PPC Audit and Consultancy

Most PPC audits are a sales pitch with a diagnosis bolted on. This one is priced on its own, delivered whether or not you retain us afterwards, and credited against month one if you do.

What the audit costs

£450 as a one off, excluding VAT. If you retain us for paid media management afterwards, that £450 is credited against month one. You are not paying twice for the same diagnosis. Management fees start from £750 a month and the bands are on the paid media pricing page.

What you get

A written report covering account structure, conversion tracking, wasted spend, keyword and search-term quality, ad and asset coverage, and bidding strategy against your actual margins. Where something is costing you money, we say how much and why. Where something is fine, we say that too, rather than manufacturing problems to justify the fee.

You get a call to go through the findings, and the report to keep whatever you decide next.

The 15-minute audit checklist

This is the same first pass we run on every account before the full audit. If you want to check your own account before booking anything, work through it in this order.

• Conversion tracking. Open the conversions section of the account. Confirm the conversion actions match what matters to the business (a sale or a qualified lead, not every form submission or every click to a phone number). Check the numbers roughly match what your CRM or e-commerce platform reports for the same period.
• Account structure. Count your campaigns and ad groups. If ad groups mix unrelated products or services under one set of keywords, spend is being averaged across things that convert at different rates.
• Search terms. Open the search terms report for the last 30 days, sorted by spend. Read the top 20. Flag anything irrelevant to what you sell. This is the fastest way to find wasted spend in any account.
• Negative keywords. Check whether a negative keyword list exists at all, and whether it has been touched in the last three months.
• Performance Max brand exclusions. If you run Performance Max, check whether your own brand terms are excluded. Without this, PMax often takes credit for traffic that would have converted anyway.
• Impression share lost to budget. On your best-performing campaigns, check “Search impression share lost (budget)”. A high number here means a campaign that already works is being capped by spend, not by the market.
• Quality Score outliers. Sort keywords by Quality Score. Anything at 1 to 3 on meaningful spend is worth a look at ad relevance and landing page match.
• Device and schedule settings. Check bid adjustments by device and ad schedule against when your business converts, not when the account happens to be spending.
• Automated rules. Check whether any rules are running (pausing high-CPA search terms, promoting converting ones to exact match) and whether they still make sense against current targets.
• Last change date. Check the change history. An account nobody has touched in months is not being managed, whatever the invoice says.

Fifteen minutes gets you the shape of the problem. The paid audit gets you the fix, priced against what we actually find rather than a flat checklist item count.

Consultancy for in-house teams

Not every business wants to hand its account to an agency. Some have someone in-house running Google Ads who needs a second opinion, a sense check before a big budget change, or someone to bring in for the parts of the account they have not had time to learn properly (Performance Max, automated bidding, conversion tracking setups that involve a developer).

We work with in-house teams on that basis: audits, one-off strategy sessions, and ongoing advisory time where we do not touch the account but tell you exactly what to change and why. This sits alongside, not instead of, the fixed-price audit above.

How to send us read-only access

You do not need to hand over admin control, a password, or ownership of the account for us to audit it. Google Ads accounts can be linked to our manager account with read-only access, so we can see everything we need without being able to change anything.

Steps to grant access, following Google’s official instructions for linking accounts to a manager account:

1. We send a link request from our Terrier Agency manager account (we send you the manager account ID with the request) to your Google Ads account’s Customer ID.
2. You will get an email inviting you to link to our manager account. You can also find the request in your account’s access and security settings, under managers.
3. Accept the request.
4. On the same screen, set our access level to read-only, so we can review campaigns, settings and reporting without being able to edit anything.
5. Nothing else changes on your side. Your billing, your account ownership and your existing users are untouched.

You can revoke access at any point from the same screen, whether or not you go on to retain us.

What happens after the audit

You get the report and the call either way. If you want us to run the account, the £450 comes off month one and we move straight into the account standards covered on our Google Ads management page. If you want to run it yourselves with what we found, that is a fine outcome too.