Paid Advertising
PPC Audit
Read-only throughout. Nothing is changed during an audit, including the things we would change on the first morning afterwards.
A PPC audit is a structured review of an advertising account you have inherited, or stopped trusting. The Nexclick works through structure, tracking, wasted spend and settings, then hands over findings ordered by the money each recovers — written to be usable by whoever runs the account next.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- You have inherited an account nobody currently in the building built.
- Performance declined and the explanation you were given did not quite land.
- A contract is up for renewal and you want an independent read before signing.
- Spend has grown steadily and the number of enquiries has not.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Verify conversion tracking before believing a single figure
- Every audit starts here. An account judged on broken tracking gets judged wrongly, and a conversion counted twice remains the most common finding of all.
- Quantify wasted spend from the search terms report
- Twelve months of queries reviewed against what you actually sell, with a figure attached to the waste. This is the section clients act on first.
- Review structure against intent and margin
- Whether campaigns are grouped so anything can be controlled, or whether everything shares one budget and one bid strategy and therefore cannot be steered at all.
- Check the settings that quietly cost money
- Display network enabled inside search, audience expansion, location set to interest rather than presence, auto-applied recommendations, and schedules that ignore your opening hours.
- Assess the automated campaign types honestly
- Whether Performance Max is producing incremental revenue or absorbing branded search and reporting it as its own achievement. The two look identical on the campaign overview.
- Read creative against landing page
- Where an advert promises something the page does not deliver, and what that costs in conversion rate rather than in clicks — which is where it is invisible.
- Review the arrangement, not just the account
- Reporting quality, account ownership, who holds the billing, and what notice you are on. Whether you could actually leave is itself a finding, and often the important one.
- Order findings by recoverable spend
- With the effort noted against each. An unordered list of forty observations gets read once and actioned never, which is the fate of most audits.
Comparison
What a PPC audit finds, and what each finding costs
These recur in nearly every inherited account. Several are checkable yourself in an afternoon, and doing so may tell you whether commissioning an audit is worth it at all.
| Finding | How to spot it yourself | What it typically costs |
|---|---|---|
| Conversions counted twice | Two conversion actions firing on one event | Every cost-per-acquisition figure halved on paper |
| No negatives added in months | Search terms report, sorted by cost | A steady share of budget on irrelevant queries |
| Brand and non-brand in one campaign | The campaign list | Performance flattered by people who already knew you |
| PMax without brand exclusions | Campaign settings, brand exclusion field | Branded search re-bought and reported as new revenue |
| Display network enabled inside search | Campaign networks setting | Cheap clicks, no intent, and flattering click volume |
| Location set to presence or interest | Location options, expand the collapsed panel | Spend from people who merely mentioned your city |
| Auto-applied recommendations left on | Recommendations tab, auto-apply section | Keywords and assets added that nobody approved |
| Ads running outside opening hours | Ad schedule against your phone lines | Calls to an answerphone, paid for at full price |
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Week 1
Read-only access and data pull
Twelve months of account data, search terms, conversion configuration and whatever reporting you have been sent by the incumbent.
- 02Week 1–2
Tracking verification
What can be trusted, and which of the findings that follow have to carry an explicit caveat because of what cannot.
- 03Week 2–3
Account review
Structure, spend, settings, creative and automation, with the working shown so any individual finding can be checked rather than taken on trust.
- 04Week 3–4
Report and working session
Prioritised written findings, presented as a session where they get challenged. Anything that does not survive the challenge should not have been in the report.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- A figure for recoverable wasted spend, drawn from twelve months of search terms.
- A verdict on whether the conversion data can be trusted, stated before any other finding.
- Findings ordered by recoverable spend with the effort noted against each.
- An assessment of the arrangement itself — ownership, access, billing and notice period.
- A document written to be handed to any agency, including the one being reviewed.
Tools and platforms
- Read-only Google Ads and Microsoft Ads access
- Merchant Center where shopping runs
- GA4 and Tag Manager
- Search terms and auction insights exports
- CRM data for conversion verification
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Three to four weeks, with the first depending entirely on how quickly read-only access arrives. An incumbent slow to grant it is itself worth recording. Two things worth saying before you commission one. There is no obligation to bring the work to us afterwards, and several audits have concluded the incumbent was doing a decent job in a difficult account — a genuinely useful finding, and one that an agency selling management has an obvious incentive not to reach. And if you already know the account is badly run and you have the authority to change it, an audit is a slow way to confirm a suspicion. Spend the money on the rebuild.
Pricing model
Day rate
Fixed price, scoped by monthly spend and the number of platforms. Sold independently of management work, deliberately — an audit whose conclusion is a proposal from its own author is worth considerably less.
Questions
PPC Audit questions
What access do you need for a PPC audit?
Read-only access to every ad platform, plus GA4, Tag Manager, Merchant Center where relevant, and ideally CRM outcome data so conversions can be verified against real sales. Read-only genuinely means read-only — nothing is changed, including the things we would change immediately afterwards.
Will you change anything in our account?
No. An audit that edits the account destroys the baseline it was meant to measure, and it also removes your ability to have the findings challenged by the incumbent. If something is actively burning money we will tell you within the first week rather than waiting for the report.
How far back do you look?
Twelve months where the data exists, which captures seasonality and lets us see whether a decline is a trend or a bad quarter. Shorter windows make normal fluctuation look like failure, which is how perfectly adequate accounts get replaced.
What is the most common finding in an inherited account?
A search terms report nobody has opened in months, with a clear pattern of irrelevant queries taking a steady share of budget. It is undramatic, entirely fixable, and the recovered spend usually pays for the audit several times over in the first quarter.
How does this differ from a full marketing audit?
This examines paid advertising accounts in depth — structure, tracking, settings, wasted spend. A marketing audit looks across every channel, reconciles total spend against outcomes, and reviews suppliers. Commission this one when the question is about the ad accounts, and the wider one when the question is where the money should go.
Do you audit Meta and LinkedIn accounts too?
Yes, and the findings differ in character — creative fatigue, audience overlap and attribution settings rather than negative keywords. Scope is priced by platform, and if paid social is where most of the spend sits, that is where most of the audit effort should go.
What if the audit concludes our agency is doing a good job?
Then that is what the report says, and it has happened often enough to be worth stating up front. Sometimes the constraint is the landing page, the offer, or an approval process inside the client. That finding is more valuable than a list of faults, and harder to get from anyone hoping to take over the account.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.