Google Ads account audit: how maitiq reviews your account

How does this audit differ from a checklist?

A checklist tells you what to look for. This audit also states what can actually be answered with the available data. It is a standalone, one-off review and not ongoing management; it is not an independent third-party assurance opinion. The related guides go deeper into individual methods. If you want to carry out the review yourself, use the Google Ads audit checklist. The overview below describes the maitiq service: which sources are read, what coverage follows from that, what you receive, and where the boundary between analysis and account change runs.

Which data paths are there?

There are exactly two paths, and both remain read-only during the audit.

Connected account. maitiq reads an authorised account and archives the report families once as a snapshot: campaigns per day including settings, impression share lost due to budget or rank, weekly search terms, weekly keyword performance, negative keywords at campaign and ad group level, and ad and asset evidence. This archived state remains the input basis. Individual connected workflows may additionally require explicitly identified live supplemental reads; each run names the source and acquisition time, along with the resulting limits. Not every check therefore runs against the same immutable state, and no entirely frozen, fully reproducible run is promised.

Native file path. You provide unmodified Google Ads downloads, for example through a one-off file handover; an upload panel in the product interface is not part of this. Up to six reports deliver the clearest source coverage: the last 90 days up to today, where the current day is not yet complete in the account time zone and is marked as a partial period. These six reports are Google Ads platform exports; on their own they establish neither CRM revenue nor lead quality nor website correctness – that requires the appropriate additional evidence and an agreed scope. The campaign report is mandatory: if it is missing or invalid, no ready file dataset is produced and the file path cannot continue as complete. Every further report is optional; a faulty optional report does not block the run, it visibly limits exactly the checks that need it. Missing optional exports are named as missing.

Google distinguishes five access levels. Read-only permits campaign review and use of planning tools, but changes nothing. Regardless of the Google role, the audit itself does not change the account.

Which checks does this source support?

This matrix describes the implemented dependency between evidence and check. It is not a promise that every source contains data in every account, and not a statement about business quality: platform reports evidence platform events, not a CRM-qualified business value. That is why every row names the evidence that supports a statement.

Before it runs, every step carries one of three states and a reason in plain language:

• complete: the required evidence is available for the intended test.
• limited: the test runs, but its statement is demonstrably bounded.
• skipped: a necessary source is missing or the step does not apply.

This state is stored on the run together with its reason. A skipped step therefore does not disappear from the report; it appears with its reason. “Complete” only means that the required evidence is available for the intended check – not that the check passed or that the entire business chain was verified. Likewise, a missing report, an existing report with zero rows and an unsupported source remain three different states. Missing Planner metrics stay empty and are never treated as zero. The three states describe workflow availability; the embedded evidence and coverage matrix at the end of this article is separate from them and shows four evidence states: observed value greater than zero (not a positive audit outcome), observed zero, not available and not verifiable.

What does maitiq check first?

Measurement before optimisation. If bidding is optimised for the wrong or double-counted value, a seemingly efficient campaign rests on an unusable signal.

Google separates primary and secondary conversion actions for this purpose. Primary actions appear in the “Conversions” column and are used for bid optimisation provided the default goal they belong to is used for bidding. Secondary actions appear only in “All conversions” and do not flow into bid optimisation – unless they belong to a custom goal that the campaign uses. “Secondary” on its own therefore does not prove that an action has no influence on the bidding logic. For a B2B lead model, a page view is not an equivalent substitute for a valid enquiry.

The audit therefore checks first whether your main conversion actually reflects the business outcome. The in-depth method is described in the conversion tracking audit.

How are search terms assessed?

The search terms report shows the actual queries that triggered ads. Google reports terms that were used by a significant number of users; terms with too little activity are omitted for data protection reasons. The report is therefore not a complete index of all queries, and “not visible” is not a statement about zero demand.

A term without a conversion is not automatically waste when the sample is small. The review covers relevance, cost, clicks, conversion delay, period, keyword option, existing positive keywords and possible conflicts with existing exclusions. maitiq produces a verifiable proposal and never applies a negative keyword during the audit.

How are budgets reviewed?

Google Ads works with an average daily budget per campaign, provided the campaign uses this budget type. For most applicable campaign types and settings, this is not a hard daily cap: actual daily costs can reach twice the average daily budget, and Google names the average daily budget multiplied by 30.4 days as the monthly upper limit. These are billing limits; the cost actually served can be higher, and pay-for-conversion campaigns or other settings can be exceptions. Shared budgets across several campaigns and total campaign budgets follow their own rules where applicable; they are not assessed here with these factors.

An audit therefore does not rely on today’s amount alone; it compares the period plan, spend to date, remaining calendar days, budget changes and the account time zone. If an approved plan is missing, a historical comparison must not be presented as a business target. Currency and date remain local to the account; two currencies within one account are rejected instead of converted. Duplicate campaign day rows lead to a clear error early on instead of silently distorting every later CPA calculation.

What does the change history show – and what does it not?

In the file path, the Google Ads downloads contain no change events. The change check is therefore skipped with exactly this reason.

In the connected account, the history is available to a limited extent because Google limits it: field-level change events are restricted to roughly the last 30 days, while the coarser change status reaches back up to 90 days and shows only the most recent change per resource, without before/after values. maitiq labels this as what it is and never calls it “complete history”. For attribution, change monitoring stores a hash of the editor address; raw addresses are not stored permanently. The hash is an attribution aid, not anonymisation.

What do you receive after the audit?

• an overview of the sources used and their limits;
• the state of every applicable check with its reason;
• concrete proposals with their derivation and the affected campaign; with verifiable before/after values where available;
• an overall report with measurement, budget, search and governance findings;
• a traceable path from run, source and state through to the later decision;
• open points that must be clarified before implementation.

Every finding stays linked to its source so that the person responsible can distinguish whether a statement rests on observed account data, a rule, a public platform definition or an open hypothesis. The agreed output formats can include an HTML report, a PDF, an XLSX file and a Markdown run log.

Illustrative example, not customer data: a campaign has a target CPA of CHF 45 and an observed CPA of CHF 21 with 63 conversions in 28 completed days. On its own, that is no reason to lower the target CPA. First, conversion quality, delay, growth target and budget limitation are reviewed. A sensible finding names these open questions and proposes a limited test only once the evidence is sound.

How maitiq turns the audit into ongoing operations

The same workflows that the audit runs once on the archived inputs and, where required, on explicitly identified supplemental live reads continue in the managed service at the agreed cadence; not every workflow runs daily. Every proposal carries an action, a rationale and supporting data. Whether and to what extent findings and proposals are discussed with you depends on the agreed service. Autopilot is off by default; within explicitly configured authority, eligible approvals and implementation can occur without a new permission step for each such action.

When is an audit particularly worthwhile?

Before an agency change, after a tracking or website change, when budget control is unclear, before a new bidding strategy, or when reporting and actual business results diverge.

maitiq suits companies whose account complexity and recurring analysis effort make systematic support worthwhile. What matters is data quality, available capacity and the business goal, not a blanket minimum budget.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and how to read them

Platform documentation explains features and limits, and authority sources explain the legal context. Publications by providers and associations should be read accordingly, not as a general market price or proof of success. Details of how maitiq works can be found at maitiq.com.

Have maitiq review your specific case.