Google Ads prompts to audit an account in minutes

Auditing Google Ads is the work of finding money parked in predictable places. AI does not discover anything a good practitioner would miss; it just does it in minutes, without the fatigue that makes us skip the search terms report for the fourth week running.

The prompts below are ordered by return: the first ones usually hand back budget on the first pass.

What each prompt needs

A good prompt with data access returns a diagnosis. A good prompt without access returns a checklist. Both have value, they are not the same thing, and confusing them is how most people get disappointed with AI in paid media.

When a connection exists, the assistant queries the numbers live. The mechanism is in what is MCP and the setup in connect Google Ads to Claude.

Waste: where money escapes first

1. "List search terms from the last 30 days with spend above US$ 50 and no conversions."
2. "Which search terms appeared more than 20 times and never produced a click?"
3. "Show terms that converted and are not yet added as keywords."
4. "Which keywords spent above average and converted below average?"

The first prompt pays for the hour. In an account that has never been audited, it typically finds 10% to 30% of spend going to searches with nothing to do with the business. The routine is in Google Ads search terms.

Structure and match types

5. "How many keywords are on broad match and what share of total spend do they represent?"
6. "Are there duplicate keywords across ad groups?"
7. "Which ad groups have fewer than two active ads?"
8. "List ad groups that spent this month with no recorded conversions."

Question 5 usually surprises people. Broad match is not wrong, but it needs an active negative list and weekly attention. Broad without negatives is the most expensive setup there is.

Impression share: where market is left

9. "What is the impression share on search campaigns and how much was lost to budget?"
10. "In which campaigns is the loss due to rank rather than budget?"
11. "Which high-converting terms have impression share below 60%?"

This block answers the question that decides budget: is there unserved demand, or have you hit the ceiling? Loss to budget is the cheapest problem in paid media to fix. Loss to rank is different work, and it runs through ad and landing page, not money. The reading is in Google Ads quality score and share of voice.

Bidding and automation

12. "Which campaigns changed bid strategy in the last 90 days, and what happened to cost per conversion afterwards?"
13. "Is any campaign on maximize clicks while conversions are configured?"
14. "Compare cost per conversion between automated and manual campaigns in the same period."

Number 13 finds a common, silent mistake: the campaign optimizes for click volume while the business objective is conversions.

Ads and landing pages

15. "Which ads have a CTR below their own ad group's average?"
16. "Are there disapproved ads or policy warnings in the account?"
17. "Which landing pages get the most clicks and convert the least?"

Budget and result reading

18. "Break down this month's spend by campaign in percentages."
19. "Compare spend and conversions for the last 30 days against the previous 30, by campaign."
20. "Summarize in five lines what changed in the account this month, for me to send the client."

The twenty-minute audit, in order

If you only have time for one pass, run this sequence. It goes from immediate money back to work that needs a project.

1. Search terms with spend and zero conversions. Prompt 1. Action: add negatives. Return the same day.
2. Duplicate keywords and ad groups with no active ad. Prompts 6 and 7. Action: clean up.
3. Share lost to budget on converting terms. Prompt 9. Action: raise budget where demand is sitting idle.
4. Bid strategy mismatched with the objective. Prompt 13. Action: switch, and wait out the new learning period before judging.
5. Landing pages with many clicks and few conversions. Prompt 17. Action: a page project, the slowest and usually the highest impact. See landing page not converting.

The first four you handle yourself this week. The fifth normally involves someone else, which is why it always ends up last — not because it matters less.

A note on cadence: a full audit does not need to be weekly. Steps 1 and 2 are worth weekly; the rest, monthly. Auditing too often produces too much change, and an account that changes every week never leaves the learning phase.

How to rewrite a weak prompt

The right-hand column never asks for an opinion. It asks for a slice of your data. The opinion comes later, once you are looking at the right table — and then it is worth something. For the CPC question specifically, see Google Ads CPC too high.

One prompt per account size

The same audit does not fit every account, and the biggest waste of time is running the enterprise checklist on a five-campaign account.

Small accounts, under ten campaigns. Prompts 1, 6 and 19 cover almost everything. At this size the money is in negatives and in one bad landing page, not in structure.

Mid-size, a dozen to fifty campaigns. Add 5, 9 and 13. Structure starts to cost real money here, and bid strategy mismatches hide well in the middle of the list.

Agency, many accounts. Change the question itself: instead of auditing one account deeply, ask across accounts. "Which of my accounts has the highest share of spend on terms with no conversions?" That ranks where your hours should go this week. The setup for working across accounts is in managing multiple ad accounts.

The agency case is the one where AI changes the most. Auditing twenty accounts by hand every month does not happen, so it does not get done; asking one ranking question across twenty accounts takes a minute and tells you which three deserve the deep pass.

The honest limit

AI reads well, summarizes well and finds patterns fast. What it does not do is know that the odd term on the list is your client's product name, or that the expensive campaign is the only one bringing annual contracts. Business context stays yours, and it is what turns the list into a decision.

The reporting routine that uses these prompts every week is on the paid media reporting page.