A £20,000 monthly ad budget can look busy while quietly losing money. Campaigns may generate sales, dashboards may show a respectable return on ad spend, and yet the account can still be scaling unprofitable products, misattributing revenue or paying for demand it would have captured anyway. That is what does a PPC audit include at its best: not a cosmetic review of settings, but a commercial investigation into where profit is being protected, lost and constrained.
For established eCommerce brands, the purpose is not to produce a longer report. It is to identify the changes that can improve profitable revenue without blindly increasing spend.
What does a PPC audit include?
A proper PPC audit examines the relationship between account data, product economics, tracking accuracy, campaign structure and the customer journey. Google Ads, Shopping, Performance Max and paid social all have different mechanics, but the question remains the same: are you buying incremental, profitable sales at a cost your business can sustain?
The scope depends on your channels, catalogue size and monthly spend. A brand spending £3,000 per month with a tight range of high-margin products needs a different level of analysis from a retailer spending £100,000 across thousands of SKUs. Still, the core components should be consistent.
Commercial targets and margin reality
The audit should begin before anyone opens a campaign. Your agency or internal team needs to understand average order value, gross margin, repeat purchase behaviour, shipping costs, refunds, contribution margin and your breakeven cost of sale.
Without this context, ROAS is a vanity metric dressed as a commercial one. A 4x ROAS might be excellent for a product with strong margins and repeat purchase potential. For a low-margin product with expensive fulfilment and high returns, it may be a loss-making result.
This part of the audit should clarify which products deserve aggressive investment, which can only be advertised within strict limits, and where a blended target is masking poor performance. It should also establish whether customer lifetime value is being used responsibly. Lifetime value can justify acquiring a first-time customer at a lower immediate return, but only if retention data supports the claim.
Conversion tracking and data quality
Every optimisation decision is only as good as the conversion data behind it. An audit checks whether purchase tracking is firing accurately, whether transaction values match the website, and whether duplicate conversions are inflating platform reporting.
It should also review consent mode, enhanced conversions, server-side tracking where relevant, cross-domain tracking, refund handling and attribution settings. These details are not administrative housekeeping. If Google is optimising towards duplicated purchase events or Facebook is missing a meaningful proportion of conversions, automated bidding will learn from the wrong signals.
There is no perfect attribution model, particularly for brands with longer consideration periods or strong organic demand. The point is not to make platform figures look precise. It is to understand their limitations and compare them against backend revenue, new-customer acquisition and blended efficiency.
Account structure and budget control
An audit examines whether the campaign structure gives you enough control to make profitable decisions. Over-segmentation can spread data too thinly and create a management burden with little upside. Under-segmentation can force high-margin bestsellers, clearance stock and low-margin accessories to compete for the same budget.
For Google Ads, this usually means reviewing campaign priorities, product groupings, brand versus non-brand activity, search and Shopping overlap, geographic targeting, device performance and budget allocation. For Performance Max, the review should assess asset groups, listing groups, audience signals, brand exclusions where appropriate and whether the campaign is being allowed to absorb too much budget without sufficient product-level accountability.
A strong account is not necessarily a complicated one. It is a structure that makes waste visible, protects priority products and allows spend to move quickly when performance changes.
Search terms, keywords and negative keywords
Search campaigns require a close look at the actual queries generating spend. Broad match can be highly effective when conversion data is sound and bidding is disciplined. It can also burn budget on loosely relevant searches if the account has weak negatives, unclear targets or no active search-term review.
The audit should identify irrelevant queries, non-commercial research terms, competitor searches that do not convert, and terms that produce revenue but fail the profitability test. It should then review match types, keyword coverage, bidding strategy and negative keyword lists.
For Shopping and Performance Max, query visibility is more limited than traditional search. That makes campaign segmentation, feed quality and product performance analysis even more important. You cannot manage what the platform does not reveal simply by looking at a keyword report.
Google Shopping feed quality
For eCommerce advertisers, the product feed is often the engine room of performance. An audit should inspect titles, descriptions, product types, categories, GTINs, images, availability, pricing, sale price annotations and custom labels.
Weak titles make products harder to match with valuable searches. Missing or inconsistent product identifiers restrict reach. Generic images can depress click-through rates before the shopper has even reached the site. Poor custom labelling removes the ability to separate bestsellers, high-margin lines, seasonal ranges and products with weak stock levels.
Feed optimisation is not about stuffing every title with keywords. It is about making product data useful to both the platform and the shopper. The right approach varies by category. A fashion retailer may need material, fit and gender attributes in a title, while a parts retailer may need precise compatibility data and manufacturer codes.
Bidding, spend efficiency and wasted budget
The audit should review how each campaign bids, what targets it uses and whether those targets reflect reality. Target ROAS and target CPA settings can be useful guardrails, but they can also suppress volume when set too aggressively or encourage poor-quality scale when set too loosely.
Spend analysis should separate obvious waste from strategic investment. Obvious waste includes products with sustained spend and no meaningful return, out-of-stock items still receiving traffic, irrelevant placements, poor-performing audiences and campaigns limited by flawed settings. Strategic investment may include prospecting campaigns that are less efficient in-platform but demonstrably create new customers and support future revenue.
This is where a specialist audit earns its keep. Cutting every campaign below a target may improve short-term dashboard efficiency while reducing overall sales and surrendering market share. Equally, calling every poor result an awareness play is not a strategy. The evidence has to support the spend.
Paid social creative and audience review
For Meta campaigns, an audit should go beyond audience settings. Creative fatigue, weak product messaging, poor offer presentation and a mismatch between ad promise and landing page frequently cause the real performance problem.
The review should assess prospecting versus remarketing allocation, audience exclusions, catalogue activity, campaign objectives, attribution windows and creative testing cadence. It should also look at whether the account relies too heavily on retargeting, which can make results look stronger while doing little to generate new demand.
Creative performance needs context. A high click-through rate is not valuable if the traffic does not buy. A lower click-through rate can still win if it attracts better-qualified shoppers and produces stronger contribution after ad spend.
Landing pages and the conversion path
PPC cannot compensate indefinitely for a poor product page. An audit should review the pages receiving paid traffic for page speed, mobile usability, stock messaging, delivery clarity, product imagery, reviews, pricing, variant selection and checkout friction.
The aim is not to turn an ad agency into a web design agency. It is to identify conversion barriers that distort paid media performance. If a bestselling product is regularly out of stock, the right action may be to reduce its visibility. If users abandon because delivery costs appear late in the journey, better targeting alone will not solve the problem.
A useful review also checks message match. If an advert promotes a specific offer, product benefit or category, the landing page should immediately confirm it. Making shoppers hunt for the item they clicked is an expensive way to lose intent.
Reporting, testing and a prioritised action plan
The final part of a PPC audit is where many reports fall short. A list of observations is not a plan. The output should prioritise actions by likely commercial impact, required effort and confidence level.
Some fixes are immediate: pause wasted spend, correct broken tracking, exclude irrelevant traffic or repair disapproved feed items. Others need controlled testing, such as restructuring Performance Max, changing bidding targets, expanding prospecting or rebuilding product segmentation. These changes should not be thrown into the account at once, because you lose the ability to understand what produced the result.
At Oxedent, the standard is simple: every recommendation should connect to profit, scale or cleaner decision-making. If it does none of those things, it is probably not a priority.
A PPC audit is valuable when it gives you a clearer answer to what happens next. You should leave knowing where your budget is working, where it is leaking, which assumptions need testing and what profitable growth will actually require from your account.