Second chapter of the AdsPulse playbook. The four analyses that follow are read-only: they do not change the account, so you can run them on a client that arrived this morning, on a prospect who gave you read access, or on your own account before a review.
They have one thing in common: the quality of the answer depends on the context you give before asking. Objective, target CPA, what the client does not want to sell. Without it, the numbers are read in a vacuum and the action plan will be generic.
Full account audit
Onboarding a client or a periodic review. It is the chat version of the audit checklist we use at the agency, with the difference that pulling the data is no longer the bottleneck.
Audit [account] over the last 90 days: structure, Quality Score, device, geo, time of day, demographics, landing pages and wasted spend. Close with an action plan in order of priority.
What you get. A complete picture of the account with the numerical evidence and a plan ordered by impact: what to do first, how much it weighs, which data it rests on.
Watch out. Give the context before asking: objective, target CPA, what the client does not want to sell. A lead-gen account with a €40 target CPA and an ecommerce account with a target ROAS of 5 are read with different criteria, and the audit needs to know that before, not after.
Tracking check
Before trusting any CPA. Every decision in the next chapter rests on conversions: if those are wrong, so is everything else. It is the same reasoning as what Smart Bidding should optimise towards, applied in a minute.
List the conversion actions of [account]: which are primary, which have recorded nothing in the last 30 days, and whether the offline imports are really arriving.
What you get. Active and silent actions, primary and secondary, diagnostics for offline imports and Customer Match jobs. A primary action that has been silent for 30 days is the most important signal an audit can find.
Watch out. Tracked does not mean used for bidding: also ask which goals drive the bidding. A conversion can be recorded correctly while no campaign is optimising towards it.
Landing page audit
Traffic arrives but does not convert. Before touching bids and keywords, it is worth looking at where the clicks really land, and how long those pages take to load on mobile. The reasoning is in the article on landing page experience.
For [account], show the landing pages by clicks, cost and conversions, compare the configured URLs with the ones actually served, and run a mobile Lighthouse audit on the two with the most spend.
What you get. The ranking of the pages, the redirects and the URLs Google chose instead of yours, the Lighthouse scores and Core Web Vitals of the most expensive pages.
Watch out. The Lighthouse audit runs in the background: ask for the result after a few minutes. The page ranking and the URL comparison arrive immediately; the scores do not.
PMax and Shopping X-ray
You want to know where the PMax budget really ends up. The interface hides it behind a single campaign row; the data exists, and it is the data we discuss in Performance Max channel reporting and controls.
For the PMax campaigns of [account], show spend by channel (Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, Maps), the search terms, the placements and the asset groups with ad strength and ROAS.
What you get. Where PMax spends, on which queries and on which sites, and which asset groups carry the result.
Watch out. Asset combinations say what went live, not what performs best: they have no metrics of their own. To judge an asset group look at the asset group’s ROAS and conversions, not at the “best” combination Google shows.
Where they sit in the week
In the typical week, 05, 06 and 07 are the monthly deep check; 08 sits on Wednesday every two weeks, next to the recommendations review. Since all of them are read-only, the order does not matter and there is nothing to undo.
Next chapter
Once the diagnosis is clear, it is time to write to the account: chapter 3, Optimisation and execution, with RSA and sitelinks from the landing page, new ad groups, bids and budgets, Google recommendations. Every change arrives first as a preview. The previous chapter is Routine and control.