure, and ad text optimization, low average Quality Scores can indicate that you’re missing some piece of the puzzle.

2. Click-Through Rate

Recently, I asked 17 PPC experts what the top three they pay the most attention to are when analyzing their AdWords accounts. Click-through rate was the number one most common answer. CTR is important for several reasons, among them:

• It’s one of the most important factors in determining your Quality Scores
• It tells you whether or not your ads are relevant to searchers

Low click-through rates mean that either your keywords or your ad creative (or both) need improvement.

3. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate tells you how many people who clicked your ad went on to complete the desired action on your landing page. Conversion rate is just as important as click-through rate. You don’t want to pay for tons of clicks and traffic if none of that traffic ends up taking a meaningful action.

Strong conversion rates show that your campaign turns paid clicks into meaningful business results. Marketing teams use conversion rate to measure whether ad spend leads to leads, customers, or revenue.

4. Cost Per Conversion

As Joe Vivolo of KoMarketing Associates put it, “This obviously is the number that makes or breaks a campaign from a success/failure standpoint.”

If you have to pay more to gain a new customer than that customer is actually worth to your business, then your campaign is failing, and you haven’t attained a return on investment.

5. Wasted Spend

Wasted spend is a measure of how much money you’re essentially pouring down the toilet by paying for clicks that don’t convert. In other words, it’s an ROI killer.

The best way to reduce your wasted spend is through the smart use of negative keywords. Negative keywords help advertisers block irrelevant searches before they waste budget. A PPC audit reveals which search terms drain spend without driving conversions.

By creating a negative keyword, you’re preventing your ads from displaying for search queries that contain that keyword. Bidding on non-converting keywords is a waste of your marketing budget.

The is a free tool that performs an instant PPC audit on your AdWords account, comparing your performance in areas like Quality Score and wasteful spending to other advertisers in the same budget range.

It’s an easy way to benchmark your PPC performance over time. 黑料吃瓜网 helps marketing teams connect ad metrics, conversions, and ROI reporting in one place so they can turn audit findings into action faster.

Frequently Asked Questions About PPC Audits

What is a PPC audit?

A PPC audit is a structured review of your paid search account to find problems with targeting, keywords, ads, landing pages, and conversion tracking. Its goal is to reduce wasted spend and improve performance.

Why is a PPC audit important?

A PPC audit helps you uncover wasted spend, spot performance issues early, and improve return on investment. It also helps you catch problems with account structure, keyword targeting, and conversion paths before they get more expensive.

When should you run a PPC audit?

You should run a PPC audit when performance drops, after major budget or strategy changes, when you inherit an account, or as part of a regular quarterly review. A lighter monthly check can help you catch issues before they grow.

What should a PPC audit include?

A PPC audit should include a review of the following:

• Location targeting
• Ad-to-landing-page alignment
• Ad extensions
• Keyword strategy

PPC audits also analyze core performance metrics like Quality Score, CTR, conversion rate, cost per conversion, and wasted spend.

What tools can you use for a PPC audit?

You can use your ad platform’s native reporting, analytics tools, and audit templates to review campaign setup and results. Automated graders and reporting tools can also help you benchmark performance and spot waste faster.

What is the difference between a PPC audit and ongoing PPC management?

A PPC audit is a focused review to diagnose issues and find opportunities, while ongoing PPC management is the day-to-day work of optimizing bids, budgets, ads, and targeting. In short, an audit tells you what needs attention, and ongoing management is how you improve it over time.

Turn PPC Audit Findings Into Real Revenue

A PPC audit is only as useful as the action you take after running one. Once you’ve identified weak Quality Scores, underperforming keywords, or misaligned landing pages, the next challenge is connecting those findings to real business outcomes — leads, customers, and revenue.

Tools like 黑料吃瓜网’s Ads Software can help. It lets teams manage Google, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn campaigns in one place while tying ad performance directly to CRM data. Instead of reporting on clicks and impressions in isolation, marketers can see which ads are actually generating leads and driving ROI — making it far easier to act on audit findings and continuously improve paid search strategy.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2011 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

The Ultimate Google Ads PPC Kit

A free guide and template to help run Google Ads campaigns.

• Set your budget.
• Research your keywords.
• Plan your ROI.
• Grow your business.

Get Your Free Kit

Download Free

All fields are required.

Form not available

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.