Campaign Health Checklist for Google Ads Managers

Account audits should not be a once-a-quarter event. The best Google Ads managers run a lightweight health check weekly and a deeper audit monthly. The difference between a well-maintained account and a neglected one compounds quickly — small issues left unchecked for 30 days can waste thousands of dollars.

Here is the checklist we use, organized by priority.

Conversion Tracking (Check First, Always)

Nothing else matters if your conversion tracking is broken. This is the foundation everything else builds on.

• Verify conversion actions are firing — Check the “Last conversion” column in Tools > Conversions. Any conversion action that has not fired in 7+ days needs investigation.
• Check for duplicate conversions — If your conversion count seems unusually high relative to actual sales or leads, you may have duplicate tags firing. Compare Google Ads conversions against your CRM or analytics platform.
• Validate conversion values — For ecommerce, ensure dynamic values are passing correctly. A single broken value tag can skew your entire ROAS calculation.
• Review attribution model — Data-driven attribution is now Google’s default and generally the best choice. If you are still on last-click, consider switching — but expect reported numbers to shift during the transition.

Budget and Spend Efficiency

• Campaigns limited by budget — Any campaign with a “Limited by budget” status that is also performing well deserves more budget. Conversely, campaigns limited by budget with poor performance should have budgets reduced, not increased.
• Search impression share lost to budget — Aim for less than 15% for your highest-priority campaigns. Higher than that means you are consistently missing qualified traffic.
• Wasted spend on non-converting queries — Pull your search term report for the last 30 days and calculate how much was spent on queries with zero conversions. If it exceeds 20% of total spend, your targeting or negative keywords need work.

Quality Score Diagnostics

Quality Score directly impacts your cost per click and ad position. A Quality Score of 5 means you are paying roughly 50% more per click than an advertiser with a score of 8 for the same position.

• Keywords below QS 5 — These are actively hurting your account. Review ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected CTR for each.
• Ad relevance ratings — “Below average” ad relevance means your ad copy does not match the keyword intent. Rewrite ads to include the keyword theme naturally.
• Landing page experience — “Below average” landing page experience is often caused by slow load times, poor mobile experience, or content that does not match the ad promise.

Lyra’s Campaign Health Analyzer includes Quality Score diagnostics that flag keywords with declining scores and surface the specific component (relevance, CTR, or landing page) dragging each keyword down.

Ad Copy and Extensions

• RSA ad strength — Google rates responsive search ads from “Poor” to “Excellent.” Aim for at least “Good” on every ad. “Poor” ads often receive reduced impression share.
• Pin usage — Are you pinning too many headlines? Over-pinning limits Google’s ability to test combinations and usually reduces performance.
• Extension coverage — Every campaign should have sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets at minimum. Check that extensions are approved and showing.
• Ad testing cadence — If your best-performing ad has been running unchanged for 90+ days, it is time to test a new variant. Ad fatigue is real.

Keyword Health

• Search terms alignment — Are your keywords triggering the right queries? Broad match keywords especially need regular search term review.
• Keyword conflicts — Check for keywords competing against each other across campaigns. Same keyword in multiple campaigns means you are bidding against yourself.
• Low-performing keywords — Keywords with significant spend but zero conversions over 60 days should be paused or moved to a test campaign with lower budgets.
• Negative keyword gaps — Review search terms weekly and add negatives for irrelevant queries before they accumulate significant spend.

Audience and Targeting

• Audience observation data — Even if you are not targeting specific audiences, add them in observation mode to collect performance data. This reveals which demographics and interests convert best.
• Location targeting — Verify you are targeting “Presence” not “Presence or interest.” The latter shows your ads to people searching about your target locations, not just people in them.
• Device performance — Check if mobile, desktop, or tablet performance diverges significantly. Apply bid adjustments or create device-specific campaigns where warranted.

Automate the Routine Checks

Running this checklist manually works for a handful of campaigns. At scale — managing 10, 20, or 60 accounts — manual checks become impossible to maintain consistently. This is where automated health monitoring tools pay for themselves. The goal is to surface the issues that need human judgment while eliminating the repetitive work of finding them.

A healthy Google Ads account is not one without problems. It is one where problems are caught early, addressed systematically, and prevented from compounding. Build the habit of regular health checks and the performance improvements follow naturally.