How to Audit Your Google Ads Bidding Strategy
Ad costs climb, reports look busy, yet profit barely moves. When that happens, the issue is rarely Google Ads itself-it is almost always the bidding strategy running underneath your campaigns. According to Google’s own economic impact data, businesses on average earn $2 for every $1 spent on Google Ads, a 200% return on investment, but that kind of performance depends on how intelligently bids are set and adjusted.
An audit of your bidding strategy isolates where money is being wasted, where demand is being throttled, and where smart automation is working against you instead of for you. Rather than adding more keywords or more budget, the goal is to tune how you pay for each click or conversion so that spend flows to the queries and audiences that actually drive revenue.
This guide walks through a practical, repeatable way to audit Google Ads bidding. It focuses on what to look at, which questions to ask, and how to turn messy data into specific action. The steps apply whether you use manual CPC, enhanced CPC, or fully automated strategies like Target ROAS or Max Conversion Value, and they are written for marketers who care about profitable growth, not vanity metrics.
Get Clear on What “Good” Looks Like for Your Account
A bidding audit fails when it tries to fix everything at once without a clear definition of success. Before touching any bid setting, decide what you are actually trying to optimize: revenue, lead quality, margin, cash flow, or some blend of those. The same strategy that looks fantastic on a cost-per-click chart can be a disaster if it fills the funnel with low-value leads.
Think of your bidding strategy as the steering system for your entire account. If the steering wheel is pointed at the wrong goal, every optimization just moves you faster in the wrong direction. Clarifying your targets first ensures the audit improves the things your business actually cares about.
Define Business Goals Before Ad Goals
Start outside Google Ads. Talk with sales, finance, and leadership about what really matters over the next stretch of time. Is the priority to protect profit, take market share, unload excess inventory, or hit a specific revenue milestone? Each of those goals translates into very different tolerance levels for cost per acquisition and return on ad spend.
Only after that conversation should you pick your primary Google Ads goals. For ecommerce this might be revenue or return on ad spend. For lead generation it might be qualified leads at a certain effective cost per lead. For complex sales cycles you may aim to maximize high-intent form fills or phone calls from target regions. The key is to choose a tiny handful of metrics that line up directly with business outcomes.
Set Realistic Constraints on Budget and Risk
Every bidding strategy has to live inside a box: the maximum budget you are willing to invest and the level of volatility you can stomach. Smart bidding can aggressively chase conversions by bidding higher in the auctions it expects to convert, but if budgets are too tight or targets too strict, it can end up choking traffic instead of scaling.
Write down the upper limit you can responsibly spend over the next few months, the minimum acceptable profitability threshold, and how much short-term fluctuation the business can handle. Those constraints become the boundaries for your audit. They also help you push back when someone internally asks to “just double the budget” without changing anything else.
Pull the Right Data Before You Judge Your Bids
Bidding decisions are only as good as the data feeding them. A solid audit starts with a structured data pull that covers performance over a meaningful time window. Too short and you chase noise. Too long and you hide recent shifts in demand, competition, or tracking setups.
Instead of scrolling endlessly through the default campaign view, build a focused picture of how bids are performing by network, device, audience, and match type. That picture often reveals that the problem is not the overall bid level, but where the bids are being applied.
Start with an Account-Level Health Check
Begin at the top. Look at spend, conversions, revenue (if tracked), and your primary efficiency metric at the account level. The job at this stage is not to diagnose, only to answer two questions: has efficiency improved, declined, or stayed roughly flat, and has volume moved in the same direction or the opposite one? That simple combo already hints at whether bids are too aggressive, too conservative, or misaligned with value.
Then layer in a date comparison. Check how performance has shifted between recent periods that are long enough to smooth out random swings. If efficiency improved but volume cratered, your bidding strategy may have become too restrictive. If volume grew while efficiency collapsed, bids may have loosened too far or begun over-valuing certain conversions.
Drill into Networks, Devices, and Locations
Once the high-level picture is clear, break it down. Segment performance by Search vs Performance Max vs Display, then by device and location. Bidding strategies that work well overall often hide glaring inefficiencies in one segment. For example, mobile traffic in certain locations might be far less profitable than desktop, yet automated bidding continues to fund it because low-cost clicks look attractive.
This segmentation stage rarely gives final answers, but it surfaces hypotheses to test later. If one device, region, or campaign type repeatedly drags down efficiency, your audit will need to decide whether to adjust bids, add constraints, or exit that segment entirely.
Watch CPC and Conversion Trends Over Time
Cost per click trends say a lot about what is happening in the auction. A benchmark analysis from WordStream found that the average cost per click in Google Ads was $4.66 across accounts, with major differences by industry. If your account’s CPCs are marching far above or below typical levels for your niche, that can signal either an opportunity or a structural problem.
Plot CPC and conversion rate over time for your main campaigns. Rising CPCs paired with stable or falling conversion rates usually mean your current bidding is paying more for the same or worse traffic quality. Stable CPCs with rising conversion rates can indicate that your targeting and creative are improving and that a more aggressive bidding strategy might unlock profitable scale.
Audit Your Current Bidding Strategy Type
With the big-picture data in hand, shift to the settings screen. The bidding strategy type you choose-manual, enhanced, or one of Google’s smart bidding options-sets the rules for how bids are placed in each auction. An audit needs to evaluate whether those rules fit your data volume, tracking quality, and business goals.
Different parts of the same account often deserve different strategies. Brand campaigns that already dominate impression share may need a gentle, protective approach, while non-brand prospecting campaigns often benefit from automation tuned to a clear conversion goal.
Smart Bidding Strategies Under the Microscope
Many advertisers default to smart bidding without ever revisiting whether the chosen strategy is still appropriate. An industry analysis by Optmyzr found that Max Conversion Value tended to drive stronger return on ad spend and cost per acquisition than other Google Ads strategies, while Max Clicks-often overlooked-performed well when used correctly for volume-focused goals in their bidding strategy comparison.
During your audit, identify where each smart bidding strategy is used and whether the underlying signals are strong enough. Campaigns running Target ROAS or Target CPA need reliable conversion tracking and enough volume to allow the algorithm to learn. If tracking is broken, or if conversions are too sparse, smart bidding often guesses wrong, shifting spend toward cheaper clicks instead of genuinely valuable customers.
When Manual and Hybrid Approaches Still Make Sense
Manual bidding is not dead; it just requires more discipline. In campaigns with low conversion volume, very narrow targeting, or highly seasonal behavior, manual CPC or enhanced CPC can still provide better control. The audit should look for cases where smart bidding is constantly hitting limits, failing to spend, or swinging wildly between high and low bids from day to day.
Hybrid setups are also worth considering. Some advertisers keep their brand and high-intent campaigns on smart bidding while running experimental or top-of-funnel campaigns on manual or enhanced CPC. The audit should surface where automation is clearly helping and where a more hands-on approach could stabilize performance long enough to gather better data.
Inspect Keywords, Search Terms, and Match Types
Bidding strategy and keyword strategy are tightly connected. Even the most sophisticated bidding algorithm cannot rescue a campaign that is matching against the wrong queries. A thorough audit always includes a sweep of keyword coverage, match types, and the actual search terms being triggered.
The goal is simple: ensure that the queries you truly care about are getting enough coverage and that you are not overpaying for irrelevant or low-intent searches. That balance depends heavily on how match types are used and how often search term reports are reviewed.
Why Match Types Still Matter
Google has blurred the lines between match types over time, expanding how Phrase and Exact behave in real auctions. Even so, they are not interchangeable. A recent State of PPC study from Optmyzr reported that Exact Match keywords outperformed other match types in a clear majority of accounts, showing that tighter control over queries still tends to pay off when implemented carefully in their 2024 research.
During the audit, review how heavily your account relies on Broad vs Phrase vs Exact. Excessive dependence on Broad can flood smart bidding with noisy signals, while an overbuilt Exact structure can starve campaigns of data. The sweet spot is usually a curated mix, where Exact protects your highest-value queries and broader match types are allowed to explore within guardrails like negative keywords and audience filters.
Build a Repeatable Search Term Review Workflow
Pull a search term report for a reasonable date range and sort by spend first, then by conversions, then by cost per conversion. You are looking for three things: irrelevant terms consuming budget, promising terms hiding under Broad or Phrase matches, and surprising winners that deserve their own focused targets. Tag each term with an action: add as keyword, add as negative, or leave as is.
This exercise feeds back into your bidding audit. If many high-spend terms are irrelevant, your bids have been propping up waste and need to be dialed down or excluded. If specific high-intent terms are driving excellent results while hiding inside broader ad groups, moving them into their own campaigns with more tailored bidding strategies can unlock scale without sacrificing efficiency.
Rebuild Your View of the Auction and Competition
Bidding does not happen in a vacuum. Every adjustment you make interacts with what competitors are doing in the same auctions. For years, Auction Insights reports and third-party dashboards made it easy to track shifts in impression share and overlap rate, but recent changes have limited some of that visibility.
A good bidding audit acknowledges that gap and looks for new ways to monitor competitive pressure. Instead of chasing every move your rivals make, the goal is to understand when rising costs are being driven by the market and when they are self-inflicted by your own settings.
Life After Auction Insights in Looker Studio
Recent platform updates removed the native Auction Insights connector from Looker Studio, making it harder for advertisers to blend competitive data into their usual dashboards. Pemavor documented how Google withdrew this feature in late 2024 and discussed the impact on advertisers that relied on automated comparison reports in their analysis of PPC auction changes.
For your audit, that means leaning more on in-platform Auction Insights exports and custom reporting workflows. Schedule regular manual exports for key campaigns and store them in a spreadsheet or database so that you can see trends over time. Even a simple chart of impression share and top-of-page rate against your own bids and budgets can reveal when a competitor has entered, exited, or changed strategy in your auctions.
Use Competitive Insight Without Overreacting
Competitive data should inform your bidding, not control it. When impression share drops or average position worsens, resist the instinct to simply raise bids until you “win” again. Instead, check whether the lost share is concentrated in low-value queries or segments that do not align with your goals. If a rival is overspending on those, letting them win that corner of the auction might actually be the more profitable move.
On the other hand, if you see a direct competitor consistently outranking you on core brand or high-intent non-brand terms, your audit may justify more aggressive bids, a shift in bid strategy, or an increase in budget ceilings for those specific campaigns. The key is to tie each reaction back to business value, not ego.
Turn Your Audit into an Action Plan (or Get Help)
An audit only matters if it leads to clear, prioritized changes. By this point, you should have a list of findings across goals, data quality, bidding strategies, keyword coverage, and competitive context. The next step is to turn that list into an ordered plan that balances quick wins with structural improvements.
Think in terms of experiments, not permanent verdicts. Bidding strategies respond to new data, and the market shifts constantly. Your action plan should outline what you will change, how you will measure impact, and when you will review results, rather than assuming any setting is “set and forget.”
Prioritize Quick Wins Before Deep Rebuilds
Start with changes that clearly reduce waste or fix tracking issues, since those amplify everything else. Tighten or add negative keywords to block irrelevant queries, fix broken conversion tracking, and clean up any campaigns whose goals do not match their bidding strategy type. These items usually improve efficiency quickly without large structural changes.
Next, schedule controlled tests of different bidding strategies on carefully chosen campaigns. For example, you might try moving a well-performing manual campaign with solid conversion volume onto a smart bidding strategy, or shifting a Maximize Conversions campaign to Max Conversion Value once you have reliable revenue tracking. Document baseline performance, define your evaluation window, and resist judging the test too early while the algorithm is still learning.
Why Working with North Country Consulting Pays Off
Auditing bids takes deep platform knowledge, clean analytics, and a lot of judgment. That is exactly where we at North Country Consulting specialize. We live inside Google Ads and analytics tools every day, and we design audits that are grounded in your actual business economics rather than generic best practices. When Statista reported that retail accounted for roughly twenty-seven percent of total Google Ads spending, it highlighted how fiercely competitive these auctions have become for merchants and brands in their summary of Google Ads spend by vertical. Navigating that environment without expert help can be costly.
When we run a bidding strategy audit, we do more than flip switches. We map your margins, customer lifetime value, and sales cycle to the right mix of smart bidding, manual control, and campaign structure. We also stay involved through implementation and iteration, so your account does not just look better on paper-it actually drives more profit from the same or lower ad spend. If your current Google Ads performance feels stuck or unpredictable, partnering with us gives you a trusted team whose only goal is to turn your bidding strategy into a genuine competitive advantage.
Ready to elevate your Google Ads performance and see real results? At North Country Consulting, our expertise is rooted in hands-on experience from our founder's tenure at Google and leadership roles in revenue at Stripe and Apollo.io. We understand the intricacies of Google Ads for both ecommerce and leadgen, and we're here to help you harness its full potential. Don't let your ad spend go to waste—book a free consultation with us today and discover how our tailored audits can make a tangible difference in your digital marketing strategy.