A PPC audit answers one question: is the money buying the thing you think it is buying. Ten checks, in the order they bite. Conversion tracking first, because every number after it inherits the error. Then search terms, then where the spend concentrates, then bidding, then structure, then the automated campaign types, then copy, then targeting, then the landing page, then a ranked list of fixes. Anything that starts with account structure is checking the furniture before the foundations.

The full version is below, then something odd about the UK search results for this exact term.

The checklist

1. Conversion tracking, before you look at anything else

Nothing downstream is readable until this is right, because Smart Bidding optimises towards whatever you told it to count.

  • Open the conversion actions list. Which are set to Primary and which to Secondary? Only Primary actions feed the Conversions column and the bidding.
  • Is anything counted that is not a business outcome? Page views, PDF downloads, phone-number clicks with no answer, newsletter signups sitting alongside sales enquiries.
  • Count setting: One for lead generation, Every for ecommerce. A lead form set to Every will inflate a repeat submitter into three conversions.
  • Are the same conversions arriving twice, once from a Google tag and once from an imported analytics goal?
  • Conversion windows. A 30-day click window on a product with a four-month sales cycle undercounts everything.
  • Consent handling. Check whether consent mode is deployed and how large the modelled portion of conversions is. If a big share is modelled, treat small differences between campaigns as noise.
  • Value. Are conversions carrying a value, or is every enquiry worth the same? If they all carry the same value, the account cannot tell a £200 job from a £20,000 one.

If any of this is wrong, stop. Fix it, wait for a fortnight of clean data, then audit.

2. What the money actually bought

Read the search terms report, never the keyword list. The keyword is what you asked for. The search term is what you got.

  • Sort by cost, descending. Take the top fifty. How many are queries you would pay for?
  • Look for the near-misses that broad match invents: jobs and careers, free and DIY, competitor brand names, wrong product, wrong country.
  • Check how much spend sits in aggregated or withheld terms. Google does not show every query, so know the size of the part you cannot read.
  • Check account-level negative keyword lists exist and are applied to every campaign, not campaign by campaign.

3. Where the spend concentrates

  • Rank campaigns by cost. Rank them again by conversions. Compare the two orders. The gap is the finding.
  • Same at ad group level inside the two biggest spenders.
  • Impression share lost to budget against impression share lost to rank. Lost to budget means a working campaign is capped. Lost to rank means it is not working and more money will not fix it.
  • Find the spend with zero conversions over a period long enough to matter for your sales cycle.

4. Whether the bidding strategy is being fed

  • Which strategy is each campaign on? Manual, Maximise clicks, Maximise conversions, target CPA, target ROAS.
  • How many conversions does each campaign produce a month? A target-based strategy on a campaign with a handful of conversions is guessing with your money.
  • When did the targets last change? By how much? Repeated large target changes reset the learning and are usually the cause of the instability they were meant to fix.
  • Check whether recommendations are set to auto-apply. Someone else is editing the account if they are.

5. Structure, now that the numbers mean something

  • Does the campaign split match the way the budget needs to be controlled? Budgets sit at campaign level, so anything you need to fund separately needs its own campaign.
  • Are brand and non-brand separated? If not, the account’s headline cost per acquisition is mostly people who already knew your name.
  • Count the ad groups with almost no traffic. Fragmentation starves every one of them of the data the bidding needs.

6. The automated campaign types

Performance Max, Shopping and Demand Gen hide more than search campaigns do, so audit them differently.

  • What share of total spend sits inside them? That is the share of the account you cannot see directly.
  • Performance Max: are brand terms excluded? Without an exclusion it will happily buy your own name and report it as a win.
  • Search themes, asset group coverage, then the channel and placement reports. Look for spend landing in placements you would never have bought.
  • Shopping: feed health, disapprovals, then whether the products that make margin are the products getting the impressions.

7. Ad copy and assets

  • Count assets per responsive search ad. Check how many are rated Low against Best.
  • Does the ad repeat the query, or does it repeat the brand? The first earns the click.
  • Are sitelinks, callouts and structured snippets present at account, campaign and ad group level?
  • Anything time-limited still running months after the offer ended.

8. Targeting: geography, schedule, device

  • Location settings. Presence against Presence or interest is the most common quiet leak in a UK account: the second buys people abroad who are merely interested in the UK.
  • Check the exclusion list too, not the included list alone.
  • Day and hour performance against when the phone is actually answered.
  • Device splits. A mobile-heavy account pointing at a slow desktop-first page is paying twice for the same failure.

9. What happens after the click

  • Does the landing page answer the query the ad was bought for, in its first screen?
  • Load speed on a mobile connection, measured rather than assumed.
  • Form length. Whether every field earns its place.
  • Are the forms tracked? Half the accounts that look untracked are tracked badly at this exact point.

10. The output

Three to five ranked fixes, each with the reason for the ranking, what it will cost and who does it. Not a backlog.

An audit that ends in a hundred-item spreadsheet has moved the hard decision back to you and charged you for the privilege. If the deliverable cannot be read in ten minutes, it will not be acted on.

What does Google think “ppc audit” means?

Something worth checking before you spend anything on this term, because it is a live example of check number two.

“PPC audit” gets 700 UK searches a month with a keyword difficulty of 0 and a $12.00 cost per click, the highest CPC in this category (Ahrefs keywords-explorer-overview, GB, 10 August 2026). On paper it is a bargain. Then read the actual result page.

The top organic result in the UK for “ppc audit” is Thomson Reuters. It has nothing to do with advertising. Its PPC audit guides are accounting and audit practice guides, sold alongside its Cloud Audit Suite for accountancy firms. PPC there stands for a publishing imprint, not pay per click.

Google’s AI Overview on the query cites that page too. Google’s own “people also ask” block on the same result page asks “What is PPC in auditing?” and “What does PPC stand for in accounting?” beside “How to conduct a PPC audit?”. Google has not decided which industry the phrase belongs to, so it is showing both.

Two consequences follow, both practical.

Ahrefs puts the traffic potential of this term at 20 visits a month, against 700 searches. A keyword difficulty of 0 and a $12.00 CPC look like an open door. Most of what is behind the door is accountants, plus an AI Overview taking the rest.

Nobody is bidding on it. The result page for “ppc audit” carried no paid results when we pulled it. “Google ads audit”, which is half the volume at 350 a month and a lower $6.00 CPC, carries ads at the top and the bottom of the page. Advertisers with money in this market have quietly settled on the unambiguous phrase. The $12.00 figure on the ambiguous one is a number without a live auction under it.

That is the whole of check number two in one query. The keyword is what you asked for. The search term is what you get.

What do the pages ranking for it actually contain?

We read the UK top ten (Ahrefs serp-overview, GB, 10 August 2026) and classified each page by what a reader can do with it.

Position Page What it is Price published
2 Thomson Reuters Accounting audit guides no
4 PPC Geeks Free audit offer, agency page no
5 Adalysis Software, automated checks no
6 Embryo Checklist, closing on “hire an agency” no
7 Optmyzr 15-step checklist inside a software page no
8 Whitehat 8-step framework bands only
9 Clear Design Agency page, eight broad categories no
10 Reddit r/PPC Practitioner thread, 34 replies no

Three of the ten contain a sequence a reader could follow without buying anything. Three are sales pages. One is software. One is about accountancy. One is a forum thread, which is the only page on the list where the people answering have no product to sell.

Not one publishes a fixed price. Whitehat comes closest, quoting UK bands of £500 to £1,500 for accounts spending £5,000 to £15,000 a month, £2,000 to £5,000 for larger accounts and £8,000 upwards at enterprise level. Those are its estimates of the market rather than its own rate card, so treat them as a well-informed opinion instead of data. The pattern matches what we found for AI search audits, where two providers in ten put a number on the page a buyer lands on.

What the free ones are worth

The free PPC audit is a lead magnet, which is fine as long as everyone knows.

A free audit is normally an automated grader: read-only access, a dozen checks, a score, a PDF, then a call. It will reliably find the mechanical things, which is genuinely useful. It cannot do checks 1, 3 and 10 on this list, because those need someone to know what the business sells, what a lead is worth and which fix to do first.

Take them. Run three. Then notice they disagree with each other, which is the most useful thing they will tell you.

Who does the work afterwards

The audit and the fixing are different purchases. Confusing them is how a diagnostic quietly becomes a retainer nobody agreed to buy.

Most of the ten checks above land on someone inside your business: a developer for tracking, a designer for the page, whoever holds the budget for the ranked list at the end. Where the ongoing work is paid search management, we sell that separately on published limits and a published monthly price, so the two decisions stay separate.

The same discipline is why the audit ends at three to five items. An audit tells you everything. The useful version tells you what to fix first.

If you are auditing search spend in 2026, run this alongside the organic read rather than after it. The two channels now compete for the same answer box: what the organic traffic data actually says covers why the click is a worse proxy for demand than it used to be, which changes what a cost per click is worth.

Data in this article: keyword volumes, difficulty and CPC from Ahrefs keywords-explorer-overview, GB, 10 August 2026. Result page composition and traffic potential from Ahrefs serp-overview and the same endpoint, GB, the same date. Every page in the classification table read directly on 10 August 2026. CPC figures are Ahrefs estimates in US dollars, which is how the tool reports them.