Google Ads Account Audit: 4 Issues Found in a Real Client Account

The account had Shopping campaigns running. Traffic was coming in. But something was off — and a 10-minute look under the hood revealed four problems that were costing the store money every single day.

None of these issues were exotic. They did not require advanced knowledge to spot. They just required someone to actually open the account and look.

This audit is a real walkthrough of a real account, on camera, with real numbers. It covers conversion tracking, product feed health, location data, and policy violations — the exact same areas I check at the start of every new client engagement.

After auditing dozens of e-commerce accounts, the same problems keep showing up. Not occasionally — constantly. Conversion tracking configured incorrectly. Product feeds with significant disapprovals. Location data that nobody has looked at. Policy violations sitting untouched for months.

The reason they persist is simple: most store owners set up their Google Ads account once and assume it is running correctly. Agencies and freelancers often focus on campaign-level metrics — clicks, CPA, ROAS — without ever checking the plumbing underneath.

These issues are what that plumbing looks like when it is broken.

The first place to check in any Google Ads account audit is the conversion setup. Go to Goals > Conversions > Summary, then click “View all conversion actions.”

In this account, three primary conversion actions were running simultaneously: Purchase, Add to Cart, and Contact Us. All three were set to Primary — which means Google’s smart bidding was treating all three as equally important goals to optimize toward.

That is a problem. A contact form submission is not worth the same as a purchase. When Google sees all three as primary, it will happily chase the easiest signal — which is usually not revenue.

You should have exactly one primary conversion action — the one that directly represents your most important business goal. For e-commerce, that is always Purchase. Everything else (Add to Cart, Begin Checkout, Contact Form) should be set to Secondary so you can still see the data without contaminating the bidding algorithm.

For a detailed breakdown of which conversions to include in bidding and which to track as secondary, see this post on enhanced conversions and custom goals.

The second thing to check is the click-through conversion window. This setting controls how many days after a click Google can still attribute a conversion to that ad.

For e-commerce — especially higher-ticket categories like jewelry, furniture, or anything with a longer research phase — you want this as long as possible. If someone clicks your ad today, browses for three weeks, and then purchases, you want Google to connect those dots and attribute the sale to the campaign that started the journey.

Set the click-through conversion window to 90 days (the maximum) for any product with a meaningful consideration period. Most accounts are still on the default 30-day window.

After checking the conversion list, go to the Diagnostics tab within the Conversions section. This is where Google flags anything that is not configured correctly.

In this account, there were three items flagged in the Enhanced Conversions section. Enhanced conversions pass additional user data (name, email, phone number) to Google at the point of purchase — hashed before it leaves your site, so no raw personal data is transmitted. Google uses this to identify the user more precisely and match their purchase behavior to future ad exposures.

When enhanced conversions are broken, Google loses that additional signal. The algorithm can still optimize, but it is working with less data. Over time this makes it harder to scale, especially in competitive categories where smart bidding accuracy matters.

The Diagnostics tab is one of the most overlooked sections in any account. Most advertisers never open it. But Google is actively telling you what is broken — you just have to look.

Go to Campaigns > Products, then click the Issues tab. For any e-commerce account running Shopping ads, this is the second most critical check after conversion tracking.

In this account, out of 13,000 products in the catalog, 3,000 had issues — and 2,000 of those were completely ineligible. That means they were not running in any ad. At all.

The product diagnostics showed several different issue types across the disapproved items. Some were straightforward — missing product images, out-of-stock items still in the feed. Others were more unusual — a currency mismatch where some products were priced in one currency and others in a different currency, which Google’s systems cannot make sense of for bid calculations.

There was also a “missing Korean business registration number” error appearing on products from an Australian store — which points to a settings misconfiguration at the feed or Merchant Center account level, not a product-level problem.

Missing attributes across multiple products: color, age group, gender. These are required fields for certain Shopping ad formats and for Dynamic Remarketing. Missing them means some inventory will never be eligible for those placements.

Go to Campaigns > Locations, click into your target country, then break the data down by region. This shows you how your budget is distributed across geographic areas and how each area converts.

In this account, targeting Australia, the regional breakdown revealed a significant performance gap. Some regions had conversion rates of 2.5% to 3%. Others were at 0.3% to 0.5%. And the regions with the worst conversion rates were receiving more budget than the ones with the best.

This pattern is common in accounts where smart bidding is not receiving good conversion signals. When the algorithm lacks reliable purchase data, it cannot optimize geographic spend intelligently. Budget ends up spread across the entire country instead of concentrating where it actually converts.

The calculation matters here. This account was running on a constrained budget. The spend that went to the low-converting regions could have gone to the high-converting ones instead — and at a 3% versus 0.5% conversion rate difference, that reallocation could have produced several times more sales with the same total spend.

Go to Tools > Troubleshooting > Policy Manager. This shows every ad in your account that has been disapproved, along with the specific policy it violated.

In this account, there were multiple disapproved ads with more than one policy violation each. These ads were sitting in the account, not running, affecting the overall health score of the account.

Run this checklist on any account before you touch a single bid or add a single keyword. If any of these items are broken, fixing them will have more impact than any campaign-level optimization you could make.