Most Google Ads audits check the same handful of things: account structure, keyword match types, ad copy. Those are worth checking, but they miss the question that actually determines whether an account is healthy — is any of this spend generating profit, not just conversions? This checklist covers both: the structural items a conventional audit catches, and the profitability check most don't.
Work through it in order — structural issues are worth fixing first, since they're usually quick, and cleaning them up makes the profitability numbers in the final section more reliable (waste and overlap distort spend-to-revenue figures at every level below them).
Account structure and campaign overlap
- Are there multiple Shopping or Performance Max campaigns targeting overlapping products? These bid against each other in the same auctions and inflate costs for both without benefit.
- Is campaign naming and structure still logical, or has it accumulated test campaigns and one-off experiments that were never cleaned up?
- Are budgets allocated in proportion to what's actually performing, or mostly reflecting how the account happened to grow over time?
Search terms and negative keywords
- When was the Search Terms report last reviewed? (Campaigns → Insights and reports → Search terms.) If it's been more than a month, start here — this is usually where the fastest, most obvious waste hides.
- Is there a shared, account-level negative keyword list, or are negatives only applied inconsistently per campaign?
- For Performance Max specifically: are campaign-level negatives in use? Google now supports up to 10,000 per PMax campaign, plus account-level negative keyword lists spanning Search, Shopping, PMax, and Local — a real gap if this hasn't been revisited recently. See wasted ad spend in Google Ads for the full walkthrough.
Budget and bidding
- Is the current budget based on a deliberate plan, or is it whatever the account has historically spent? Our Google Ads budget calculator turns a monthly figure into a daily cap and estimated order volume if it's worth re-checking against current numbers.
- If using Target ROAS or Target CPA bidding, when was the target last updated? A target set months ago against outdated margin assumptions will misallocate budget even if the bidding strategy itself is working exactly as configured.
- Is bidding strategy consistent with actual profitability, or optimising purely for a revenue target that hasn't been checked against break-even ROAS?
Product feed and Shopify-specific checks
- Are there disapproved or pending products in Merchant Center reducing the effective size of the catalog being advertised?
- Is product data — titles, images, availability, pricing — staying in sync with Shopify, or are there known feed sync delays or errors?
- Are high-margin products getting proportionate visibility in Shopping/PMax campaigns, or is budget flowing mostly to whatever happens to have the most reviews or the lowest price?
The profitability check most audits skip
This is the section a conventional Google Ads audit rarely includes, because it requires data the platform doesn't have natively: cost of goods sold.
- Does the account have any connection between campaign spend and product margin, even a rough flat-margin estimate? If not, every other item on this checklist is being evaluated against revenue, not profit — which means an audit can conclude an account is "healthy" while campaigns are quietly losing money on low-margin products.
- What's the break-even ROAS for the products driving the most spend? If nobody can answer this without checking, that's the single highest-leverage gap to close. See how to calculate break-even ROAS for the formula, or use our break-even ROAS calculator directly.
- Are Smart Bidding targets set against a genuine profit threshold, or copied from a generic "good ROAS" benchmark that doesn't reflect this account's actual margins?
A quick illustration of why this section matters
An account passing every structural check above — clean negatives, sensible campaign structure, healthy-looking budget pacing, a synced feed — can still fail this last section entirely. A campaign posting a 4x ROAS looks identical on every conventional audit checklist whether it's selling a 50%-margin product (comfortably profitable) or an 18%-margin product (losing money on every sale, since break-even for that margin is roughly 5.6x). Nothing in a structural audit catches that difference; only a margin-aware check does. This exact scenario is worked through in more detail in our complete guide to Google Ads for Shopify.
Turning findings into action
A checklist is only useful if it changes what happens next. Structural issues — overlapping campaigns, stale negatives, feed errors — are usually quick, one-time fixes: pause the overlapping campaign, add the negatives, resolve the feed disapprovals, and move on. They're worth fixing, but they don't need ongoing infrastructure once addressed.
The profitability gap is different. It's not a one-time fix so much as an ongoing data connection that needs to exist between Shopify and Google Ads on a continuing basis, because margins and campaigns both change over time — a margin-aware audit done once and never repeated goes stale the same way a spreadsheet-based COGS tracking effort does. That ongoing connection is exactly the piece most Shopify-specific tooling doesn't provide out of the box, and it's the difference between an audit that's a one-time cleanup and one that reflects an account's actual, current health.