Paid Search Account Audit

Paid Search Account Audit

Every paid search audit I have been handed compares the account's CTR and CPC with a published "industry benchmark" and calls the gap the problem. It never is. The benchmark is someone else's customers, someone else's prices and someone else's tracking. The only numbers that can judge an account are its own: what a conversion is worth to you, what each campaign and term cost per conversion, and where the account is spending on things that cannot convert while starving the things that do.

This skill audits in a fixed order, because each step makes the next one readable. Tracking first: if the primary conversion is a page view or a test never fired, every CPA below it is fiction. Waste second: campaigns and search terms with clicks and nothing to show. Starved winners third: campaigns under your target that lose impressions to budget. Landing pages last, because a good keyword on a bad page looks like a bad keyword. Every threshold is an engine rule and says so.

When to use

The user is reviewing an account they run, inheriting one from an agency or a predecessor, judging whether an agency is doing its job, or trying to explain a CPA that went the wrong way.

Do not use it to split budget across channels; paid-media-budget-allocation does that. Do not use it to judge ad creative; ad-creative-testing sizes and reads creative tests.

Before you start

1. Set a target cost per conversion from unit economics, not from what the account has been getting. unit-economics produces it.
2. Export 30 days (or one full cycle if longer): the campaign report with impression share lost to budget and rank, the search terms report, and the landing page report.
3. Go into the account and check the nine setup items yourself. The engine takes true, false or unknown; unknown is treated as not done.
4. Write the irrelevant patterns: words that mean the searcher can never be a customer (free, jobs, salary, tutorial, template, login...). Yours, not a generic list.

Method

Setup, nine checks. Conversion tracking verified with a real primary action; CRM outcomes imported; brand in its own campaign; search partners reviewed; display expansion off; geo targeting by presence not interest; shared negative lists; auto-applied recommendations off; assets complete. Three are blocking (tracking, brand separation, display expansion). An unverified tracking setup makes the verdict "foundations" whatever else is found.

Campaigns, against your target. Per campaign: CPA, CTR and conversion rate are reported, not judged against anyone else. Findings: ten or more clicks and no conversions (blocking); CPA under target while losing 20% or more of impressions to budget - a starved winner, and the cheapest growth in the account; CPA more than twice target on three or more conversions; automated bidding (target CPA, target ROAS, maximise conversions) on fewer than 30 conversions in the period, which is AAJ's rule for when the algorithm is still guessing; Performance Max without brand exclusions marked. Brand and non-brand CPA are split, and brand taking half or more of spend gets a question.

Search terms. Terms matching your irrelevant patterns and not negated are the first waste. Terms with ten or more clicks and no conversions are the second. Terms with two or more conversions that are not keywords are winners to add as exact match. Waste share is reported against search-term spend.

Landing pages. A page with ten or more clicks and no conversions is blocking. A page converting under half the account's median page rate is checked. Message mismatch (the page does not repeat the ad's promise) is blocking; it is the most common reason a good keyword looks bad.

One fix list. Blocking findings first, then by the spend each touches, so the first three items are always the biggest money. Verdict: foundations, waste (15% or more of spend produced nothing), scale (a starved winner exists and the account is clean enough to read), fix, or healthy.

Workflow

Step 1 - Foundations. Run the setup check. Fix tracking before reading anything else.

Step 2 - Stop the waste. Negatives into a shared list; pause campaigns with clicks and nothing to show.

Step 3 - Feed the winner. Move the freed budget to the campaign under target that is losing impressions to budget.

Step 4 - Fix the pages. Message match on the pages the biggest campaigns land on.

Step 5 - Re-run in 30 days with a clean period. The waste share and the non-brand CPA are the two numbers to watch.

Run the tool

node resources/search-audit.js --demo

run({ targetCpa, setup, campaigns, searchTerms, irrelevantPatterns, landingPages }) returns the setup items, the account and per-campaign reads with findings, the negate / irrelevant / add lists with waste share, the landing-page reads, the ranked fix list and the verdict. Any section may be omitted.

Present the result

1. The verdict and the three numbers: non-brand CPA against target, waste share, and the starved winner if there is one.
2. The top five fixes with the spend each touches.
3. The negative list to add today, and the winners to promote to keywords.
4. What to re-check in 30 days.

Guardrails & common mistakes

• Never judge CTR or CPC against a benchmark. Judge CPA against your target, and terms and pages against each other.
• Never read an account whose tracking is unverified. Fix it, wait a week, then read.
• Never negate a term with under ten clicks. It has not had a chance; that is an engine rule, and it is deliberate.
• Do not credit brand for the account. Report non-brand CPA on its own.
• Do not trust automated bidding on thin data. Thirty conversions in the period is AAJ's floor.

Related AAJ resources

• Account and funnel architecture, and the optimisation cadence: https://aajconsult.com/playbooks/digital-advertising-playbook
• Setting the target CPA and splitting spend across channels: https://aajconsult.com/playbooks/paid-media-budget-allocation-playbook
• The allocator, once the account is clean: https://aajconsult.com/tools/paid-media-budget-allocator
• What early-stage accounts get wrong: https://aajconsult.com/blog/digital-ads-early-stage-startups-guide-2026

Related skills

• paid-media-budget-allocation - where search sits against other channels
• ad-creative-testing - testing the ads once the account is clean
• landing-page-brief - fixing the pages the audit flags
• unit-economics - the target CPA this audit reads against
• incrementality-and-mmm - whether brand search spend is incremental at all