The PPC Audit Most Companies Never Get: What a Real One Includes and How Long It Should Take

Most PPC audits answer the wrong question. They tell you what's wrong with the ad account. You needed to know why the ad spend isn't turning into revenue.

So the audit comes back as a long list. Missing negative keywords. A low optimization score. Ad extensions to add. Every item is technically true, none of them is ranked, and the last page is a proposal. You're left exactly where you started, with more reading.

If you run a $10M+ company and you're weighing a PPC audit, or you just got one and can't tell if it was any good, this is the standard to hold it to: what a real audit includes, what it needs from you, how long it should take, and what you should walk away holding.

Three Kinds of PPC Audit

Almost every audit on the market falls into one of three buckets. Two of them are built to start a sales conversation. One is built to fix the account.

The automated version is easy to spot because it arrives almost instantly. The checklist version is harder, because a person did produce it. The question is which person. In many agencies, the audit is how the sales team qualifies you, and the strategist who would actually run your account never sees it.

It's the medical equivalent of letting the intake nurse write your diagnosis. The vitals are real. The interpretation is where the expertise lives.

What a Real PPC Audit Includes

A real audit looks at the whole path from ad click to closed deal. Here are the nine areas we expect to see covered, and the ones we cover in our own second opinions.

Notice what isn't on the list: optimization score as a goal. Google describes optimization score as "an estimate of how well your Google Ads account is set to perform," and it's driven largely by Google's own recommendations. It's a useful to-do list. It can't tell you whether a single lead turned into a customer. Google is even more direct about Quality Score, which it says "is not a key performance indicator and should not be optimized." An audit that leads with either number is grading the account on Google's terms instead of yours.

What You Should Hand Over (and What You Shouldn't)

A good audit asks for very little, and explains why it needs each thing.

• Read-only access to one to three ad platforms. Granted through each platform's own user settings. Google's read-only access level lets a reviewer view campaigns and run reports without being able to edit anything. You can remove it in one click when the review is done.
• A 30-day export of your CRM leads. Name, date, source, and whether the lead was qualified is plenty. It's what turns an account review into a revenue review.
• Never your password. Any reviewer asking for your login, or for admin rights to "fix things while they're in there," is asking for more than an audit needs.

If you're unsure who has access to your accounts today, that's worth checking before anyone else gets added. Our guide to the signs of a bad PPC agency walks through how.

How Long a PPC Audit Should Take

There's no single right number, but there is a right shape.

An automated grader takes minutes, and it can only see what the platform shows it. A thorough review by hand, across several platforms, with CRM matching and landing pages, takes real hours from several senior people. Agencies that sell this as a paid engagement commonly quote anywhere from several business days to a few weeks, often with intake interviews and meetings up front.

We do it in 48 hours because we go straight to your data instead of starting with weeks of interviews and meetings. Here's how that works.

Was the Audit You Got a Real One?

What You Should Walk Away With

A real audit ends with a decision. You should be able to answer three questions the moment it's over: what's wrong, what to fix first, and what that fix should change in your numbers.

That's the difference between findings and a diagnosis. Findings tell you what's broken. A diagnosis tells you which broken thing is costing you the most, and a treatment plan tells you the order to fix it in. You should be able to hand that plan to your own team, your current agency, or a new one, and have them run with it.

And if the audit concludes that your agency is doing excellent work, it should say so. Ours does, when it's true. We'll show you the proof and tell you to keep them.