By Lee Moran, Founder of Veritas Digital
If you’re spending significant volumes on paid media and quietly wondering whether you’re getting your money’s worth, you’re not being paranoid. You’re being commercially astute. A good PPC audit doesn’t look for one big smoking gun – it looks for the small leaks that never show up in a monthly report. The many minor things that all compound when added up. On a six-figure monthly budget, those compounding leaks stop being a rounding error and start being real money that’s being wasted. Below are the five I personally find most often, and how to spot them yourself before you sign with anyone.
Why a PPC audit matters more than a monthly report
A monthly performance report is written by the people being graded. When you build the dashboard, you get to choose which numbers go on it, and the numbers that get chosen tend to be the flattering ones.
A PPC audit is different. It’s a cold look under the bonnet by someone whose job is to find the problems, not to explain them away. Having trained as an accountant before I moved into paid media, I think of it the way an auditor thinks about a set of books: the goal isn’t to trust the summary, it’s to test whether the summary is true.
There’s a good reason this matters more now than it did a few years ago. Costs are rising fast: Search Engine Land reports that average Google Search cost-per-click rose roughly 45% year on year across a sample of client campaigns, one of the more reasonable increases across the major platforms. When every click costs more, every wasted click costs more too. And the waste is not small: Search Engine Land has reported industry estimates that advertisers collectively burn around $11 billion a year on branded clicks and internal competition alone, and closer to $16 billion on the non-brand side. That is not beginners fumbling small accounts. A large share of it sits inside big, sophisticated, well-resourced advertisers who assumed a real human was monitoring their accounts and not leaving it entirely to automation.
Here is the maths that should focus the mind. Industry analyses of Google Ads accounts consistently put wasted spend somewhere in the 20–40% range for accounts that aren’t being actively, forensically managed. On a £100,000-a-month account, the midpoint of that range is £30,000 a month going to clicks that were never going to convert. That’s £360,000 a year. Even the optimistic end of the range, a tight 15% on a well-run account, is £15,000 a month you could be redeploying into the campaigns and keywords that work better. At this level of spend, an audit isn’t housekeeping. It’s one of the highest-return exercises available to you.
Below are the five findings that come up again and again in the audits I’ve done previously. And it’s not the big, obvious mistakes – it’s always the ones hiding three or four clicks into a PPC account where you eventually find these small issues that all add up.
The 5 ways your budget quietly disappears
1. Search terms that never matched your business intent
Here’s the single biggest one, and it hides in plain sight.
Your keyword list is what you told Google to target. Your search terms report is what people typed before your ad showed. The gap between those two things is where a huge amount of budget disappears, and most accounts have a gap you could drive a bus through. Especially with the rise of AI Max making that gap even higher than before.
At six-figure spend, the size of that gap is the whole game. A 5% leak on a £10K account is a nuisance; the same 5% leak on a £150K account is £7,500 a month walking out the door on searches you’d never knowingly have bid on if they’d appeared as keyword suggestions for your account. Scale doesn’t shrink this problem – it magnifies it significantly, because broad and AI-driven match types like AI Max spray across far more queries when there’s a big budget feeding them.
What a PPC audit checks: whether anyone is reviewing the search terms report (weekly for higher-spend accounts, fortnightly at a minimum) and whether the negative keyword list reflects that work. An account spending six figures a month with only a handful of negatives is a red flag on its own. A healthy account builds negatives up over time into a properly organised, layered set of lists that anyone can understand – campaign-level negatives for what’s irrelevant to one campaign, account-level lists for what should never trigger an ad anywhere.
One quiet caveat worth knowing: you can overdo this too. As Search Engine Land points out, if you’re having to add more than 10% of your search terms as negatives, the real problem is usually your targeting, not your negative list. A good auditor knows the difference between cleaning up and playing whack-a-mole.
2. Conversion tracking that’s telling everyone everything is amazing
This is the one that genuinely keeps me up at night, because the whole account depends on it.
Modern Google Ads runs on Smart Bidding, and Smart Bidding is only as good as the conversion data feeding it. If the tracking is wrong, the algorithm optimises confidently towards the wrong thing – and it does so with your spend, at speed. On a large account, “at speed” means five figures can move in the wrong direction before anyone opens a report.
As Search Engine Journal puts it, conversion tracking is the single most important factor affecting results, and when performance starts lagging, faulty conversions are almost always to blame. Get the numbers wrong and you’ll scale the campaigns you should pause and pause the ones quietly turning a profit. And it’s rarely one dramatic break – it’s tracking that was set up correctly once and has since drifted, double-fired, or quietly dropped a conversion action nobody noticed.
What a PPC audit checks: whether conversion counts roughly reconcile against your actual sales or CRM, whether duplicate tags are inflating the figures, whether Enhanced Conversions and Consent Mode are set up properly for UK GDPR, and whether “conversions” actually means revenue rather than newsletter sign-ups counted as if they were sales or worse, optimising to page views (you’ll be surprised than even major global brands doing this from time to time). For considered-purchase and longer-cycle businesses, it also means checking that offline conversions are fed back in, so Google is optimising toward closed revenue rather than raw leads. This is the closest paid media gets to bookkeeping, and it’s exactly where a keen commercial eye earns its keep.
3. An attribution model that flatters the wrong channels
Attribution is invisible plumbing, which is precisely why it goes unexamined for years.
Many accounts still quietly run last-click attribution, which hands 100% of the credit to the final click and none to everything that did the persuading beforehand. For a business with any kind of considered purchase (anything where people don’t buy on the first visit) that paints a badly distorted picture. And the bigger the budget and the longer the sales cycle, the more expensive the distortion, because you’re reallocating large sums based on a story that isn’t fully true.
Search Engine Journal notes that inconsistent attribution settings across campaigns are one of the most common tracking issues, producing data that simply doesn’t match up and leads to poorer bidding decisions. The result is over-investment in bottom-of-funnel keywords that merely catch demand, and under-investment in the activity that creates it.
What a PPC audit checks: whether the attribution model suits your sales cycle rather than just sitting on whatever the default was two years ago, and whether it’s applied consistently across the account. This one rarely shows up as a significant “waste” line – it shows up as years of budget slowly pointed at the wrong things. Always check what attribution model is being applied to each of your conversion goals, as this quick fix can make all the difference.
4. Account structure built for a version of Google that no longer exists
Google Ads has changed enormously, and a lot of accounts are still wearing clothes that stopped fitting years ago.
The classic example is the single keyword ad group (also known as a SKAG) – a structure that made sense when match types were literal and makes much less sense once Google’s automation took over. As Search Engine Land notes in its guidance on auditing accounts in an age of limited data, keyword-to-search-term matching is far less precise than it used to be, and micro-segmenting the account often hurts performance today because the algorithms need ample data to bid well. The same guidance flags another silent drain: leaving auto-apply recommendations switched on, which lets Google make unwanted changes (like adding keywords or assets you never approved) while everyone assumes a human is minding the account.
There’s a modern version of the same problem too: over-segmentation in Performance Max. Splitting one campaign into five feels like control, but it starves each one of the conversion volume the algorithm needs to learn, so five under-fed campaigns end up performing worse than one well-fed one. On big accounts there’s an added, expensive wrinkle – PMax cannibalising your own brand terms and claiming credit for conversions that would have happened anyway, unless your brand name is explicitly excluded as a brand exclusion.
What a PPC audit checks: whether the structure reflects how Google works now (grouped by intent and budget priority rather than by an old product spreadsheet) and whether legacy settings and auto-applied changes are silently draining spend. Structure isn’t glamorous, but it’s the difference between guiding the automation and fighting it. And nowadays a simpler, consolidated account usually outperforms an over-segmented one.
5. “Set and forget” dressed up as “stable”
The most expensive habit in paid media rarely looks like a mistake. It looks like calm.
Ad copy that hasn’t changed in a year. The same bidding strategy running on autopilot. Budgets pacing along untouched. It photographs beautifully in a monthly report: nothing’s on fire – but stale accounts leave steady performance on the table, week after week, and nobody notices because nothing broke. On a six-figure budget, “steady” underperformance is the most expensive outcome of all, precisely because it never triggers an alarm.
The job itself has changed underneath a lot of these accounts. As PPC Hero argues in its paid search survival guide, automation has fundamentally rewritten the media buyer’s role: Smart Bidding took the wheel from manual CPC strategies, responsive search ads turned ad testing into an AI-driven exercise, and Performance Max removed most keyword control entirely. The work that’s left isn’t pulling levers all day; it’s using human judgement. Knowing what to feed the machine, what to test, and when to overrule it. An account running on autopilot is one where nobody is doing that thinking.
There’s a strategic version of this trap, too, and it’s the one that costs the most. In Search Engine Journal, a point is made that a campaign can be technically flawless and still deliver zero business value if the strategy behind it is misaligned – and notes that cost-per-lead rose in 13 of 23 industries in 2025. A monthly report full of green metrics can hide the fact that the whole campaign is pointed at the wrong objective. Efficiently spending large sums on the wrong thing is still waste – it’s just tidier looking waste.
What a PPC audit checks: when the ad copy was last meaningfully tested, whether experiments are running, whether anyone is reviewing recommendations by hand and, one level up, whether the strategy still matches the business. You’re paying for judgement by a human specialist, not just a machine on autopilot. An audit checks you’re getting it right.
The uncomfortable question underneath all five
Here’s the thread connecting every point above: none of these leaks are hidden because they’re hard to find. They’re hidden because finding them isn’t in the interest of whoever set them up.
That’s not a reason to distrust every agency – many agencies out there are excellent, and the good ones will happily walk you through all five of these unprompted. But it is a reason to get a second opinion from someone with no stake in the existing setup. Against a six-figure monthly budget, an independent audit costs a rounding fraction of the spend it scrutinises, and in my experience almost always pays for itself several times over – especially when the savings are considered across the full 12 months after the audit, not just the month you fix them. On a £50K per month account, a 10% saving is £60K per year. Minus the cost of the audit and it’s effectively a free month worth of advertising.
The bottom line
A PPC audit isn’t about catching your agency out. It’s about knowing what you’re paying for, and whether the numbers on your monthly report describe reality or just describe themselves. The five leaks above are ordinary, common, and fixable – and honestly, usually only the beginning on a large account. The only genuinely expensive mistake is never looking, never challenging the PPC team who are running your accounts.
If you’d like an honest, no-obligation look at where your paid media budget is really going, this is exactly the kind of work we do at Veritas Digital. You can see how we approach paid search and PPC management here, how we run PPC audits, or get in touch with us for a straight-talking conversation about your account.
Frequently asked questions
How often should a PPC account be audited?
A full, structured audit twice a year is sensible for most accounts, with lighter “health checks” monthly. Higher spending accounts, or any account that’s just changed hands, warrant a deeper look straight away – the handover moment is when the most expensive legacy problems tend to surface.
How much of a large Google Ads budget is typically wasted?
Industry analyses consistently put wasted spend in the 20–40% range for accounts that aren’t being forensically managed. On a £100,000-a-month account that’s £20,000–£40,000 a month, or roughly £240,000–£480,000 a year. The good news is that most of it is fixable, and you rarely need a bigger budget to fix it; you need a clearer picture of what needs fixing.
Can I audit my own PPC account?
Up to a point, yes. The search terms report, conversion settings, and attribution model are all things a diligent team can review using the five checks above. What an independent audit adds is the absence of a vested interest – someone with no stake in the current setup asking whether it’s working, and who can go much deeper than those five checks alone.
What’s the difference between a PPC audit and ongoing optimisation?
Optimisation is the week to week tuning of a live account. An audit is a structured, top to bottom review of whether the account is set up correctly in the first place – the foundation the optimisation is built on. You can’t optimise your way out of a broken structure or broken conversion tracking, especially if you have both at the same time.
Get in touch with us
Not sure whether your current setup is leaking budget? Get in touch with us and we’ll take a look. No jargon or hard sell – just a clear, commercially grounded view of what’s working, what isn’t, and what it would take to fix it.
- Search Engine Land – 4 PPC trends to monitor closely in the second half of 2025: https://searchengineland.com/ppc-trends-second-half-2025-458296
- Search Engine Land – Are you wasting your Google Ads budget bidding against yourself?: https://searchengineland.com/are-you-wasting-your-google-ads-budget-bidding-against-yourself-453325
- Search Engine Land – 7 Google Ads search term filters to cut wasted spend: https://searchengineland.com/google-ads-search-term-filters-cut-wasted-spend-458977
- Search Engine Land – Auditing and optimizing Google Ads in an age of limited data: https://searchengineland.com/auditing-optimizing-google-ads-limited-data-461528
- Search Engine Journal – Is Your Conversion Data Misleading You? 7 Common Google Ads Tracking Issues: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/is-your-conversion-data-misleading-common-google-ads-tracking-issues/548098/
- Search Engine Journal – The 5-Pillar Audit: Diagnosing Strategy vs. Tactic Failures in a Google Ads Account: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-5-pillar-audit-diagnosing-strategy-vs-tactic-failures-in-a-google-ads-account/562678/
- PPC Hero – The Paid Search Survival Guide for 2025: How to Win Without Relying on Keywords: https://ppchero.com/the-paid-search-survival-guide-for-2025-how-to-win-without-relying-on-keywords/
