Google Ads Account Audit and Funnel Strategy
In 2025, many teams invest heavily in Google Ads, but fewer treat the Google Ads account audit and funnel design as an ongoing discipline. As budgets rise and competition increases, a structured approach to auditing performance and building a clear paid search funnel becomes the difference between guesswork and predictable growth.
This article explains how to connect a robust Google Ads account audit with a practical Google Ads funnel strategy. The aim is to clarify what to review, how to audit Google Ads account performance, and how to turn those insights into a repeatable Google Ads funnel optimisation strategy.
Why a Google Ads account audit matters for your paid search funnel
A Google Ads account audit is more than a one-time cleanup. It is a systematic review of how campaigns, keywords, ads, and landing pages work together to move users through a paid search funnel. When it is done well, you can:
- Align campaigns with business and revenue goals.
- Remove wasted spend on irrelevant queries.
- Improve conversion rates at each funnel stage.
- Build a data foundation for long-term optimisation.
Without a regular Google Ads account audit, teams often scale budgets on weak foundations. Conversion tracking may be misaligned, search terms may not align with intent, and landing pages may slow funnel performance.
Step one: Set goals before you touch the account
Before opening the interface, define what success looks like. A helpful Google Ads audit checklist always starts with clear objectives, for example:
- Lead generation volume and cost per lead
- Revenue and return on ad spend
- Pipeline metrics such as marketing-qualified leads and sales-qualified leads
- Brand visibility in priority markets
Once these goals are defined, you can judge every part of the Google Ads account audit against them, rather than against generic benchmarks.
Step two: Apply a structured Google Ads audit checklist
A well-designed Google Ads audit checklist moves from high-level settings down to granular performance. Typical components include:
- Account and campaign settings
Check conversion actions, attribution windows, locations, languages, and bidding strategies, and ensure they support your goals. - Campaign and ad group structure
Review whether campaigns are segmented by brand, product, geography, or intent, and whether ad groups are tightly themed. - Keywords and match types
Identify missing high-intent terms, over-broad coverage, and opportunities for negative keywords to cut wasted spending. - Ad copy and assets
Evaluate whether ads align with search intent and whether you use extensions, such as sitelinks and callouts, effectively. - Landing pages
Confirm message match, page speed, mobile experience, and clarity of calls to action. - Bidding and budgets
Check if strategies such as Target CPA or Target ROAS have enough data, and whether high-performing campaigns receive priority budget. - Quality Score and relevance
Review expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience for your core terms.
This structured approach keeps the Google Ads account audit focused and repeatable, rather than a one-off exercise.
Connecting the audit to a Google Ads funnel strategy
An effective Google Ads funnel strategy recognises that not every click is equal. Some users are just becoming aware of a problem, some are comparing options, and some are ready to speak with sales. Your audit should therefore map campaigns to three core stages of the paid search funnel:
|
Top of funnel (TOFU) |
Display, Discovery, broad Search, Video |
Reach new audiences and educate |
|
Middle of funnel (MOFU) |
Intent-based Search, remarketing, YouTube consideration formats |
Build trust and qualify interest |
|
Bottom of funnel (BOFU) |
High-intent Search, Shopping, remarketing lists for search ads |
Capture demand and convert |
During the Google Ads account audit, you can tag each campaign to a funnel stage and ask three questions:
- Is this campaign targeting the right audiences?
- Is the message appropriate for their level of awareness?
- Does the landing page move them to the next step in the paid search funnel?
Designing a Google Ads funnel optimization strategy
Once the audit reveals where each campaign sits, the next step is to build a practical Google Ads funnel optimisation strategy.
Top of funnel (TOFU): reach and education
- Use broad or informational keywords, discovery formats, and video.
- Introduce the brand and highlight awareness of the problem.
- Focus on impressions, views, and engaged sessions rather than complex conversions.
Middle of funnel (MOFU): interest to evaluation
- Search campaigns with more specific intent keywords.
- Use remarketing to re-engage previous visitors.
- Present case studies, comparison content, and product explainers
Key metrics here are leads, trials, downloads, and qualified traffic.
Bottom of funnel (BOFU): conversion efficiency
- Target high-intent keywords linked directly to core offers.
- Align ad copy, offer, and landing page tightly.
- Monitor cost per lead, cost per acquisition, and return on ad spend.
At each stage, the Google Ads funnel optimisation strategy should specify which campaigns to scale, refine, or pause based on data from the Google Ads account audit.
How to audit Google Ads account elements for lead generation.
For teams focused on pipelines rather than only online sales, a targeted Google Ads audit for lead generation can reveal hidden losses and new opportunities.
Key checks include:
- Lead quality and tracking.
Confirm that form fills, demo requests, or contact submissions are tracked as primary conversions and that low-value actions are excluded. - Keyword to lead alignment
Review search terms to ensure the queries driving leads align with your ideal customer profile, not just early-stage curiosity. - Ad to landing page consistency
Check whether the promises made in the ad copy are fulfilled on the landing page and whether the forms balance brevity with qualification data. - Follow-up journey
Ensure leads from Google Ads enter nurture sequences, sales workflows, or remarketing lists so no high-intent prospect is lost.
By combining this lens with the broader Google Ads account audit, teams can design a Google Ads funnel strategy that goes beyond traffic and builds a predictable engine for qualified opportunities.
Turning audit insights into action
A strong framework is only valuable if it leads to change. After completing the Google Ads account audit, it helps to prioritise actions into three groups:
- Quick wins
Add or refine negative keywords, fix broken tracking, update clearly underperforming ad copy, and reallocate budget from low-intent to high-intent campaigns. - Structural improvements
Adjust campaign groupings around funnel stages, refine bidding strategies based on data volume, and improve landing page speed and relevance. - Strategic tests
Experiment with new remarketing segments, creative formats, and offers at each funnel stage to identify which combinations drive higher conversion rates.
Many teams choose to work with specialists such as SJ Curve, whose work at https://sjcurve.com/ focuses on lifecycle-driven growth systems that connect the Google Ads account audit with the overall paid search funnel.
Building a continuous audit and optimisation loop
The most effective advertisers do not treat a Google Ads account audit as a once-a-year event. Instead, they build a simple rhythm:
- Weekly checks on core metrics and search terms
- Monthly mini audits of structure, ads, and landing pages
- Quarterly deep dives into funnel performance and strategy
This ongoing cycle ensures that your Google Ads funnel strategy keeps pace with changes in demand, competition, and product priorities.
When the Google Ads account audit, the Google Ads audit checklist, and execution are all aligned, Google Ads becomes more than a channel for experiments. It becomes a disciplined, measurable system for acquiring and nurturing customers across the entire paid search funnel.