A PPC account audit is a structured check of who your campaigns reach, what each platform optimises for, where money is spent and whether paid leads become qualified pipeline. If you want to know how to do a PPC audit, start with the business outcome and conversion data, not a list of ad settings. A campaign can look efficient on cost per lead (CPL) while attracting buyers your sales team cannot close.
This B2B SaaS guide covers Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising for search, plus paid social accounts such as LinkedIn Ads and Meta Ads. It gives you a cross-platform QA method, an example scorecard and a repeatable 30/60/90-day action plan. For a single-platform deep dive, use the separate Google Ads audit checklist.
What should a complete PPC audit achieve?
The outcome of an audit is not a long slide deck. It is a defensible diagnosis with evidence, priority, an accountable owner and a way to verify that a fix worked. A useful PPC review should answer these questions:
- Are campaigns aimed at the agreed ideal customer profile (ICP) and the correct buying stage?
- Are ad clicks, forms, meetings and sales-qualified leads tracked accurately?
- Which search terms, audiences, placements and landing pages waste budget or attract low-fit demand?
- Do spend and bidding decisions reflect qualified leads, opportunities and pipeline instead of only platform-reported conversions?
- What must be repaired now, tested next and scaled only after the results are validated?
A Google Ads audit focuses on Google Ads settings and results. A broader PPC account audit also examines channel roles, cross-platform attribution, shared audiences, CRM handoffs and budget allocation between platforms. That distinction matters when a business uses multiple ad accounts to reach the same buying committee.
Before you start: collect the audit evidence
Use the most recent 30 days for operational checks, then compare 60 to 90 days and a prior equivalent period when volumes and sales cycles allow. For low-volume B2B sales funnels, inspect a longer lookback and avoid drawing conclusions from a handful of conversions. Capture a timestamped baseline before editing anything.
- Account access: Read access to Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, LinkedIn Campaign Manager and Meta Ads Manager, plus change history and billing or spend data.
- Measurement access: Analytics, tag manager, consent controls, conversion action settings, offline event diagnostics and a safe process for test submissions.
- CRM access: Stage definitions, lead source fields, opportunity status, pipeline value, close dates and permission to reconcile a sample of lead records.
- Business context: ICP criteria, approved geographies, product segments, average sales cycle, budget, lead response SLA and agreed commercial targets.
- Audit register: A working table that records check, evidence, severity, impact, owner, due date, fix and retest result.
If you have multiple countries or products, separate their funnels before calculating blended averages. A lead from an enterprise US campaign should not automatically be scored against an SMB campaign in India.
How to do a PPC audit: 10 checks in the right order
1. Confirm the campaign goal and ICP before looking at clicks
Write down what a qualified outcome means. For a SaaS demo campaign, it may be a meeting with a buyer at a target company, not every form completion. Check firmographic fit, role, geography, use case and exclusions such as students, job seekers or unsupported industries. Then map these criteria to campaign goals and the CRM lead-status logic.
Create a funnel dictionary that every team uses: visit, lead, marketing-qualified lead (MQL), sales-qualified lead (SQL), opportunity and closed-won customer. Record the owner, timestamp and acceptance criteria for each transition. If Sales and Marketing use different definitions of an SQL, campaign optimisation based on reported SQL counts will remain unreliable.
2. Inventory platforms, accounts and campaign roles
List each ad platform, account, currency, market, objective, active campaign type, spend owner and primary conversion signal. Flag duplicate accounts, outdated access, unapproved billing, campaigns that are live without an owner and naming conventions that prevent reporting across channels.
Mark each campaign as brand capture, non-brand search, competitor evaluation, prospecting, remarketing or customer expansion. Compare these roles before merging totals. A remarketing campaign and a first-touch search campaign should not be judged as if they are identical demand sources. Where account design is messy, the Google Ads campaign structure framework offers more detail for search-specific organisation.
3. Audit search campaigns, ad groups and negative keywords
In Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, export campaigns, ad groups, keywords and available search-term reports. Group search terms by buyer intent and compare cost with verified lead quality. Review exact, phrase and broad match behaviour, brand versus non-brand segmentation, geography, language and destination URLs. Do not assume that every high-cost query is wasteful: an expensive term can still produce low-cost opportunities.
- Ad groups: Do keywords and ad copy describe one clear solution or intent? Split mixed themes only when the resulting structure remains manageable.
- Search-term waste: Investigate irrelevant job, training, consumer or unrelated-software queries with repeated spend and poor downstream outcomes.
- Negative keywords: Check account and campaign exclusions for missed waste, contradictory negatives and accidental blocking of valuable terms.
- Automation: Inspect applicable broad-match controls, automated assets, final URL choices and search query visibility rather than assuming the system always picks the intended offer.
Review the underlying logic in our negative keywords and ad targeting guide before adding exclusions. Negative keywords should remove irrelevant intent, not indiscriminately eliminate research-stage demand.
4. Review paid social audiences, creative and placements
For LinkedIn Ads and Meta Ads, replace keyword-level checks with audience and creative QA. Compare the targeting settings with the ICP, the actual people or companies reached where reports permit, and the conversion signal used to optimise delivery. Review exclusions, location settings, audience expansion, remarketing windows, frequency trends and available placement breakdowns.
Read the ad promise as a buyer would. Is the offer suited to the audience stage? Do lead forms ask for the information Sales needs without creating unnecessary friction? Are auto-generated variations accurate? Compare lead quality from instant forms with quality from website-based forms rather than assuming that one format is inherently better. Treat attribution claims from each platform as separate reporting views, not additive unique buyers.
5. Test the ad-to-landing-page conversion funnel
Open live ads on desktop and mobile. Confirm that the headline, offer, audience and call to action match the destination page. Review load behaviour, visible proof, form usability, error messages, thank-you handling, calendar booking and sales handoff. Run a test lead end to end, including mobile, and confirm that a real completed submission produces one intended conversion.
Audit each meaningful funnel exit. If visitors click but do not start forms, investigate message match or friction. If forms are completed but meetings are not booked, inspect lead routing, follow-up timing and qualification. The landing-page conversion checklist can support a focused post-click review.
6. Verify conversion events, deduplication and goal selection
Inspect primary and secondary conversion actions, counting rules, event sources, attribution settings, conversion windows and consent-dependent behaviour on the platforms you use. Compare ad-platform conversions with analytics and CRM lead records, allowing for genuine differences in attribution and reporting windows.
Check that a button click is not treated as a completed demo, that duplicate tags do not double-count submissions and that events still work after consent choices, redirects and third-party embedded forms. For bidding, distinguish diagnostic micro-conversions from the outcomes you actually want to optimise. A clean implementation matters more than a larger reported conversion count.
7. Reconcile leads with offline and CRM conversions
Take a sample of ad-attributed leads and trace each record through the CRM. Validate source, campaign identifiers, click identifiers or approved first-party match data, created date, qualification decision, opportunity ID, value and stage changes. Identify missing records, repeated imports, stale syncs, rejected offline events and attribution gaps. Do not send personal information to ad platforms without the required controls, consent and policy compliance.
For Google Ads lead-generation campaigns, review enhanced conversions for leads and supported Data Manager integrations. Import only events that are defined consistently with your CRM, validate diagnostic reports and make sure old offline uploads do not silently fail. A CRM field existing in a spreadsheet is not proof that Google Ads or another platform is receiving usable qualified-lead signals.
For a deeper explanation of connecting first-party sales outcomes to paid media, see how to connect ad spend to pipeline.
8. Challenge budget allocation and bidding decisions
Compare budgets by channel, campaign role, market and ICP segment. Look at pacing, limited-by-budget conditions, impression share where available, learning periods, target changes and whether bidding has enough trustworthy conversion data. Ask whether incremental spend is going to campaigns producing more qualified opportunities, or merely to campaigns generating cheap form fills.
Do not cut budgets simply because a platform reports a higher CPL. Examine cost per SQL and cost per opportunity, lag to qualification and the quality of the underlying data. The Google Ads bidding strategies guide and B2B SaaS paid media budget framework provide supporting detail for channel-specific decisions.
9. Compare the entire lead-to-pipeline journey
Build one reconciliation view with spend, unique leads, MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, created pipeline and, where the sales cycle permits, closed-won revenue. Segment by platform, market, campaign role and ICP fit. Deduplicate leads and opportunities before using them in cross-platform totals. Define a consistent pipeline attribution rule and make reporting windows explicit.
Illustrative example: Search spends $6,000 and brings 40 leads and five opportunities. Paid social spends the same $6,000 and brings 150 leads but only two opportunities. Search has a $150 CPL and $1,200 cost per opportunity; paid social has a $40 CPL and $3,000 cost per opportunity. The lower CPL would have pointed to the wrong budget decision if opportunity quality was ignored. These example figures are hypothetical, not OneMetrik client results.
For every channel, use the same definitions: CPL = ad spend / unique leads; cost per SQL = ad spend / SQLs; cost per opportunity = ad spend / sourced opportunities. Pipeline-to-spend can inform planning, but pipeline value is not booked revenue and must not be labelled as realised ROAS.
10. Turn observations into assigned, testable fixes
Record each issue with a screenshot or export, affected campaigns, business impact, confidence level, remediation owner and acceptance test. Label urgent data integrity or broken-funnel issues as P0; meaningful waste or relevance defects as P1; and routine tests as P2. Review change history and dependencies before making irreversible account changes.
A useful issue reads: “Demo-form tag fires twice on a successful submit; analytics owner to repair; test on mobile and desktop; pass when one valid submit yields one conversion and one CRM lead.” “Optimise ads” is not an actionable audit finding. Use the B2B SaaS PPC mistakes guide to check whether preventable errors recur across campaigns.
Sample PPC account QA table
Use the following as an illustrative scorecard, not an assessment of any actual OneMetrik or client account. A real audit should replace the example statuses with evidence and dates. PASS means the check has been verified; REVIEW means more evidence is needed; FAIL means a specific issue has been reproduced.
| Audit area | Sample evidence or check | Sample status | Priority and owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goals and ICP | Qualified-demo criteria match campaign objectives and exclusion rules | REVIEW | P1 | Growth lead |
| Platform roles | Brand, prospecting and retargeting campaigns have distinct purposes | PASS | P2 | Paid media |
| Ad groups and search terms | Mixed-intent groups and irrelevant terms checked against CRM lead quality | REVIEW | P1 | Search lead |
| Negative keywords | Exclusions checked for both wasted queries and accidentally blocked demand | REVIEW | P1 | Search lead |
| Paid social relevance | Audience, placements and lead forms reflect approved ICP and offer | REVIEW | P1 | Paid social lead |
| Landing pages | Test form submits correctly on desktop and mobile | FAIL | P0 | CRO / Web |
| Conversion actions | One successful test lead produces one counted primary conversion | FAIL | P0 | Analytics |
| CRM feedback | Qualified and opportunity events arrive, reconcile and show no import errors | FAIL | P0 | RevOps |
| Budget and bidding | Allocation assessed using cost per opportunity, not only CPL | REVIEW | P1 | Paid media |
| Pipeline reporting | CRM opportunity counts deduplicated and attribution windows documented | REVIEW | P1 | RevOps |
When a sample row is marked FAIL, assign an owner and acceptance criteria before presenting the audit as complete. If a measurement issue affects bidding, isolate the impact and validate the repair before making large strategy changes.
30/60/90-day PPC audit action plan
A PPC audit should become a repeatable operating cycle. The first 30 days are for correcting critical defects and establishing a baseline; the next 30 days are for controlled improvements; the final 30 days are for deciding what to scale, stop or investigate further.
| Period | Actions | Evidence of completion |
|---|---|---|
| Days 1-30: Repair | Confirm ICP and CRM stages; fix conversion duplication and broken forms; review access; remove confirmed irrelevant search queries; document the baseline and P0/P1 owners. | Test submissions reconcile across platform, analytics and CRM; urgent issues have owners and retest evidence. |
| Days 31-60: Test | Tidy ad groups; test landing-page message match and lead forms; review audiences and placements; adjust bidding only after conversion signals stabilise; run controlled channel tests. | Each test has a hypothesis, start date, success metric, guardrail and documented readout. |
| Days 61-90: Reallocate | Compare cost per SQL and opportunity by channel and ICP segment; scale validated winners gradually; pause persistent low-fit demand; update account QA checks and review cadence. | Budget decisions reference verified pipeline outcomes, change history and clear next review dates. |
Repeat the light QA weekly or monthly for tracking, account changes, search terms and landing-page errors. Revisit the full cross-channel audit each quarter, after a major site or CRM change, or when pipeline quality deteriorates. Frequency should follow the volume and complexity of the account rather than a rigid calendar.
Should you run the audit in-house or hire a PPC audit agency?
An internal audit works when the team has platform access, CRM visibility and enough independence to challenge its own setup. Bring in a PPC audit agency when you need specialist channel review, an impartial second opinion, complex offline conversion diagnosis or capacity to implement findings. A good PPC audit firm should state the scope, access requirements, evidence standards, what is excluded and who owns the resulting action plan.
Whether you work with a PPC audit company or an internal team, ask for the same deliverables: a platform inventory, reproducible findings, a prioritised issue register, a 30/60/90-day plan and leads-to-pipeline measurement. If the next step is hands-on execution, compare the scope of PPC management services with the specialist support of a Google Ads agency.
One implementation reference for offline lead measurement
Google documents the supported setup for importing qualified-lead outcomes from CRM systems through Data Manager. If an audit reveals missing or rejected offline events, use Google Ads guidance on enhanced conversions for leads and Data Manager when verifying the integration and diagnostics. The guidance supports the technical check; it does not replace your own CRM reconciliation or privacy review.
Frequently asked questions
What is included in a PPC account audit?
A PPC account audit checks campaign goals and ICP fit, account and ad group structure, search terms and negatives, paid social targeting, landing pages, conversion tracking, CRM feedback, budgets, bidding and lead-to-pipeline performance. It ends with evidence-backed priorities and assigned actions.
How do you do a PPC audit if you have several ad platforms?
Start with one shared ICP and conversion dictionary, inventory every active account, then audit each platform using its own controls. Reconcile all reported leads and opportunities to deduplicated CRM records before comparing channels or reallocating budgets.
What is the difference between a PPC audit and a Google Ads audit?
A Google Ads audit examines one advertising platform in depth. A cross-platform PPC audit also covers platforms such as Microsoft Advertising, LinkedIn Ads and Meta Ads, plus shared tracking, channel roles, budget allocation and pipeline attribution.
How often should a B2B SaaS company perform a PPC audit?
Run lightweight checks for broken conversion events, account changes and search-term waste weekly or monthly. Perform a broader review approximately quarterly and after major tracking, landing-page, budget or CRM changes. Adjust the schedule to the account size and sales cycle.
What should a PPC audit agency or company deliver?
Expect an account inventory, a documented QA scorecard, screenshots or exports supporting each finding, severity and owner assignments, an implementation roadmap and a plan for validating qualified leads and pipeline. Avoid providers who only report clicks, impressions and generic recommendations.
Turn the audit into a pipeline improvement plan
The best PPC audits do not end with a score. They establish which leads matter, identify the settings and experiences that prevent those leads from becoming opportunities, and assign accountable fixes. If you want a second review before changing live campaigns, OneMetrik also offers a free paid ads audit as an initial assessment. Treat any findings as hypotheses until they are verified against your account and CRM records.