A Forensic Google Ads Account Audit is a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of your Google Ads account compared to a traditional Google Ads audit. While a traditional audit provides a high-level overview of your account, a forensic account audit aims to uncover the true root cause of performance issues within your google ads management.

The purpose of a forensic audit is to diagnose why performance issues are occurring and provide insights on how to fix them. This type of audit is designed to go beyond a simple list of observations and recommendations and instead delves into the underlying framework of your google ads account and its performance.

During a forensic account audit, we will examine your account structure, targeting settings, ad copy, bidding strategies, keywords & search terms, landing pages, and several other elements within your account. In doing so, we dig into your historical data to identify patterns and trends in performance. The goal is to identify the areas where PPC performance is lacking and pinpoint the specific reasons why.

By uncovering the root cause of performance issues, a forensic audit can help you craft hypotheses and experiments to remedy Google Ads performance and create a long-term strategy that yields sustainable, positive ROAS.

In short, a Forensic Account Audit is a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of your Google Ads account that aims to uncover the root cause of performance issues, whereas a traditional Google Ads audit provides a high-level overview of your account and may not provide the insights needed to optimize your campaigns effectively.

Our forensic audits typically take between 10 and 30 hours of work, depending on how complex the account is.

During the analysis, we will dig into “the weeds” of your account and create our own unique data segments, looking to isolate areas of underperformance and get a better understanding of what is actually responsible for performance ups and downs in your Google Ads (aka Adwords) account.

Please note that these forensic audits are more complex than ones done by a normal Google Ads agency, and thus takes a little longer.

One of the key benefits is that a forensic audit is designed to uncover the root cause of performance issues within your paid search account(s). By dissecting and diagnosing why performance issues are happening, we can identify areas where performance is lacking and pinpoint the specific reasons why. This deep analysis helps to provide insights that may not be apparent from a traditional audit and can be used to craft hypotheses and experiments to improve SEM (and potentially other digital channel) performance.

As your growth partner, we can then create a tactical, ROI-centric strategy and guidance on what changes to implement with the goal of sustainable, long-term, profitable performance.

In addition to uncovering performance issues, our forensic audits can also help identify missed opportunities for growth. Examples include overall user journey strategy, landing page CRO, and new areas of keyword targeting.

We think differently than other digital marketers. We have founded, grown, and sold our own high-growth companies, and have top-flight MBAs to boot. On top of that, we also have over a decade of experience crafting meticulous, highly-tactical, ROI-centric Google Ads strategies and accounts. Hopefully without sounding too arrogant, we are digital marketing unicorns.

We’ve executed hundreds of forensic audits for brands ranging from Fortune 100 to Startups, and have analyzed over $200M of Google Ads spend. We’ve seen everything from MCCs with 170+ sub-accounts to accounts with only a handful of campaigns, and everything in-between.

We get hired by other Google Ads agencies to perform our forensic audits in an effort to fix their under-performing clients.

If you want to understand the true root cause (and not simply some generic salesy vanity “audit”) of what’s happening in your Google Ads account, and then work to develop a game plan for how to improve performance moving forward, then we are your people.