How to Audit Your Meta & Google Ads in Under 30 Minutes

Key Takeaways

• A systematic 30-minute audit can identify up to 25% budget waste across Google and Meta campaigns

• Focus on three critical areas: search terms, ad performance, and budget allocation

• Poor account structure creates cascading problems, fix the foundation first

• Quality Score below 5 and Meta frequency above 3.0 demand immediate action

• Reallocating 10% of budget from worst to best performers typically improves ROAS by 15-25%

  
  

Why Audit Your Ads Regularly

Learning how to audit your Meta & Google Ads accounts in under 30 minutes helps businesses identify up to a quarter of their budget going to the wrong places. A systematic PPC audit catches these opportunities before they add up to thousands in missed returns.

We've built this framework from years of optimising accounts across both platforms. It's the same process we use when assessing new client accounts, and it consistently uncovers opportunities that, once optimised, improve returns by 20-40% within weeks.

A 30-minute PPC audit systematically reviews your Google and Meta advertising accounts to identify wasted spend, performance bottlenecks, and immediate optimisation opportunities. Before you start, you'll need admin access to both accounts and Google Analytics.

Minutes 0-5: The Foundation Check

Your account structure determines everything else - if this bit's wrong, nothing else matters. Look at your campaign naming first. Seeing things like "Campaign 1 Copy" or "Test - DO NOT DELETE"? That's not just messy, it's a symptom of deeper problems.

What you want is a consistent format that shows platform, type, objective, and audience at a glance. Without this, you're basically guessing when it comes to tracking performance, and spotting patterns becomes near impossible.

Have a look at where your budget's actually going. We consistently find high-performers barely getting any spend whilst campaigns that haven't worked in months keep draining thousands. If your top three spenders aren't your top three performers, you've just found a major fix.

Last thing: scan for duplicate campaigns targeting the same audiences or keywords. This creates internal competition - you're literally bidding against yourself, pushing up costs whilst your performance data gets fragmented across multiple campaigns. Happens more often than you'd think.

Minutes 5-12: Google Ads Rapid Assessment

Search Terms & Negative Keywords

Open your Search Terms report and filter by highest spend. This is where budget opportunities sit. You're looking for irrelevant queries, informational searches triggering your commercial campaigns, competitor brand names, generic terms with absolutely no buying intent.

Here's the benchmark that matters: if more than 20% of your search term spend is going to irrelevant queries, there's room for improvement. Add these as negative keywords straight away.

Quality Score & Ad Performance

Ad performance comes next. Sort by impressions and find search ads with CTR below 5%, they need attention because you're paying for visibility that isn't converting to clicks. Quality Scores matter here too. Anything below 6/10 means you're paying significantly more per click than you should be.

Budget allocation tells the real story. Find campaigns spending over 20% of budget but delivering under 5% of conversions, these need reassessing. On the flip side, identify budget-limited campaigns with strong ROAS, they're practically begging for more investment.

Quick win here: reallocating just 10% from worst to best performers typically lifts overall ROAS by 15-25%. That's real money back in your pocket, not theoretical improvements.

Minutes 12-20: Meta Ads Quick Diagnostic

Audience Targeting & Structure

Meta's shifted heavily toward AI-driven targeting in 2025, which changes how you need to audit. Audience size matters, anything under 1 million can run into delivery problems. Check if you've got multiple ad sets targeting similar demographics, because that creates auction competition within your own account. You're competing against yourself.

Creative Performance Analysis

Creative performance determines 70-80% of your Meta results, so this bit's absolutely crucial. CTR below 1% for cold audiences means your creative isn't stopping the scroll. Video versus static formats can tell different stories, sometimes one format dramatically outperforms the other, and you'd never know without checking.

Creative fatigue shows up clearly in the data. If performance drops after 21-28 days, your audience has seen the ad too many times. Frequency above 3.0 is a clear signal you're saturating your audience and need fresh creative.

Budget distribution works differently on Meta than Google. Healthy accounts typically spend 60-70% on prospecting (cold audiences) versus remarketing. If that ratio's reversed, you're likely leaving growth on the table because you're only talking to people who already know you.

Placement performance whilst you're here deserves attention. Sometimes Feed, Stories, or Reels dominate spend without proportional results. Breaking this down often reveals opportunities to cut waste and reallocate budget to what's actually working.

Minutes 20-25: Cross-Platform Performance Review

Conversion Tracking Analysis

Conversion data between platforms and Google Analytics needs comparing. Significant variations point to tracking problems, attribution window mismatches, double-counting issues, or missing codes. These discrepancies cost you accurate decision-making.

Cost-per-acquisition across both platforms tells you which one's delivering better value for your specific goals. Sometimes Google Ads crushes Meta for certain businesses, whilst others see the opposite. There's no universal rule here, just what works for your particular market and audience.

Competitive Position Check

Auction insights on Google and delivery insights on Meta reveal competitive shifts. Are competitors gaining ground? Rising costs without performance improvements? New competitors suddenly appearing? These patterns tell you when market conditions are shifting and your strategy needs adjusting before you're caught off guard.

Platforms often get treated as separate entities when they should work together. Users typically interact with both before converting, which makes integrated platform strategies significantly more effective than running them in silos. It's about understanding the full journey, not just individual touchpoints.

Minutes 25-30: Action Prioritisation

You've now got a list of opportunities. Here's how to tackle them based on urgency and impact.

Do today:

• Pause campaigns with CPA over 200% of target, they're actively losing you money

• Add negative keywords for obvious irrelevant terms

• Reallocate 20% spend from worst to best performers

• Fix any broken conversion tracking, because without accurate data, you're flying blind

  
  

This week:

• Refresh fatigued Meta creatives showing performance decline

• Add high-performing search terms as exact match keywords

• Exclude poor-performing demographics that are dragging down your averages

• Implement automated bidding where appropriate, particularly for campaigns with sufficient conversion data

  
  

This month:

• Restructure poorly organised campaigns, yes, it's tedious, but the performance gains justify the effort

• Optimise landing pages for high-traffic, low-converting campaigns

• Implement proper attribution modelling so you understand the real customer journey

  
  

Mind you, focusing on high-impact changes first actually moves the needle. Perfecting minor details whilst major problems persist is just procrastination dressed up as optimisation.

Need expert help with your advertising audit? Working with Lucky Penny means you get specialists who review accounts daily and can identify your top opportunities in a free consultation.

Emergency Warning Signs

Some issues can't wait for your monthly audit cycle, they need attention now.

Google Ads warning signs include Quality Score below 5, which means fundamental relevance problems that are driving costs through the roof. Search impression share below 50% means you're missing most relevant auctions, potential customers are seeing competitors instead of you. Budget utilisation over 95% consistently shows campaigns hitting daily limits, which restricts growth artificially.

Meta warning signs look different. Delivery issues where ads spend less than 80% of daily budget signal targeting or creative problems that Meta's algorithm can't overcome. Frequency above 3.0 means audience saturation, you're annoying the same people repeatedly instead of reaching new ones. CTR below 1% indicates creative failure. CPA trending upward without explanation needs immediate investigation.

When you're seeing multiple emergency signals at once, bringing in specialists makes sense. At Lucky Penny, we've built our approach around transparency and collaboration. Working with Lucky Penny means direct access to senior specialists who show exactly what's happening and why it matters to your bottom line, with live dashboards that update in real time so you're never wondering where your budget's going. Book a free consultation with Lucky Penny to discuss what's possible with your campaigns.

Caio for now

Ali Puglianini

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I really audit both platforms in 30 minutes? For identifying major issues, absolutely. This PPC audit framework prioritises breadth over depth initially, you're looking for critical problems that justify deeper investigation, not conducting detailed analysis of every metric.

What's the most common mistake in PPC audits? Focusing on minor optimisations whilst major structural problems persist. Businesses often perfect ad copy when their campaign architecture needs work, or obsess over bid adjustments when a quarter of their budget's going to irrelevant search terms.

What if my advertising audit reveals problems I can't fix myself? That's when specialist help makes sense. Complex attribution issues, advanced automation setup, or complete account restructuring often need expertise built over years of platform-specific work. Working with specialists who've solved these problems hundreds of times typically delivers better results than months of trial-and-error.