Google Ads Audit across Greater Manchester

What a Google Ads audit actually does

A Google Ads audit is a forensic review of your account. It’s not a health score out of 100 generated by Google’s own tools — which are optimised to get you to spend more, not to find your waste. It’s a manual, structured investigation by someone who has spent 12 years inside accounts of all shapes and sizes.

I’m Stevie Morris, a freelance PPC consultant and Google Partner. An audit I conduct covers five core areas: account structure, keyword targeting and match types, ad copy quality, bid strategy configuration, and conversion tracking accuracy. Each of those areas has common failure modes — and most accounts I review have at least one major problem in each.

The output is a prioritised list of findings. What’s costing you money, what’s limiting your results, and what to fix first. You get that whether or not you hire me to do anything else.

What the audit covers

• Account and campaign structure — Whether your campaigns are organised in a way that gives you control over spend allocation and performance visibility, or structured in a way that obscures what’s actually happening.
• Keyword targeting and match types — Which keywords are triggering your ads, which search terms are actually being matched, and where broad match is generating irrelevant traffic at real cost.
• Search term analysis — The actual queries driving your clicks. This is often where the biggest surprises are — and where negative keyword lists are most urgently needed.
• Ad copy and asset review — Whether your responsive search ads, headlines, descriptions, and sitelinks are written to convert or just to pass the format check.
• Bid strategy assessment — Whether your Smart Bidding configuration is working with your data or against it, and whether targets are set appropriately for your margin structure.
• Conversion tracking verification — Whether the actions Google is optimising for are the ones that actually matter to your business, and whether the data is accurate.

Greater Manchester audits — what to expect in a competitive region

Greater Manchester is one of the UK’s most economically active regions, which means Google Ads competition is real and sustained. Businesses in sectors like home services, legal, financial services, and ecommerce are often competing against both local operators and national brands allocating geographic budget to the region.

In competitive markets, poorly structured accounts get punished faster. When CPCs are high, sending clicks to a weak landing page or bidding broadly on unqualified terms is expensive quickly. A wasted pound in Greater Manchester goes faster than the same wasted pound in a smaller market.

For businesses serving the surrounding areas — West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, or North Yorkshire — geo-targeting configuration is also worth scrutinising. Radius targeting, location bid adjustments, and location-specific campaign segmentation can all affect cost efficiency in ways that aren’t obvious from the headline numbers.

How the audit process works

1. Request your auditGet in touch via the button below. I’ll ask for a brief overview of your account — what you’re running, what concerns you, what your rough monthly spend is. We’ll agree scope before anything starts.
2. Account accessYou grant read-only access to your Google Ads account. I don’t need billing access, edit permissions, or anything that lets me make changes. Read-only is sufficient to conduct a thorough review.
3. Audit and analysisI work through the account systematically — structure, keywords, search terms, ads, bids, tracking. This takes time because I’m reading the data properly, not running a script against it.
4. Findings and prioritiesYou receive a clear findings document: what I found, why it matters, and what to do about it — in priority order. We’ll go through it on a call so you can ask questions and understand the reasoning.

No obligation to continue

An audit is a fixed-scope piece of work. You get the findings, we go through them on a call, and then you decide what to do. If you want me to implement the changes, we can talk about that. If you want to hand the findings to your existing agency or in-house team, that’s completely fine.

I’ve conducted audits where the conclusion was that the account was in reasonable shape and the issue was elsewhere in the funnel. I’ll tell you that if it’s true. I won’t manufacture problems to justify a management engagement.

For businesses in Greater Manchester looking for an independent view of their Google Ads — not filtered through the agency that runs them — this is where to start.

Who benefits most from a PPC audit

• Businesses that have been running Google Ads for 12+ months and aren’t sure if performance has drifted or been optimised correctly over time.
• Companies switching agencies or reviewing their current agency’s work — an audit gives you an independent benchmark before you make a decision.
• In-house teams that have taken over an inherited account and want to understand what they’re dealing with before making significant changes.
• Businesses considering scaling ad spend who want to make sure the foundations are solid before increasing budget.
• Ecommerce brands and home services businesses in Greater Manchester and surrounding regions where ad spend efficiency directly impacts margin.