Google Ads account audit: Quality Score and a 6-point health check

Every keyword in Google Ads receives a Quality Score from 1 to 10, built from three parts: expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. When all three sit below average you have to outbid competitors just to hold the same position.

The score is a symptom, not a target. A low number tells you that search intent, ad copy and page have drifted apart. The point of an audit is to find that gap, not to game the metric.

Always start with measurement. Conversion actions with zero results in 30 days, counts that suddenly doubled, or actions that only count page views poison every other decision in the account.

Tecrube’s measurement analysis lists each conversion action, flags primary actions that carry no value and highlights duplicate counting. Do not touch bidding until this step is clean.

Open the last 90 days of search terms and group the ones that spend without converting. If you sell a service, patterns such as “free”, “jobs” or “how to” are usually the quiet leak in the budget.

Collecting those terms into an account-level negative list protects spend and lifts expected CTR at the same time. Tecrube does the grouping, shows the proposed list in a preview and applies it only after you approve.

If one ad group holds keywords with twenty different intents, no responsive search ad can match all of them. Split low-relevance groups by intent and give each one at least one headline that mirrors the query.

A “Poor” or “Average” ad strength on its own is not a problem; but if CTR is below your category average, adding headline variety should be the first experiment.

Three questions cover landing page experience: does it load on mobile in under three seconds, is the ad’s promise visible above the fold, and is there a single clear call to action? If any answer is no, copy alone will not fix the score.

For bidding, campaigns on automated strategies with fewer than 30 conversions a month cannot feed the algorithm enough signal. For budget, a winning campaign flagged as limited next to a weak one that cannot spend its budget means a reallocation is overdue.

These three are linked: a better page lifts conversions, more conversions teach automated bidding faster, and budget can then move toward the winner.

Doing these six checks by hand takes half a day on a mid-sized account. Tecrube’s Google Ads analysis runs the same checks the moment you connect, ranks findings by impact and attaches an action to each.

Actions move through preview → approve → apply; no negative keyword, budget or bid change is written to the account until you confirm. You can also trigger the same audit from inside Claude or ChatGPT through the MCP connector.

An audit is not a one-off. Run the full check on your 75 free credits, then schedule it weekly on Pro or per client on the Agency plan.

What should my Quality Score be? There is no single right number; 8–10 is normal on brand terms and 5–7 on competitive generic terms. What matters is the score of the keywords that take most of the spend. Rather than chasing a low-score keyword that never spends, focus on the twenty keywords that receive eighty percent of the budget.

How often should I audit? Light checks (search terms, budget warnings) weekly; a full audit (structure, measurement, landing pages) monthly. After a major campaign change, a site migration or the start of a season, run the full audit without waiting.

What if the AI audit suggests something wrong? A suggestion is only a preview and waits for your approval before anything is written. You can drop an item, change a value or reject the whole thing. Rejected suggestions are logged too, so the next audit weighs them with that context.

Is this useful if I already have an agency? Yes, as an independent second pair of eyes. Connect Tecrube with read-only access, share the audit report with your agency and run the meeting on concrete findings instead of general questions.