How to Audit a Google Ads Account: A Checklist for Kuwait Businesses

To audit a Google Ads account, work through it in priority order: conversion tracking, search terms, structure, bidding and budgets, location and language settings, ads and assets, landing pages, and finally who controls access. A Google Ads audit is a structured review of whether the account measures the right outcomes and spends only where those outcomes happen. Tracking goes first because Smart Bidding learns from whatever the account calls a conversion. Each check below says what bad looks like and what to do.

Check: are the right actions primary? Open the conversions summary and list every action marked primary. As of September 2026, Google Ads Help says primary actions appear in the Conversions column and are used for bidding, while secondary actions are for observation and appear only in All conversions. Bad looks like page views, clicks on an Instagram icon, or one purchase counted twice through both the Google tag and a Google Analytics import. Keep one primary action per real business outcome and set the rest to secondary.

Check: do conversions carry values? Google's help explains that automated bid strategies use the values you assign, so an account where every conversion is worth the same, or nothing, cannot tell a KD 6 order from a KD 160 one. Stores should pass the actual order value from checkout. Lead businesses can use a fixed value built from their own numbers. As an illustration, if one in five consultation bookings at a Salmiya clinic becomes a patient worth KD 150 in margin, each booking is worth KD 30.

Check: are WhatsApp taps, calls and enhanced conversions covered? Count taps on your WhatsApp button and phone number as website conversions. As of September 2026, Kuwait is not on Google's list of countries with Google forwarding numbers, which rules out call-length tracking from call assets, but tracking number taps on your mobile site needs none. Then turn on enhanced conversions, which send hashed customer details such as an email or phone number to improve matching. If reported conversions and real orders disagree, start with why ads suddenly stop working.

Check: what are people actually searching? The search terms report shows the real searches that triggered your ads. As of September 2026 it sits under Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms, and Google leaves out terms with too little search activity for privacy reasons, so it never shows everything. Sort it by cost over the last 90 days. Bad looks like spend on searches naming Dubai or Riyadh, searches for used items, or how-to searches from people who want to do the job themselves.

Check: do your negatives cover both languages? Negative keywords stop your ads showing for searches that contain them. Google's help says negatives do not match close variants or synonyms, so you have to add synonyms and singular and plural forms yourself, although casing and misspellings are handled for you. This matters more in Arabic, where a plural is often a different word: دورة and دورات, or وظيفة and وظائف. An English-only negative list, or an Arabic one with singular forms only, leaves obvious gaps.

Check: are your negatives blocking buyers? Old negative lists collect mistakes. A broad negative such as price, or سعر, added to stop bargain hunters also blocks the person typing the price of your exact product, and that search is often the closest to buying. Google offers three negative match types: broad, which is the default, phrase and exact. Read your list against your best-converting search terms, and narrow any broad negative that overlaps them to phrase or exact match.

Check: are you learning from the report? Search terms show how Kuwait actually types: Arabic, English, Arabic written in Latin letters, and mixtures of all three in one query. Terms that convert again and again deserve to become keywords in an ad group of their own, with an ad in the same language. Terms that spend without converting become negatives. Twenty minutes a week on this report is often worth more than another bidding change, and it is one task an owner can do without specialist help.

Check: does the structure match how you sell? Bad looks like one campaign holding brand searches, generic searches and every service together. Brand searches are cheap and convert well, so they make the generic keywords look better than they are. Separate brand from non-brand, and group the rest by product line or service, each with its own landing page. In a market the size of Kuwait, stop before the account splits into so many campaigns that none of them gathers enough conversions to learn from.

Check: which networks are switched on? Google Ads Help says search partners are included by default when you create a Search campaign, and a Search campaign can also be set to include the Google Display Network through its Networks setting. Neither is wrong, but both should be deliberate choices. Google also notes that it doesn't show which partner sites carried your Search ads unless you run Performance Max. If nobody can explain why a network is switched on, switch it off and compare the following month.

Check: does Smart Bidding have enough data? Smart Bidding is Google's set of bid strategies that use Google AI to set bids at auction time for conversions or conversion value, such as Target CPA and Target ROAS. As of September 2026, Google recommends judging performance over periods with at least 30 conversions, such as a month or longer, and 50 for Target ROAS. A few bookings a month falls far short. Pool conversions by consolidating campaigns, and set targets you can afford using the Google Ads calculator.

Check: who changed what, and did anyone agree to it? Auto-apply recommendations let Google make eligible changes on a schedule, and Google's list includes adding broad match keywords and adjusting targets. Open the auto-apply settings under Recommendations and switch off anything nobody chose. Then read the change history, which Google keeps for two years and which shows who made each edit. Make sure Ramadan or White Friday budgets were reset after the season. What clicks cost here is covered in how much Google Ads cost in Kuwait.

Check: Presence, or Presence or interest? As of September 2026, Google Ads Help describes two location options. Presence or interest, the default and the setting Google recommends, reaches people who are in or regularly in your chosen locations, plus people who have shown interest in them. Presence reaches only people who are likely to be in, or regularly in, those locations. For a Kuwait business that only delivers or serves inside Kuwait, interest can mean paying for clicks from people abroad who are reading about Kuwait.

Choose deliberately. A salon in Jabriya or a store delivering across the six governorates usually wants Presence, because someone researching from another country cannot buy. A hotel, a clinic treating patients from other Gulf countries, or a school courting families about to relocate may want interest included. To see what you are getting now, open Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then When and where your ads showed, then Matched locations, which separates physical locations from locations of interest.

Check: is every ad written in the language of its keywords? This check changes this month. As of September 2026, Google Ads Help says that starting in September 2026 the campaign-level language setting is being removed from Search campaigns, and Search ads will match based on the language of the ads themselves. In Performance Max, the campaign language setting will no longer apply to ads on the Google Search Network. Google judges which languages a person understands from signals such as the language of their search and their settings.

In a bilingual market, that turns your ad copy into your targeting. An English ad sitting in an ad group of Arabic keywords, or a responsive search ad mixing Arabic headlines with English descriptions, no longer has a campaign setting behind it. Give Arabic keywords Arabic ads and an Arabic landing page, and give English keywords the English versions. Once the change has settled, read the search terms report again, because the searches your ads match may shift.

Check: what is Ad Strength telling you? Ad Strength rates the mix of headlines and descriptions in a responsive search ad, from Poor to Excellent. Google says it doesn't directly affect whether an ad is eligible to serve, so treat it as a prompt, not a target. Responsive search ads accept up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions. Bad looks like five headlines saying the same thing. Use the space for different reasons to choose you: a price in KD, delivery areas, KNET or cash on delivery, and opening hours.

Check: which assets are live, and who added them? Google recommends at least four sitelinks, two callouts and four images, and notes that adding an asset doesn't mean it will always show. Google can also add some assets automatically at account level; you can switch those off in account settings. Check that automated text reads properly in Arabic. Message assets, which open a chat such as WhatsApp, were still marked beta in Google's help as of September 2026, so may not appear in every account.

Check: what does Quality Score say about your pages? Quality Score is a keyword-level diagnostic from 1 to 10 built from expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Google says it is not an input in the ad auction, so read it as a pointer to problems rather than a lever to pull. Add the Quality Score columns to your keywords view and sort by cost. A Below average landing page experience on your most expensive keywords is the first place to look.

Check: does each ad land on the right page, in the right language, quickly? Bad looks like an Arabic ad sending people to an English homepage, a Ramadan offer landing on a page that no longer mentions it, or a product page that takes several seconds to show anything on mobile data. Open every final URL on your own phone, away from office wifi. Match the landing page language to the ad, keep the offer visible without scrolling, and put the WhatsApp button where a thumb can reach it.

Check: who holds Admin access? Google Ads has five access levels: Admin, Standard, Read-only, Billing and Email-only, and only Admins can invite users, change access levels or cancel invitations. Read the list of users and their levels. Bad looks like a sole Admin who is a former employee, a freelancer's personal Gmail address, or an agency with nobody from your company on the list. The fix, and why it matters, is in who owns your ad accounts.

Check: which manager accounts are linked, and who pays? Agencies often manage accounts through a manager account. Google's help notes that when ownership is enabled, admins of the linked manager account can also control user access and product links, which is fine while the relationship lasts and awkward after it ends. Check who each link belongs to. Then check the billing details: an account paid on an employee's personal card, or invoiced to a company that isn't yours, is a problem waiting for the day that person leaves.

Check: when should you run the audit again? Read the search terms every week or two and run the full audit every quarter. Add an audit before the budgets that matter most in Kuwait: Ramadan and Eid, National and Liberation Day in February, back to school and White Friday. Repeat the tracking checks after any website change, such as a new theme, a new checkout or a switch of KNET payment gateway, because those are the moments conversion tags can break without anyone noticing.

Check: are the fixes in the right order? Fix tracking before anything else, then stop the waste in search terms and settings, then improve ads and landing pages. Change one thing at a time and write down the date, so next month's numbers can be read against it. If you hire someone to audit the account, ask for these checks in this order, with screenshots from your own account rather than a generic score, and keep the report with your company's records.