What an account health check covers
A health check is a structured pass over an advertising account looking for faults rather than opportunities. It has four parts. Measurement comes first: is every conversion action still recording, is anything being counted twice, does the value attached to a lead match what the business actually counts as a lead. Then settings: locations, languages, networks, ad schedules, budget caps and the campaign options that quietly widen reach.
Third, structure: whether campaigns are grouped so budget can go where it should, whether the naming makes sense to someone seeing the account for the first time, whether anything is competing with itself. Fourth, spend quality: search terms that never convert, placements draining a display budget, feed items sitting disapproved, ads rejected weeks ago and never fixed.
Why account health checks matter
Advertising accounts decay. Platforms release new settings and switch some on by default, staff leave, landing pages are redesigned, tracking tags disappear during a website update, product feeds go stale. None of these announce themselves. The account keeps spending, and the damage usually becomes visible in a monthly report when the money has already gone.
A check also protects every decision that follows it. Almost all optimisation depends on conversion data being correct. If tracking is broken or double-counting, automated bidding is optimising towards a false signal, and every conclusion drawn from that month’s data is unsafe — including the one about which campaign to scale.
Where account health checks go wrong
They turn into opinion pieces. A document listing what the reviewer would have done differently is not a health check; it is a preference. A health check tests things that are either working or not working, and every finding should be verifiable by anyone else who opens the account.
The other failure is scope. Checking only what sits inside the ad platform misses the half of the problem that sits outside it — the landing page that now loads slowly on a mobile connection, the enquiry form that stopped emailing, the phone number nobody answers after hours. In Nepal, where most paid traffic arrives on a phone over mobile data, the landing page is often where the money is genuinely being lost, and no report inside Google Ads will say so.
How to run one
Work from a written list in the same order every time, so nothing depends on what you happen to notice that day. Start with tracking, because everything else rests on it, then settings, then structure, then spend quality. Record each finding with evidence — where you saw it and what it is costing — and keep faults separate from ideas, because faults get fixed now and ideas get scheduled.
Run it on a rhythm rather than when something already looks wrong: a short pass monthly, a fuller one each quarter, and an immediate one after any website change, tag change or handover. Reading the account’s change history alongside the findings usually explains how a fault arrived, which is the part that stops it happening again. Where the question is broader than faults — whether the money is in the right channel at all — that is a Google Ads audit rather than a health check.