Most paid search audits are written for the agency that wrote them, not the operator who has to act on them. They open with a number, present a list of recommendations, and end with "let's discuss." What most of them don't do is tell the operator which three things to fix on Monday morning.

Below is how to read any paid search audit you receive, what each section should contain, and the red flags that tell you the audit was a checkbox exercise rather than analytical work.

Start with the scorecard, not the recommendations

A real audit opens with a scorecard — not a number, a structure. The scorecard breaks the account into sections (account targets, attribution, campaign settings, search terms, quality score, and so on) and rates each one independently. The overall percentage at the top is fine for a screenshot. The section-level ratings are where you decide what to fix first.

The structure matters more than the number. An account scoring 70% with five "decent" sections and one "bad" section is a different problem than an account scoring 70% with ten "good" sections and three "critical" ones. The first account has a single area to focus on; the second has structural rot scattered across multiple surfaces.

Two red flags to check immediately:

  • Pass/fail with no nuance. If every question on the audit is either a checkmark or an X, the auditor either didn't look hard or didn't understand what they were looking at. Real findings come with severity, evidence, and recovery cost.
  • "Everything looks good" on an account that isn't profitable. If the account is below break-even and the audit's overall rating is "good," at least one of three things is true: the audit is incomplete, the tracking is broken in ways the audit missed, or the rating system isn't calibrated for SMB economics. Investigate which.

The scorecard is the table of contents. Read it, then jump to the lowest-scoring section first.

Find the workhorse

A workhorse is the campaign carrying the account. The audit should name yours — by spend share, by conversion share, by efficiency. A clean finding looks like this:

Brand Search runs at 9.14x ROAS on $140 of spend (9% of total budget) — accounting for 74% of the account's conversion value. Impression share is 94.7%, near the ceiling for branded queries. This campaign is the floor of the account's health. It is also dramatically underfunded relative to what it produces.

If your audit names a workhorse and stops there, that's half the analysis. The full analysis answers two follow-ups:

  1. Is the workhorse appropriately funded? A 9x ROAS campaign at 9% of budget is usually starved. The opportunity cost of capping it is not zero.
  2. What protects the workhorse from breaking? Workhorses tend to die quietly. A misconfigured Auto-Apply experiment, an audience exclusion that catches the wrong segment, a budget reshuffle that throttles brand at the wrong moment. Real audits identify which settings, if changed, would kill the campaign that's working.

If the audit doesn't call out a workhorse explicitly, ask the auditor: "What's the single best-performing campaign in this account, by ROAS and by absolute conversion value?" The answer should take five seconds.

Find the drains

A drain is the opposite — a campaign consuming budget without earning back. The audit should name yours with the same specificity. A clean drain finding looks like this:

Performance Max (unbranded) consumed 79.6% of monthly budget at 0.34x ROAS, with no apparent ROAS floor configured. The campaign produces fewer attributed actions than Brand Search on roughly nine times the spend. The cause is structural: launched with default Maximize Conversions bidding, no target ROAS, no audience signal exclusions, and competing against Brand Search for the same brand traffic.

The pattern matters more than the number. There's a difference between:

  • Earned drains. Campaigns that used to perform but are decaying as the market shifts. These need new creative, not a pause.
  • Default drains. Campaigns running on Google's recommended settings (auto-apply, broad match expansion, no ROAS floor) that never had a chance. These can usually be fixed structurally in an afternoon.

If the audit lists "PMax is underperforming" and stops there, ask: "Is the PMax campaign on default settings, or has it been deliberately configured?" Default settings is a structural finding; deliberate underperformance is a strategic finding. The remediation paths are different.

The single most common drain pattern in SMB accounts is a Performance Max campaign with no ROAS floor consuming 60-80% of budget. If your audit doesn't mention this, and your account spends most of its money on PMax, the audit missed the headline.

Conversion tracking is where audits earn their keep

Everything above this section is contingent on tracking actually counting what you think it's counting. If conversion tracking is broken, the ROAS numbers in the audit are fiction. A real audit reconciles the conversion model against the actual revenue model before drawing conclusions.

Three checks the audit should run:

  • Are conversion actions counted once or multiple times per real-world outcome? Shopify's Shopping App Purchase action commonly fires alongside the standard Purchase action, double-counting the same order. The audit should identify this and report a deduplicated number.
  • Are local-action "conversions" being counted as revenue? Direction clicks, phone-call clicks, and Google Business Profile interactions all show up as "conversions" with $1 attributed values in Google Ads. Treating them as revenue inflates ROAS by 3-10x. A real audit either excludes them from the headline number or breaks them out as a separate KPI.
  • Is CAPI (Conversions API) configured? On Meta in particular, iOS attribution leakage means browser-pixel-only tracking under-reports conversions by 20-40%. The audit should flag pixel-only setups and recommend the server-side complement.

If the conversion section is one paragraph long and reads "GA4 is installed, GTM is configured, ROAS is 2.1x," the audit didn't actually look at conversions. Almost every SMB account has at least one tracking problem worth surfacing. If yours allegedly does not, get a second opinion.

Recommendations should be ranked, not listed

There's a meaningful difference between a recommendation list and a remediation queue. The list says "consider doing X, Y, Z." The queue says "do X this week, Y in the next 30 days, Z when budget allows."

A real recommendation has four parts:

  1. What to change. Specific, not "explore Performance Max optimization."
  2. Estimated dollar impact. "Approximately $900/month of misallocated spend" beats "improve efficiency."
  3. Time horizon. When this needs to happen, and what blocks it (no booking conversion → no PMax target ROAS → no fix until tracking lands).
  4. Priority class. P0 (blocks scale; do now), P1 (fix in 14 days), P2 (next quarter).

If your audit's recommendations are unranked, you're doing the prioritization yourself based on which one sounds most important to you. Which means you're doing the auditor's job. A real audit makes the prioritization explicit even when you disagree with the ranking, because the ranking creates the conversation.

The red flag here is "consider Performance Max" or "investigate Shopping campaigns" without a budget cap, a ROAS floor, or a remediation prerequisite list. That phrasing is the auditor avoiding commitment. Push back.

The closing question

The most useful question to ask of any audit is: "Which three fixes would you do this week?"

If the audit answers that question clearly, you have an action plan and you can execute Monday. If it doesn't (or answers it differently than the audit body suggests), the audit is incomplete. The summary should be a forcing function for the auditor to commit to a priority order, not a restatement of the body.

A good audit treats the closing question like a contract. Bad audits treat it like a postscript.