Google Ads Audit Checklist Canada: 8 Things to Check Before You Pay an Agency
Why Audit Your Google Ads Account First
If you're running Google Ads for a Canadian business and the results feel underwhelming — high spend, few calls, cost-per-lead you can't fully explain — the instinct is usually to either "fix it yourself over the weekend" or hire an agency and hope. There's a better first move: run a structured audit of your own account before you decide either way.
A proper audit tells you exactly where your budget is going and whether the problem is strategy, tracking, or simple neglect. It also arms you to have a smarter conversation with any agency you talk to, because you'll already know which questions matter. This checklist walks through the same eight areas we review whenever a Canadian small business asks us to look at their account, in the order that tends to reveal the most expensive problems first.
None of this requires expensive software. Everything below is visible inside your standard Google Ads dashboard — you just need to know where to look and what a healthy number looks like versus a warning sign.
The 8-Point Audit Checklist
Account & campaign structure
Open Campaigns and count how many you're running, and how tightly each ad group is themed. A healthy structure groups closely related keywords into small ad groups (5–20 keywords) with matching ad copy — not one giant campaign with hundreds of unrelated terms lumped together. Sprawling, poorly organized structures are one of the clearest signs an account was set up once and never revisited.
Search Terms report vs. negative keywords
Go to Keywords → Search Terms and scroll through the last 30–90 days. This is the single highest-leverage check in the whole audit. Flag anything irrelevant to what you sell (a roofer paying for "roofing jobs hiring," a clinic paying for "free consultation reddit") and add it as a negative keyword. Accounts we review often haven't touched this report in months — it's the fastest way to stop paying for clicks that will never convert.
Conversion tracking accuracy
Check Goals → Conversions and confirm calls, form submissions, and (if relevant) online bookings are all firing correctly — then test one yourself. If your account is optimizing toward "clicks" or a vague page-visit goal instead of real leads, Google's bidding algorithm is guessing blind. This is frequently the single biggest fix in an underperforming account, because everything downstream depends on it.
Match types
Review your keyword list for broad match terms running with no guardrails. Broad match can work well when paired with strong negatives and smart bidding, but on a neglected account it usually means your ad is showing for searches that only loosely relate to your business. If you see mostly broad match and few or no negatives, that combination alone can quietly burn a large share of monthly spend.
Quality Score & ad relevance
Add the Quality Score columns under Keywords and look for scores of 1–4 (out of 10). Low scores usually mean the ad text and landing page don't closely match the keyword's intent, and they directly raise your cost-per-click — sometimes by a significant multiple compared to a well-matched keyword. If a chunk of your keywords sit in that low range, expect to be paying more per click than you should.
Budget pacing & day-parting
Check whether your daily budget is being fully spent every day (a "Limited by budget" status is a strong signal you're missing traffic) or, on the flip side, whether budget runs out by early afternoon and you go dark for the rest of the day. For urgent local services, being invisible during evening or weekend searches can cost real jobs. Ad scheduling should match when your customers actually search, not just business hours.
Geographic & device targeting
Confirm your location targeting matches your real service area — not the whole province when you only serve one metro area — and check the Locations report for spend leaking to cities you don't serve. Also compare conversion rate by device under Devices; if mobile converts far worse than desktop, your landing page or click-to-call setup on mobile likely needs attention, since most local searches happen on a phone.
Landing page match
Click through your own top ads as a customer would and land where they land. Does the page match what the ad promised, load quickly on mobile, and make it obvious how to call or book? A mismatch between ad promise and landing page is one of the most common reasons a campaign gets clicks but few leads — the traffic was fine, the destination wasn't.
Should You Fix It Yourself or Hire an Agency?
Running through this checklist yourself is entirely doable for a business owner with an hour to spend and access to their Google Ads dashboard. Where it gets harder is knowing what "normal" looks like for your specific industry and city, and having the time to keep re-auditing every few weeks as the account drifts again — because it will. A one-time cleanup helps, but Google Ads rewards ongoing attention, not a single fix.
That's really the dividing line: if you can commit to reviewing search terms and Quality Score monthly, a self-audit plus your own follow-through can genuinely work. If you'd rather have someone else own that recurring discipline — and benchmark your account against similar businesses they manage — that's the point of bringing in a Google Ads agency in Canada. Either way, running the checklist first means you'll walk into that conversation already knowing whether an agency is diagnosing your account accurately or just reciting a generic pitch.
If you decide to go the agency route, ask them to show you their findings against this same list — account structure, negative keywords, conversion tracking, match types, Quality Score, budget pacing, geo/device targeting, and landing page match. A credible audit should be specific to your account, not a copy-pasted report.
Want Us to Run This Audit on Your Account?
We'll walk through all 8 checkpoints on your live account, for free, and show you exactly where budget is leaking. Book a free strategy call to get started.
Get My Free Ad Audit →What a Healthy Account Looks Like After the Fixes
Once the checklist items above are addressed, a Canadian small-business account should generally show: tight ad groups matched to specific services, a negative keyword list reviewed at least monthly, conversion tracking that reports real calls and form fills (not just clicks), the majority of keywords sitting at Quality Score 6 or higher, a budget that paces evenly through the day without going dark, geographic targeting that matches your actual service radius, and landing pages that load fast and match what the ad promised.
None of that requires a huge budget — it requires attention. This is exactly why our Google Ads management is built around a flat monthly fee rather than a percentage of your spend: the incentive should be to make your existing budget work harder, not to talk you into spending more. If your audit turned up more red flags than green ones, that's useful information either way — now you know what to fix, and where to start.
Ran through the Search Terms check on our account and found we'd been paying for "plumbing courses" and "plumber salary" for weeks. Fixed in five minutes. Wish I'd checked this months ago.
The conversion tracking point was the real eye-opener for us — our "conversions" were actually just people landing on the contact page, not calls. No wonder the algorithm was optimizing for the wrong thing.