Most Google Ads accounts we looked at during our nine years running a marketing agency had one thing in common: they hadn't had a proper ppc review in months. Budgets were bleeding into broad-match keywords nobody had checked, quality scores were drifting, and the account structure that made sense at launch had quietly become a liability. A ppc review is the single most reliable way to find out whether your ad spend is doing what you think it is.
A ppc review is a structured audit of your Google Ads account that examines campaign settings, bid strategy, keyword performance, ad copy, and budget allocation — and it should directly inform every optimisation decision you make next.
What a PPC Review Actually Covers
A ppc review is a structured audit of a Google Ads account. It covers campaign settings, keyword performance, bid strategies, quality scores, ad copy relevance, audience targeting, and budget distribution across ad groups. The output should be a prioritised list of actions, not a vanity report.
The distinction matters. Plenty of agencies send clients a PDF full of charts and impressions data. That isn't a review — it's a performance summary. A genuine ppc review identifies what is wasting money, what is underperforming relative to its potential, and what changes are likely to improve return on ad spend. Those are three separate things, and conflating them is one of the most common mistakes we saw in accounts handed over to us mid-campaign.
In practical terms, a review will look at search term reports to identify irrelevant queries consuming budget. It will check whether negative keyword lists are current. It will examine whether campaign bid strategies are aligned with actual conversion data, or whether they're running on assumptions made during setup six months ago.
For a useful breakdown of what the management layer around these reviews involves, Google Pay Per Click Management: What SMEs Need to Know covers the operational side in detail.
How Often Should You Run a PPC Review?
The honest answer is: more often than most SMEs do. For accounts spending under £5,000 per month, a thorough review every four weeks is reasonable. For accounts spending more than that, bi-weekly check-ins with a monthly deep audit is closer to best practice.
What we saw repeatedly in agency work was accounts that had been left on autopilot for quarters at a time. Google's automated bidding strategies are better than they were, but they optimise toward the signals you give them. If your conversion tracking is misconfigured, if your target CPA is set too loosely, or if your landing pages have changed without the campaigns being updated, the algorithm will optimise confidently in entirely the wrong direction.
Frequency also depends on market conditions. A retail account in Q4 needs far more frequent review than the same account in February. Auction dynamics, competitor budgets, and search intent all shift seasonally, and your campaigns need to reflect that.
For context on what these reviews cost when you outsource them, PPC Management Fees: What SMEs Actually Pay is worth reading before you sign anything.
What to Look For in a PPC Review
Search Term Reports and Negative Keywords
Search term reports are where the money is. They show you exactly what queries triggered your ads, not just the keywords you're bidding on. In almost every account we inherited, there were clusters of irrelevant terms consuming five to fifteen percent of monthly budget. The fix is straightforward — add negatives, tighten match types — but it only happens if someone is actually looking.
Negative keyword lists decay over time. New products launch, business focus shifts, and the queries that were irrelevant six months ago may now be borderline relevant, while new irrelevant terms accumulate without anyone noticing.
Bid Strategy Alignment
Bid strategy is where accounts most commonly drift from intent. An account set up on Maximise Clicks during the learning phase and never migrated to Target CPA or Target ROAS once conversion data accumulated is leaving money on the table. Google's own documentation on Smart Bidding strategies explains the data thresholds needed before each strategy becomes viable — most accounts switch too early or never switch at all.
The trade-off worth acknowledging: automated bidding can outperform manual in stable, data-rich environments, but it performs poorly when conversion volume is low or tracking is unreliable. A ppc review has to assess the quality of conversion data before recommending any bid strategy change.
Quality Score and Ad Relevance
Quality Score affects your cost per click directly. A score of 7 or above typically means your cost-per-click is lower than auction average; below 5 and you're paying a premium for every impression. The three components — expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience — each require different fixes, and a review should diagnose which of the three is the problem before recommending action.
Budget Distribution Across Campaigns
Budget allocation is often set once and forgotten. A common finding in reviews is that a low-priority campaign is consuming a disproportionate share of daily budget because it was given equal footing with higher-converting campaigns at setup. Rebalancing budget toward proven performers is frequently the fastest lever for improving overall account ROAS.
| Review Area | Common Issue Found | Typical Impact on ROAS |
|---|---|---|
| Search term reports | Irrelevant queries consuming budget | Medium to high |
| Bid strategy | Wrong strategy for conversion volume | High |
| Quality Score | Low ad relevance or poor landing page | Medium |
| Budget allocation | Spend skewed to weaker campaigns | Medium to high |
| Negative keywords | Outdated or sparse lists | Medium |
| Conversion tracking | Misconfigured or double-counting | Very high |
This table reflects patterns we saw across client accounts over nearly a decade of agency work — not industry benchmarks from a single study.
Doing a PPC Review Yourself vs Outsourcing
This is where the trade-offs become real. Running a ppc review yourself is entirely possible if you know Google Ads well and have a few hours to dedicate to it. The problem for most SMEs is that both conditions are rarely met simultaneously.
If you're going to do it yourself, start with the Search Terms report under Keywords, filter for the last 90 days, and sort by cost descending. That single view will tell you more about where your budget is going than most agency monthly reports. From there, check your campaign bid strategies, review your quality scores, and look at impression share by campaign to understand where you're being outbid.
Outsourcing a ppc review to an agency is more thorough if you choose the right one, but the economics don't always work for smaller spends. An agency doing a serious review of a £2,000/month account will often charge more in fees than the account warrants. That's not a criticism — it's just the maths of billable time.
For a direct comparison of what you're actually getting from each route, Best PPC Agency or AI Agent: What SMEs Need covers the decision honestly.
A third option has emerged that changes the calculus for SMEs. Overtime is an AI agent that logs into your Google Ads account and does the operational work a review should trigger: adjusting bids, pausing underperforming keywords, reallocating budget toward better-performing campaigns, and sending you a plain-English summary of what changed and why. It's not a reporting dashboard — it acts.
PPC Review Frequency and What to Prioritise
The First Review Is Always the Most Valuable
If an account has never had a structured audit, the first ppc review will almost always find more waste than any subsequent one. That's not a reason to delay — it's a reason to do it immediately. In accounts we picked up from clients who had been running ads without oversight, it was common to find conversion tracking broken, ad groups with single broad-match keywords, and campaigns targeting the wrong geographic radius.
Fixing those issues in the first review rarely takes long, but the impact on spend efficiency is immediate. Think of it as finding the drain plug before you worry about the water pressure.
What to Prioritise When Time Is Limited
If you can only do one thing in a review, fix your conversion tracking. Everything else — bid strategies, budget allocation, keyword expansion — is downstream of accurate conversion data. Running automated bidding on bad data is worse than running manual bidding, because the algorithm will optimise confidently toward the wrong outcome.
After tracking, prioritise your search term report and negative keywords. That's where the most recoverable budget usually sits. Quality Score improvements take longer and require creative and landing page work, so they're valuable but slower to show results.
For SMEs specifically, Small Business PPC Management: What Actually Works goes into the prioritisation logic in more detail.
What Good PPC Review Outputs Look Like
A useful ppc review produces a ranked action list, not a slide deck. Each item should specify what the problem is, what change is recommended, and what the expected effect on spend or performance is. Vague observations like "ad relevance could be improved" without a specific recommendation are not useful outputs.
Good outputs also include a note on what not to change. Accounts that have been stable and performing well have that stability for a reason — over-optimising can disturb campaigns that are in a good learning phase or have built up auction history that's working in your favour. Knowing when to leave things alone is a practitioner skill that doesn't often appear in generic review templates.
As you move into 2026, the accounts that will perform best are those with a consistent review cadence, clean conversion tracking, and someone — human or AI — actively managing the operational decisions between reviews. Passive account management is not a strategy.
If you want to see what ongoing automated management looks like in practice, Overtime's pricing is transparent and structured for SME-scale accounts. For a deeper look at what the AI agent does inside your account, see how it handles Google Ads management.
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FAQ
What is a PPC review and what does it cover?
A ppc review is a structured audit of a Google Ads account that examines campaign settings, keyword performance, bid strategies, quality scores, ad copy, and budget allocation. The goal is to identify waste, underperformance, and missed opportunities — and produce a ranked list of specific changes to make.
How often should an SME do a PPC review?
For most SMEs spending under £5,000 per month on Google Ads, a thorough review once a month is the minimum. Accounts in competitive or seasonal markets may need bi-weekly reviews to keep pace with auction changes and competitor activity.
What should I check first in a PPC review?
Start with conversion tracking. If your tracking is misconfigured or double-counting, every other decision in the account is based on bad data. After that, pull the Search Terms report and identify which queries are consuming budget without converting.
Can an AI agent replace a manual PPC review?
An AI agent can handle the operational actions that a review normally triggers — adjusting bids, pausing underperformers, reallocating budget — on a continuous basis rather than monthly. It doesn't replace strategic thinking about account structure or creative direction, but it removes the gap between identifying a problem and actually fixing it.
Should I do a PPC review myself or pay someone to do it?
If you know Google Ads well and can set aside two to three focused hours, a self-review is entirely viable, particularly for accounts under £3,000 per month where agency fees may not be justified. For larger or more complex accounts, an external review often finds issues that internal familiarity causes you to miss.