Whoever you hire will open with a question, and it usually has nothing to do with your campaigns: when someone clicks your ad and turns into business, where does that show up on your side, and what is it worth? Most owners answer with a version of "more leads." That answer ends the conversation before it starts, because everything the auditor is about to do — decide which search terms are waste, which bids are defensible, whether the account is broken or just underfunded — hangs on the number that follows it.
So the useful move is to work backwards from that question and show up with the answer already in hand. It costs you an evening and it changes what you get back, because an auditor who knows what a customer is worth is grading your account against your business. An auditor who doesn't is grading it against generic best practice, which is how you end up with a report full of true statements that don't touch your revenue.
Answering it before you're asked
You need three things, none of which live in your ad account. What a closed job is worth to you on average, from your invoices — not your best month, not your dream client. Roughly how many inquiries turn into that closed job, which you can estimate from your calendar and your gut if you've never tracked it. And how inquiries physically reach you: phone, form, DM, walk-in, a booking tool nobody logs into. Multiply the first two and you have the ceiling on what a lead can be worth to buy. Write the third one down as a list, because the gap between that list and what the account is counting as a conversion is where most audits find their biggest problem in the first hour.
One phrase, nine different worries
About 370 searches a month land on this topic, stitched together from nine distinct queries — people looking for a checklist to run themselves, people wanting a free audit, people quietly checking the agency they already pay, people who inherited an account from someone who left. The timing tells its own story: the peak hit 590 in March, and the floor was 90 last November. Audits cluster when budgets reset and contracts come up for renewal, and go quiet when everyone is too busy selling to look under the hood. If you're reading this in a quiet month, you're early, which is the good version of this.
There's one more number worth knowing before you click anything: advertisers bid as much as $33.00 for top-of-page placement on these terms. That is what it costs an agency to put a "free PPC audit" offer in front of you. Nobody pays that to give away diagnostics. They pay it to start a conversation, which doesn't make the audit worthless — it makes it a sales document, and you should read it like one.
Where the money usually goes missing
Auditors differ in style but converge on the same short list of failure points, because these are the ones that survive in accounts that look fine from the dashboard. Use this to check whether a report you're handed actually went looking, or just described what the interface already shows you.
| The leak | How it looks in the account | What a real fix leaves behind |
|---|---|---|
| Conversions counting the wrong thing | Every page view, click-to-call tap, or form load logged as a win | A conversion list that matches how business actually reaches you |
| Search terms nobody reads | Strong keyword stats hiding irrelevant queries underneath | A reviewed term report and negatives with reasons attached |
| Brand spend dressed as performance | Excellent overall numbers driven by people who already knew you | Brand and non-brand separated so each is judged on its own |
| Geography and hours on autopilot | Budget flowing to places and times you can't serve | Targeting that mirrors your service area and who answers the phone |
| Ad promise vs. landing page | Clicks arriving on a homepage that doesn't repeat the offer | A page that says the same thing the ad said, with one clear action |
Telling a diagnosis from a screenshot tour
A weak audit lists observations: your quality score is low, you're not using all ad extensions, your account structure could be tighter. All possibly true, none prioritized, none tied to money. A strong one reads like a ranked argument — here is what this specific problem is costing, here is the evidence, here is what to do, here is how you'll know it worked. Ask for the ranking explicitly. If the deliverable can't tell you what to fix first and why that one, you were sold a checklist someone ran, not an opinion someone formed.
Two ways out, and how to pick
If your spend is small enough that you'd shrug at losing a month of it, run the list above yourself against the account and fix what you find — the search terms report alone usually pays for the afternoon. If the ads are a real line item, if a previous agency left and nobody has opened the account since, or if the conversion numbers and your invoices tell different stories, hire the diagnosis as a fixed-scope piece of work with a defined end. Buy the audit, own the document, then decide separately whether the same people should do the fixing. Keeping those two decisions apart is what keeps a one-time question from turning into a standing invoice.