What a Google Ads account review looks for

The account looked busy. Plenty of clicks, a steady spend, a green arrow or two on the dashboard. The owner's question was simple: is this working? And the honest answer, before anyone had looked properly, was that nobody knew. Including the account.

That's the reason a review exists. Not to find someone to blame, and not to tear everything down. Just to answer the owner's question with something better than a feeling.

What a Google Ads account review checks

• The searches behind the clicks, and whether they match what you sell.
• What's being counted as a result, and whether it's what matters to you.
• How the account is put together, and whether it reflects how you sell.
• Whether each ad and the page it leads to are saying the same thing.
• Where the spend goes, compared with where the enquiries come from.

Who it's for

Most reviews start with one of three situations. An account that's been running for a while and nobody is quite sure what it's doing. An account managed by someone else, where the reports look fine but the phone doesn't ring any more than it used to. Or a business about to start, that wants to know where the money should go before any of it is spent.

The questions are different in each case. The places worth looking are mostly the same.

The searches behind the clicks

Every click has a search behind it, typed by a real person looking for something. The account only shows you the keywords it was told to target. The searches people actually typed are a different list, and they don't always agree.

A locksmith can end up paying for people looking for locksmith courses. A dentist can pay for people researching dental careers. None of it looks wrong in the summary, because a click is a click. It only shows up when someone reads the list line by line and asks, for each search, whether that person was ever likely to become a customer.

That list is usually the first place a review goes, because it's where spend and intent meet.

What's being counted

An account can only improve at what it's told to measure. If it's counting the wrong thing, it gets very good at the wrong thing.

Sometimes nothing is being counted at all, and the account is working blind. Sometimes it's counting something easy, like a page visit, instead of something that matters, like an enquiry. Sometimes the same enquiry is counted twice. From the outside, all three can look like a healthy account with good numbers.

A review checks that what's being counted as a result is what the business would call a result.

How the account is put together

Accounts grow the way sheds do. Something gets added when it's needed, something else gets added later, and after a few years nobody remembers why half of it is there.

The question isn't whether the structure is tidy. It's whether it reflects how the business actually sells. Which products matter most, which areas it serves, which services earn the most and which barely break even. When the account doesn't match that, budget drifts toward whatever is easiest to spend it on, rather than whatever matters.

The ad and the page it leads to

An ad makes a small promise. Emergency service. A particular product. A price. Then the click lands on a page, and the page either keeps that promise or it doesn't.

A lot of spend is lost in that gap. Not because the ad was bad or the page was bad, but because they weren't talking to each other. Someone searched for one thing, was told they'd found it, and arrived somewhere that seemed to be about something else. A review reads the ads and the pages together, the way a visitor would.

Where the money goes

The last part is simple to describe and slow to do: put the spend next to the enquiries and see whether they line up.

Often a small part of the account is doing most of the work, and a larger part is spending steadily without much to show for it. That isn't always a problem. Some spend exists for good reasons that don't show up as leads straight away. But it should be a decision, not something that happened by default.

That includes parts of the account that are easy to overlook, like Search Partners and the products in a Shopping campaign.

What comes back

A review ends with a plain summary of what was found. What's working, what isn't, and what looks worth looking at more closely. Written for the person who owns the business, not for another specialist.

What happens next is up to them. Some people take it to the agency they already have. Some make the changes themselves. Some ask for help. The point was never to sell the next step. It was to replace "is this working?" with an answer.

If you'd like someone to look at yours, you can request a review, or read more about Google Ads management.