Most Google Ads accounts have a setting which spends part of your budget on things you don’t actually want, and many business owners have never even opened the page where it lives.
That doesn’t mean you’ve made some huge mistake. Google Ads has default settings which favour broad reach, and broad reach favours Google. This means that leads keep trickling in regardless and, unless you know what to look out for, those small leaks stay invisible and eventually turn into a flood.
If you’re a service business owner who prefers to take care of things themselves, this audit will help you without having to become an expert. You won’t have to change a single setting, and the goal is to teach you what "healthy" looks like when it comes to Google Ads.
So, when you have a free half an hour, open your account on a desktop, not the app, and take our audit to ensure things are running as smoothly as possible for your business.
How to Use This Audit
Don’t worry, you won’t have to diagnose every single metric. You will be checking seven specific things that, in our experience auditing service-business accounts, tend to be where money is lost.
For each step of the process, we will tell you exactly what good should look like and what should concern you. If something seems off, it doesn’t mean your account is broken beyond repair, it means it’s worth taking a closer look for the good of your business.
1. Is Search Partners Switched On, and Do You Know?
The Search Partners network shows your search ads on sites that aren’t Google. It is switched on by default for Search campaigns, and although it sometimes performs just fine, it often spends money on lower-intent placements you would never have picked yourself.
Where to look → Open a Search campaign → Settings → "Networks." You will see if "Include Google search partners" is ticked.
The red flag is not that this is on, it’s that you didn’t know it existed and you have never segmented partner traffic to see whether it converts.
That is the most common issue we see. Keep in mind that you can only turn Search Partners off for Search campaigns, not Performance Max, so don’t waste time hunting for a switch that doesn’t exist.
2. Are You Reading Blended Numbers?
Most owners make decisions based on one cost-per-lead figure for the whole account. However, that figure blends together two very different things: standard Search and Performance Max. These behave differently and cost different prices, so averaging them out ends up hiding which one is actually working.
Where to look → In Campaigns view, read cost and conversions per campaign, not the account total. Group the Search campaigns in your head, then the Performance Max ones.
It’s important that you know roughly how much Search costs per lead, and how much PMax costs per lead. The two should be clearly separated.
If you only know the blended number and PMax is quietly running at three times the cost per lead of Search, the average will hide this.
3. What Are You Actually Optimising For?
This is one of the most important questions to ask yourself when organising your ads. When Google optimises your campaigns, what is it optimising towards?
A raw form submission isn’t the same as a booked consultation, and it’s certainly not the same as a paying client.
If your account counts every form fill as a conversion, Google will just keep finding you more form fills, including the tyre-kickers, the wrong-service enquiries and people who will never actually book. This is a waste of time and money, but it’s Google doing exactly what you told it to.
A stronger setup will feed meaningful actions back to Google, so booked appointments or qualified-lead statuses are pulled from your CRM, and it optimises towards the outcomes that pay your bills, not the ones that just look busy.
🚩 Red flag: the only conversion is "form submitted" or "contact page view," and nobody has connected what happens after the lead arrives.
Also read: Conversion Tracking in 2026: Why Your Campaign Data Matters More Than Ever
4. Can You Prove the Phone Actually Rang?
For the majority of service businesses, the phone is where the money is.
This leads to a simple question: can you prove a call actually happened, or are you only counting clicks on the call button?
There is a real difference here. A click on a phone number doesn’t mean they called, that the call connected or that it lasted longer than three seconds. Call-tracking systems like Delacon or CallRail will confirm the call was made, how long it lasted and even what was said.
That last part is really important: a thirty-second wrong number and a six-minute new-client enquiry look identical if all you track is the click.
Also read: Call Tracking Explained: Everything Service Businesses Need to Know
5. What Is Hiding in Your Search Terms Report?
If we could only perform one check, this is what it would be.
Google has steadily expanded what broad match and phrase match trigger on, which means your ads now show for searches you would never have chosen and you won’t be shown most of them on the main reporting views.
Where to look → Open a Search campaign → "Search terms" report (under Insights and reports, or the Search terms tab). This will show you the actual phrases people typed, as opposed to the keywords you bought.
A family lawyer should see family-law searches, and a plumber should see plumbing searches. The red flag here is finding searches with no commercial intent, the wrong service entirely or job-seekers and competitors.
This is where many owners find out they have been paying for clicks they would never have approved.
One caveat: the Search terms report doesn’t show every query because Google withholds terms below a privacy threshold. Treat it as the visible tip, not the whole iceberg. The part that’s visible is normally enough to discover issues.
6. How Far Does Your Conversion Tracking Actually Go?
This one is a little more technical, so we’ll keep it brief. The point here is not to fix it yourself, but to know roughly where your account sits on the maturity ladder.
Two quick questions should solve most of this issue: do you have a CRM where leads are recorded? Does anything from that CRM flow back into Google Ads?
🚩 Red flag: no CRM, or leads live in an inbox and a spreadsheet so nothing downstream ever reaches Google. Your account is not reaching its potential if this is happening.
7. Are You Using Your Data, or Guessing?
The final check is the most human one. Once you have looked into the six areas above, do you actually have a way to make sense of what you find?
You don’t need to hire an analyst. Data is more accessible than ever and you can lean on AI tools to help you read it, spot patterns and explain what each chart is telling you.
If you are unsure where to start, that is the kind of analysis we run across an account, including pulling the numbers and interpreting them for you.
🚩 Red flag: the account has been on autopilot for months, and the only metric anyone watches is total spend.
The 7-Point Scorecard
Run through these and tally where you land.
What a Healthy Account Feels Like
You don’t need every check to come back perfect. A healthy account is not one with no problems, it’s one where someone knows where and what the problems actually are.
If you’ve been through these seven aspects and found three or four things you had never looked at, that is normal, and it is good news because it means there is a budget currently leaking that you can recover, usually without having to spend a penny more.
The deeper work like connecting a CRM, building offline conversion imports, setting up server-side tracking and segmenting partner traffic properly is the sort of thing we handle for clients day to day. But the audit above is yours to run yourself. The first step is just opening the screens and looking.
We help Australian service businesses turn ad spend into actual clients, not just clicks and form fills. If something doesn’t seem right to you after going through this audit, book a no-pressure call and we will walk through your account together, including the bits Google doesn’t put on the front page.
Book a time here: https://calendly.com/leadtreemarketing/30min
