Burroughs Digital provides PPC audit services — a forensic, line-by-line review of your advertising accounts that answers the question every owner spending on ads eventually asks: is this actually working, and how would I know? A PPC audit finds the wasted spend, verifies whether your tracking is telling the truth, and delivers a prioritized fix list with dollar figures attached — because in paid media, unlike almost anywhere else in marketing, waste is precisely quantifiable.
Audits are how most PPC engagements at Burroughs Digital begin, and they’re valuable standalone: audit in hand, you can fix things yourself, hold your current agency accountable, or hire us — the findings are yours regardless. Contact us to scope one.
What the Audit Examines
Where the money actually went. The search terms report is where accounts confess: the audit surfaces exactly which real searches triggered your ads and what percentage of spend went to irrelevant ones. In neglected accounts this single analysis routinely finds 15–40% of budget buying clicks that could never become customers — the negative keyword failure, quantified in your own dollars.
Whether your tracking tells the truth. The most consequential finding an audit makes: are “conversions” real leads, or page views and button clicks dressed up as results? Is call tracking present? Do the platform’s numbers reconcile with your actual phone and inbox? An account optimizing toward false conversions is confidently automating waste — and it’s alarmingly common.
Structure and settings archaeology. Match-type strategy, campaign architecture, geographic settings (accounts quietly showing ads far outside the service area are a classic), device and schedule performance, auto-applied recommendations that snuck in, and display-network leakage from search campaigns. Settings are where platforms’ defaults favor platforms.
Bidding strategy versus data reality. Automated bidding evaluated against the conversion data feeding it — automation on clean data is power; automation on dirty data is the waste machine running itself.
Where the clicks landed. Ad-to-page message match and landing page conversion capability, because half of most accounts’ “campaign problem” lives on the pages, where fixes are often cheaper.
Competitive context. Auction insights: who you’re actually bidding against, where you’re losing impression share and whether it’s budget or rank losing it — the difference matters strategically.
Cross-channel coverage gaps. Eligible for Local Services Ads but not running them? Traffic leaving without remarketing coverage? The audit maps what your account isn’t doing, too.
The Deliverable
A findings document in plain English — every issue explained, sized in dollars where the data allows, and ranked into a fix sequence: what to stop immediately, what to fix this month, what to build next quarter. Plus a live walkthrough, because an audit you don’t fully understand is a PDF, not a tool. Run your lead economics through the ROI calculator first and the walkthrough gets even sharper — waste means more when it’s denominated in leads you didn’t get.
Per our standing process commitments: the audit is honest even when it’s boring. If your account is well-run, the audit will say so — that answer is worth the fee too, and considerably cheaper than switching agencies on a hunch. Audit pricing is flat and listed on the pricing page.
PPC Audit — Frequently Asked Questions
Read-only access — we review everything and change nothing. Your campaigns run untouched while the audit happens.
Google Ads and Local Services Ads primarily, plus Meta, Microsoft, and the rest of the channels we manage. Multi-platform audits get a consolidated cross-channel view.
Reports describe activity; audits verify truth. If your reports lead with impressions and clicks rather than cost per verified lead — or if you can’t confidently answer “what does a lead cost me?” — an independent look is warranted. Sometimes we confirm the agency is doing fine; that’s a good outcome too.
Typically one to two weeks from access to walkthrough, depending on account size and history.