Free Google Ads Audit · 48-hour Turnaround · Windsor & SW Ontario
Your CPC isn’t the problem. Your account structure is.
A free Google Ads audit for SMB and mid-market operators running $5K–$50K+/month across Windsor, Essex County, Chatham-Kent, Sarnia-Lambton, London, and the wider Southwestern Ontario corridor. Quality Score read cold, keyword-to-ad alignment, match-type drift, conversion-tracking accuracy, attribution gaps, creative fatigue, and landing-page experience — with a prioritised fix list and estimated CPC impact per item. 48-hour turnaround. No retainer.
Why a Google Ads audit
The Recommendations tab tells you what Google wants. The audit tells you what’s actually broken.
- Quality Score is a price multiplier on every click you buy. Moving a keyword from QS 4 to QS 8 cuts CPC by roughly 50% (per Search Engine Land’s analysis of Google Ads auction data). Most SMB accounts have 30–60% of their spend running on QS 5 or lower — the audit reads the QS distribution cold and tells you which keywords are taxing the rest of the account.
- The Google Ads "Recommendations" tab optimises for Google, not you. Auto-applied recommendations push broad-match keywords, raise bids, and accept default conversion goals. They’re engineered to grow Google’s revenue, not yours. An independent audit reads the same account against your CPL math, your margin, and your conversion definitions — the things Google can’t see.
- Match-type drift is silent and expensive. Broad-match keywords expand into queries you never approved. Phrase match has loosened twice in 24 months. Most accounts have keywords burning $200–$2,000/month on search terms the account owner has never seen. The audit pulls the 90-day search-term report and surfaces the leak.
- Conversion tracking is the most under-audited part of every account. Duplicate counting, wrong attribution windows, missing offline conversion import, phone calls untagged, view-through inflation. Half the accounts we read have at least one conversion source that’s either double-counting or invisible — both decisions get made on bad data. The audit verifies the math before it diagnoses anything else.
- You leave with the document either way. The free audit produces a written diagnostic you can run yourself, hand to your existing agency, or extend into a LOCALiQ engagement. No retainer required. No obligation to implement through us. The audit stands alone.
The method, applied to Google Ads
Pull. Pinpoint. Prove.
Three steps, one written diagnostic. The depth of each step is shaped to your account size and spend — the order does not change.
Data before opinion.
The audit begins with a structured account read: 90-day keyword and search-term reports, ad disapprovals, Quality Score distribution by campaign and ad group, match-type spend split, auction-insights for impression share and overlap rate, conversion-action audit (every tag, every source), landing-page Core Web Vitals on top-spending keywords, and the call-tracking layer if your account is phone-heavy. The inputs are pulled before any hypothesis is formed.
Cause, not symptom.
“CPC is too high” is a measurement, not a finding. Each gap traces back to a specific lever — low expected-CTR on the head keyword, broad-match expansion into irrelevant queries, a landing page whose above-the-fold render shifted on mobile, an auto-applied recommendation that overrode your geo settings, a conversion action double-counting form submits and phone clicks. The fix list is sequenced by estimated CPC impact and effort so the order of operations is obvious.
Findings on paper.
The audit ends with a written diagnostic you can read, share, and act on — whether the fixes run in-house, through your existing agency, or through LOCALiQ. Where the engagement extends past the diagnostic, the document is the foundation the next phase is built on. Either way, the findings are yours.
What we audit
Four diagnostic surfaces, one written report.
Every Google Ads audit reads the same four surfaces. Depth shaped to account size and spend; the surfaces don’t change. No bound deliverables, no boilerplate template — the report is written for the operator who has to decide what to fix next week, next month, and next quarter.
Quality Score & ad relevance
QS distribution by ad group, expected CTR vs. category benchmark, ad-relevance signals, landing-page experience. QS 4 to QS 8 is roughly half the CPC at the same bid — we surface which keywords are paying the QS tax and which are subsidising the rest of the account.
Account structure & match-type drift
Campaign and ad-group architecture, match-type spend split, 90-day search-term report, negative-keyword hygiene, broad-match expansion into off-intent queries, auto-applied recommendations that overrode your settings. Most accounts have $200–$2K/month bleeding into search terms the owner has never seen.
Conversion tracking & attribution
Every conversion action verified: source, dedup, attribution window, offline import, phone-call tagging, view-through inflation. The most under-audited part of every account, and the one that breaks every other decision when it’s wrong. We verify the math before we diagnose anything else.
Creative, copy & landing pages
Headline-to-query alignment, RSA asset performance, creative fatigue indicators, above-the-fold render on mobile (where most paid clicks land), form friction, trust signals, post-submit handoff. Quality Score reads the landing page; humans convert on the landing page. Both are audited here.
Built for three altitudes
Same audit. Different altitudes.
- ManagerA sequenced fix list with effort tiers — what to ship this sprint, this quarter, this year. Negative keywords to add today, RSA asset rewrites, broken conversion tags, auto-applied recommendation rollbacks. The operational moves a paid-search manager can run without a second meeting.
- DirectorA roadmap mapped to CPL impact — defensible at the next budget review. QS distribution baseline, projected CPC trajectory, account-structure rebuild scope, conversion-tracking risk register. Built so a marketing director can present it without a translator.
- VPA read on what the paid-search account is actually doing for the business — including the attribution layer most audits skip. Whether your Google Ads spend is buying incremental conversions or cannibalising organic, what your true blended CAC is, and where the budget should shift over 6–12 months.
Frequently asked — Google Ads audit
What operators ask us before booking.
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What’s the difference between a Signostic Google Ads audit and Google’s own Recommendations tab?
Google’s Recommendations tab is engineered to grow Google’s revenue — it pushes broad match, raises bids, and accepts default conversion goals because those moves expand ad spend. An independent Google Ads audit reads the same account against your CPL math, your margin, and your conversion definitions. Same data, different agenda. Most operators discover their auto-applied recommendations have been silently shifting budget toward queries that don’t convert.
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How much does the Google Ads audit cost, and is it really free?
Yes — the diagnostic is free for SMB and mid-market operators running $5K–$50K/month in Google Ads spend. Turnaround is 48 hours for a focused audit, up to 5 business days for a full multi-channel diagnostic covering SEM, conversion tracking, and landing pages. No retainer required, no obligation to implement through LOCALiQ. If the audit points to a fix you can run in-house or hand to your existing agency, the document goes with you either way.
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Do you need access to my Google Ads account?
Read-only access is preferred for the deepest audit — we link your account to ours via Google Ads MCC with read-only permissions (you keep full ownership and can revoke at any time). For a faster cold-read, we can run a public-surface audit covering Quality Score signals, landing-page experience, ad copy, and AEO/AI visibility from outside the account — useful for a first-look diagnostic before you decide whether to grant access.
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How much can a Google Ads audit actually save on CPC?
Per Search Engine Land’s analysis of Google Ads auction data, moving a keyword from Quality Score 4 to Quality Score 8 cuts CPC by roughly 50%. The realistic blended impact across an SMB account is usually 15–35% CPC reduction over 60–90 days post-audit — the high end comes from accounts with broken conversion tracking (where ~half the recommendations were optimising on bad data to begin with). Specific savings depend on starting QS distribution, match-type drift, and how much of the account is structurally fixable vs. price-floor competition.
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My conversion tracking looks fine in Google Ads. Why audit it?
Because Google Ads reports what you told it to count, not what actually happened. Common silent failures: a form-submit tag firing on the “thank you” page that’s also reachable via a Google search; phone-call conversions double-counted via both Google Ads and GA4 import; offline conversions never imported because the CRM handoff broke six months ago; view-through windows inflating display performance. Roughly half the SMB accounts we audit have at least one of these. Every other audit finding depends on the conversion math being right first.
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Do I need to be in Windsor or Southwestern Ontario to book?
No. The audit runs remotely — we work from your account, your reports, and a structured intake. The book is concentrated across Windsor, Essex County, Chatham-Kent, Sarnia-Lambton, and London because those are the markets we read most closely, but Google Ads auction mechanics travel; we audit accounts across Ontario and into the wider Canadian and US SMB market regularly.
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What happens after the audit — do I have to use LOCALiQ?
No. Most fixes don’t require us at all — the document is sequenced so a paid-search manager can run the top 5–10 changes in-house. For accounts where the fix list is structural (full account rebuild, conversion-tracking re-architecture, ongoing creative production), LOCALiQ is the implementation path because we’re already operating with the audit context most agencies spend 60 days assembling. You can stop at the audit, run the fixes yourself, or extend — we don’t gate the diagnostic on the engagement.
48 hours. Full Google Ads audit. No retainer required. Account read read against your math, not Google’s.
Your free Google Ads audit is 48 hours away.
Chris Gardner runs the audit covering Quality Score, account structure, conversion tracking, and creative diagnostics — and tells you exactly what each leak is costing in CPC and CPL. Implementation available through LOCALiQ where the diagnosis warrants it; the diagnostic stands alone if you’d rather run the fixes elsewhere.
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