Most Google Ads accounts I inherit lose money in the same handful of places. This is the first hour, in order.
Conversion actions
Open the conversion actions and look at which ones are set as primary. It's common to find page views, button clicks and a form submission all counted as conversions, which means a "lead" could be anyone who reached the contact page. I want purchases, qualified forms and calls over a minimum length as primary, and everything else as secondary or removed. Then I check GA4 and Google Ads agree on the numbers for last month. If they're far apart, something is double-counting.
The search terms report
What did the account actually pay for last month? The search terms report shows the real queries behind the keywords. In most accounts there's a list of terms that have nothing to do with the business, and a list of research-stage terms ("what is", "how to", "jobs") that will never convert. Negatives go in, and broad match keywords get reviewed against what they've been matching to.
Brand spend
Searches for the business's own name convert well and cost little, and they flatter the account's overall ROAS. I separate brand into its own campaign so the generic campaigns can be judged on their own. Sometimes the finding is that the account has been doing fine on paper and losing money on every non-brand click.
Performance Max placements
If Performance Max is running, I check whether brand terms are excluded from it (they usually aren't), how many conversions a month it's learning from, and where the spend is going. Placement reports showing apps and low-quality sites mean the campaign is counting junk as wins. With fewer than about 30 conversions a month it rarely has enough data to do its job.
The landing page
Then I click the ad on my phone. Does the page say what the ad promised? Does it load in under three seconds? Is the phone number tappable and the form short? A lot of "Google Ads isn't working" is a landing page problem, and that's one of the reasons I'll fix the page myself rather than send the client to a developer.
What happens next
The client gets a short written list of the three things I'd change first, before any money changes hands. That's the account check I offer on every new engagement, and it's free because it decides whether there's anything worth working on together.
I run paid ads on Meta, Google and TikTok across the UK, the Gulf and Pakistan, and build the tracking and pages around them. Get in touch or find me on LinkedIn.