Free Google Ads audit

A Google Ads audit for auto shops: find the leaks before you change anything.

A Google Ads audit for auto shops reads the account you already run, read-only, and says in plain English where the money is leaking.

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14-day free trial, nothing charged for 14 days, Read-only connection, No add-on needed

Illustration. Product demonstration with sample data.

What does a Google Ads audit for an auto shop look at?

The places a local service account usually bleeds: budget sitting on a losing campaign, search terms that never book a job, broad match with no negative list, and conversion tracking that counts the wrong thing. The account is connected read-only, so nothing in it is changed.

Read-only access. Nothing in your Google Ads account is changed by the audit.
Findings are written in plain English, with the campaign and the figure named.
It reads the account's real history rather than a snapshot of this week.
You can act on it yourself, with us, or not at all.

Read-only — the audit never writes to Google
No add-on needed — trial included
Below its data floors it says “too early”
A healthy account reports zero findings
PII-looking search terms are never stored

The first rung

Every fix you could make starts with knowing what's broken.

Most shops inherit their Google Ads account — from an agency, a past employee, or a weekend three years ago. Money goes out every month; what comes back is a report full of clicks. Before you rebuild campaigns, hire help, or quit ads entirely, the cheapest move is to read the account properly.

That's what this audit is. It doesn't pitch you a rebuild. It reads roughly two years of your own history and names what's leaking — with the spend, the clicks and the window behind every claim, so you can check each one against your own account.

It's proof, not a promise: every number comes from your rows, and you can verify all of it before you believe any of it.

What it checks

13 checks. None of them guess.

Four groups: where money leaks, whether anything can be measured, structure Google quietly punishes, and where the budget is pointed. Only 3 of the 13 ever carry a dollar figure — the ones whose dollars are really sitting in your rows.

Where the money leaks
The three checks that can honestly carry a dollar figure — each one is spend already sitting in your own rows, restated per month.
Whether anything can be measured at all
Tracking and attribution. When these are broken, every other number in the account is a guess — so the audit checks the ruler before it measures anything with it.
Structure Google quietly punishes
Cheap fixes, visible in the imported account structure — none of them carry a dollar figure, because we hold no counterfactual and won't invent one.
Where the budget is pointed
Spend held up against your real service area and your own cost per booked job — not against a benchmark.

Every check is one of the audit codes shipped in the product's shared contract — the page and the software read the same list, so this page can't advertise a check that doesn't run. The full Ads Autopilot story lives on the Google Ads page.
			What it finds
1	Budget on a losing campaign	Where the money leaks	Real spend, real clicks, and not one booked job we can trace over the window — the whole campaign's run-rate, restated per month.	Carries a $ figure
2	Search terms that never book	Where the money leaks	The actual phrases people typed that took clicks and produced nothing — the worst offenders named, with what they cost between them.	Carries a $ figure
3	Broad match with no negatives	Where the money leaks	Broad keywords spending real money behind a handful of negatives, or none at all — the classic quiet leak in an inherited account.	Carries a $ figure
4	No conversion tracking at all	Whether anything can be measured at all	The account spent and clicked and recorded zero conversions — it is flying blind, and every other verdict softens until this is fixed.	—
5	Booked-job feedback not live	Whether anything can be measured at all	Your invoices aren't reaching Google yet, so bidding still can't tell a quote request from a paid job.	—
6	Auto-tagging switched off	Whether anything can be measured at all	Click ids never reach your CRM, so nothing you spend can ever be traced to a car in the bay.	—
7	Spend nothing can be matched to	Whether anything can be measured at all	The share of account spend running through campaigns that produced no lead we can name.	—
8	A landing page we can't attribute	Whether anything can be measured at all	Paid clicks going to a page that carries no tracking, so the leads it makes can never be tied back.	—
9	One ad in an ad group	Structure Google quietly punishes	Nothing to rotate, nothing to compare, nothing for Google to learn from.	—
10	Missing sitelinks and callouts	Structure Google quietly punishes	Free space on the results page a spending Search campaign is leaving empty.	—
11	Search partners or display on	Structure Google quietly punishes	A Search campaign quietly buying traffic from somewhere else entirely.	—
12	A campaign starved of budget	Where the budget is pointed	One that books work below your own cost per job and hits its cap nearly every day — the one place more money is an easy argument.	—
13	Targeting far wider than you serve	Where the budget is pointed	A radius — or a whole country — well past where your jobs actually happen, measured against where they really do.	—

The math

Only dollars that are already in your rows.

One formula, in the open: the spend on the thing over the last 90 days, divided by the window's days, times 30.44 — the average days in a month. No modelled uplift, no benchmark click-through rate, no industry average anything. If the dollars can't be sliced out of stored rows, the finding carries no number and shows the arithmetic it does have instead.

A campaign isn't called a loser under $150 of spend and 25 clicks — below that, the same check says “too early to judge”
A search term isn't called dead under 8 clicks, and the pattern needs at least 3 such terms and $100 between them
A check whose underlying fact isn't captured on your account stays silent — a missing fact never becomes an accusation

And one rule on top: a campaign's dollars are claimed by at most one finding per run. Three checks firing on the same campaign produce one number and two findings that say, in plain words, that their money is already counted.

How a finding becomes a dollar figure

Example

Spend already in your rows, last 90 days$2,510

÷ the days in the window90

× average days in a month30.44

Waste, restated per month$849/mo

And who gets to claim it

Losing campaignDead search termsUnguarded broad match

The first finding that fires on a campaign takes its dollars; the later ones say “not counted twice” instead of inflating the total. That's why the headline number can be checked against your actual Google Ads bill.

Sample dataWorked example with sample figures. The formula and the floors are the ones shipped in the audit's code; your findings quote them with your own numbers.

“Not enough data yet” is an answer
Below its floors the audit says so instead of inventing a verdict — a young campaign is young, not guilty. The floors are quoted inside the findings themselves.
A healthy account reports zero findings
That outcome is pinned by the audit's own selftest: a clean account produces nothing, and each staged defect raises exactly one finding. If yours comes back clean, that's the answer — not a sales hook.
Findings have a memory
Dismiss a finding and it is never re-raised for the same campaign. Fix the underlying problem and it resolves on its own at the next run. Still true? It refreshes in place with new numbers instead of stacking duplicates.

How it works

Connect tonight. Read everything. Then judge.

An audit is only worth having on real history, so the import comes first and the verdicts wait for it. Here is the honest timeline — no sixty-second scan, because a sixty-second scan of two years of history would be a guess.

1
Connect read-only
Tonight
You connect the Google Ads account you already run. The first import starts that night: every campaign — including removed ones — its budgets, keywords, negatives, ads and targeting, plus the newest slice of history first.
What the audit reads
All imported once, read forever
- About 2 years of campaign spend, and roughly 6 months of ad-group, keyword and search-term detail
- Every campaign's structure: ad counts, negatives, sitelinks, targeting radius, network settings — including removed campaigns, so old spend has a name
- Your own funnel: which leads carried a click id, which became booked jobs and paid invoices
- Your real service area, measured from where your jobs actually happened — the yardstick for the targeting check
The audit itself touches no Google API — it's arithmetic over these imported rows. An account whose access has lapsed can still be audited on what it actually did.
2
2 years of history arrives
Over about 3 nights
The backfill walks 90-day chunks, newest first, up to 3 a night — paced against Google's API limits, and resumable, so a crash continues at the next chunk instead of starting over. Ad-group, keyword and search-term detail reaches back about 6 months.
How the import paces itself
90-day chunks, newest first
- Night 1The newest ~270 days· audit window covered
- Night 2Back to ~540 days
- Night 3The full 730 days· backfill complete
Newest chunks land first, so the 90 days the audit reasons over are usually in after the first night. The walk is resumable — a timeout or a deploy continues at the next chunk, never back at the start.
3
Findings, with the arithmetic
Monday morning — or on demand
The audit runs every Monday morning, and you can re-run it from the dashboard any time once your history is in. It reads the imported rows — no Google API call at all — and every finding states the spend, clicks and window it is arguing from.
Then it keeps running
The audit isn't a one-time report you screenshot and lose. It re-runs every Monday morning on the freshly refreshed history, and you can trigger a re-run from the dashboard whenever you've changed something and want the verdict. Fixed findings resolve on their own; new leaks get raised; dismissed ones stay dismissed.
Alongside it, the Campaign ROI report keeps answering the bigger question — what your spend produced in booked jobs and paid invoices — with the same two years of history behind it.

What it costs

Reading is free. Acting is the add-on.

That's the whole pricing model, and it's deliberate: you should never have to pay to find out what your own account is doing.

Comes with your plan — no add-on

Included

Every Service VIN plan, the 14-day trial included. No add-on, no per-audit fee.

Connect your Google Ads account read-only
The import: about 2 years of campaign spend, ~6 months of keyword and search-term detail
The 13-check audit, every Monday morning — plus on-demand re-runs
The Campaign ROI report — spend, leads, booked jobs, revenue, cost per job

Ads Autopilot add-on

Paid · optional

Only for acting on what the audit found — the reading above never requires it.

Build Search and Performance Max campaigns from your real catalog — created paused
Let the weekly optimizer act on your account, lever by lever, under your ceiling
Sync Customer Match audiences — hashed and consent-gated

There's no checkout button for the add-on — turning it on is a conversation, and the audit's own waste number is usually the first thing on the table. A flat monthly fee, never a percentage of your ad spend.

Talk it through See plan pricing

What it won't do.

You're deciding whether to hand software a read of your ad account, so the restraints matter more than the features — and every one of these lives in the code path, not in a habit.

It won't change your account
The audit holds read access and writes nothing back — it doesn't pause a keyword, edit a budget or add a negative. In fact it touches no Google API at all when it runs: every finding is arithmetic over the history already imported, which is why an account whose access has lapsed can still be audited on what it actually did.
It won't guess below its floors
A campaign isn't called a loser until it has spent $150 and taken 25 clicks in the 90-day window; a search term isn't called dead under 8 clicks. Below the floors the same check reports “not enough data yet” instead of a verdict — and a check whose underlying fact was never captured on your account stays silent rather than accusing you of something.
It won't invent a dollar
Money is only ever spend already sitting in your own rows, restated per month. No modelled uplift, no benchmark click-through rate, no industry-average anything. When the dollars can't honestly be sliced out of stored rows, the finding reports no number and shows the arithmetic it does have instead.
It won't count the same dollar twice
A campaign's dollars are claimed by at most one finding per run. If three checks fire on the same campaign, the first takes the money and the others say so out loud — which is what makes the headline total a number you can hold up against your actual Google Ads bill.
It won't nag you about the same thing forever
Findings have a memory. Dismiss one and the same finding on the same campaign is never re-raised. Fix one and it resolves on its own at the next run. A finding that is still true refreshes in place with new numbers instead of stacking a duplicate.
It won't keep what it shouldn't
Search terms are free text strangers typed — and people do paste their own email or phone number into a search box. Anything shaped like either is dropped at import, before it is ever stored, not stored and cleaned up later. You're told how many were dropped.

And it won't promise you a result. The audit guarantees visibility — what your ads return depends on your market, your prices and your close rate, so you'll find no performance claims on this page. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by Google; you own the account and keep the keys.

Google Ads audit for auto shops, answered

Is the Google Ads audit really free?

Yes. Connecting your account read-only, the two-year history import, the weekly Monday audit, on-demand re-runs and the Campaign ROI report are included on every Service VIN plan — the trial included. There is no audit add-on and no per-audit fee. The paid Ads Autopilot add-on covers acting on what the audit finds: building campaigns, letting the weekly optimizer make changes, and syncing audiences. Reading your account never requires it.

How fast do I get my first findings?

Not instantly, and we won't pretend otherwise. The first import starts the night you connect, newest history first, so the 90-day window the audit reasons over is usually in after the first night — and the full 2-year backfill completes over roughly 3 nights. The scheduled audit runs every Monday morning, and once your history is in you can run one on demand from the dashboard. An audit produced faster than the data behind it would just be a guess with a progress bar.

Will it change anything in my Google Ads account?

No. The audit writes nothing to Google — it doesn't pause, edit or add anything, and when it runs it makes no Google API call at all: every finding is arithmetic over the history already imported. Acting on findings is a separate, paid, opt-in layer where every campaign starts report-only, anything built is created paused, and nothing changes without you switching that specific campaign on.

What exactly does it check?

13 things, all of them arithmetic over your own account, in four groups: where money leaks (budget on losing campaigns, search terms that never book, unguarded broad match), whether anything can be measured at all (conversion tracking, booked-job feedback, auto-tagging, unmatched spend, unattributable landing pages), structure Google quietly punishes (single-ad ad groups, missing sitelinks and callouts, search partners left on), and where the budget is pointed (starved winners, targeting far wider than you serve). Below a data floor a check reports “not enough data yet” rather than a verdict.

Where do the dollar figures come from?

Your own rows, restated per month: the spend on the thing over the 90-day window, divided by the window's days, times 30.44. Nothing is modelled and no benchmark is used — which also means only 3 of the 13 checks ever carry a figure, because only those three can slice their dollars out of stored rows. And a campaign's dollars go to at most one finding per run, so the total is a sum over disjoint dollars you can check against your own Google Ads bill.

What does it say if my account is actually fine?

Nothing — and that's the designed outcome, not a failure mode. A healthy account produces zero findings; the audit's selftest asserts exactly that, and then asserts that each defect it stages raises exactly one finding. If your account comes back clean, you've bought certainty for free, and nobody will call you about it.

What happens to search terms with personal information in them?

They're dropped before they're stored. Search terms are free text strangers typed, and people occasionally paste their own email address or phone number into a search box. Anything matching an email or phone shape is filtered out at import — never stored and later cleaned up — and the import reports how many terms were dropped.

What do I do with the findings?

Whatever you like — they're written to be actionable without us. Every finding names the campaign, the spend, the clicks and the window it rests on, so you can make the fixes yourself in Google Ads or hand the list to whoever runs your ads. If you'd rather Service VIN act on them — build campaigns, let the weekly optimizer move money, sync audiences — that's the paid Ads Autopilot add-on, and turning it on is a conversation with us rather than a checkout button.

It doesn't work alone

Keep following the money

FeatureGoogle Ads Autopilot, the pillar

FeatureTrue ROAS & cost per booked job

FeatureThe weekly optimizer

You've been guessing long enough.

Connect the account read-only tonight. In about 3 nights it has read roughly 2 years of your history, and the findings — if there are any — arrive with the arithmetic attached. If there are none, you've bought certainty for free.