The No-Nonsense Guide to Auditing Your SaaS PPC Account

We’ve all been there.

You’re staring at a Google Ads dashboard that looks like it was organized by a toddler. Or maybe you’ve just inherited an ad account from a previous agency, and you’re trying to figure out why they were bidding on keywords that have absolutely nothing to do with your product.

Whether you are trying to fix a broken funnel or just looking for efficiency in a chaotic account, you need a SaaS PPC audit. But not just a checklist of “did we use correct capitalization in headlines?”

Let’s walk through how to audit a SaaS PPC account the right way, from the high-level strategy down to the nitty-gritty settings.

Here’s a quick index of what you’ll be looking at in this blog:

Phase 1: Know the Context Before the PPC Audit

Before you even log into Google Ads or LinkedIn Campaign Manager, you need to step back. The biggest mistake marketers make is auditing the settings before auditing the strategy.

You cannot determine if a keyword is “good” or “bad” if you don’t know who is supposed to be searching for it.

1. Know the Product & the Players

You need to fundamentally understand what is being sold. This sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many audits skip this.

• What is the product? What problem does it actually solve? Not the feature list, but the pain point.
• Who is the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)? Be specific. “Marketing Managers” is too broad. “Marketing Ops Managers at Series B SaaS companies using Salesforce” is better.
• Who are the competitors? Who are you bidding against? Who is stealing your lunch money? Where do you stand in the market compared to them?

Why this matters:

This gives you the “overall picture” regarding messaging and positioning. If your ads are technically perfect (great Quality Score, low CPC) but the messaging doesn’t address the specific pain points of your ICP, you are just burning cash efficiently.

2. Do a Lead Quality Check

SaaS isn’t e-commerce. You aren’t selling $20 t-shirts where a click equals a sale. You have a funnel, and usually, it’s leaky. You need to understand the entire inbound flow before you judge the ads.

• The Flow: How does a lead come in? Do they request a demo? Start a free trial? Download a whitepaper?
• The Quality Check: This is huge. Don’t just count “leads.” A “lead” could be a student looking for research or a bot. You need to look at MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads).
• For your SaaS brand: You should be looking at whether your leads are flowing through this funnel: Leads → MQLs  → SQLs → Converted to a paying customer.

Audit Tip: If you can’t see this data, don’t go into the audit yet and fix your tracking. If you are optimizing for “Leads” but 90% of them are junk, your audit will lead you in the wrong direction.

3. Set Your Benchmarks

You need a baseline. If your conversion rate is 2%, is that good? Bad? Terrible?

For your specific category, you should have a rough idea.

• Maybe a healthy inbound funnel for your brand generates a 3% conversion rate from visitor to lead.
• Maybe your Lead-to-MQL ratio should be 45-50%.

Once you have these numbers, you can spot the outliers immediately. If your Lead-to-MQL drop-off is 90%, you don’t have a traffic problem; you have a targeting (or product) problem.

Phase 2: Look at the “Eagle’s View” (High-Level Metrics)

Now that you know who you are targeting, it’s time to look at the data. But don’t dive into the weeds yet. We are going “top-down.”

1. Follow the Money

Where is the budget actually going? Divide your spend by channel. Usually, for SaaS, this means Google, LinkedIn, Meta, and maybe Reddit.

Check the “Bare Minimum” metrics for each channel:

• Overall Spend
• Impressions & Traffic (Clicks)
• Cost Per Lead (CPL)
• Cost Per SQL / Opportunity

Ideally, you want to track revenue as well, but it’s not that important as a basic metric. However, it is good to have those numbers if possible.

Why this step is critical:

This highlights the “Bleeders.” You might find that LinkedIn is consuming 60% of the budget but generating 10% of the SQLs. Or that Google Ads has a high CPL but a fantastic conversion rate to Opportunity. This “Eagle’s View” tells you where to dig deeper.

Phase 3: Deep Dive into Google Ads (The Intent Engine)

Okay, now we roll up our sleeves. For most SaaS companies, Google Ads is the bread and butter because it captures intent. People are literally searching for your solution.

Here is how to audit Google Ads specifically:

1. The Campaign-Level Reality Check

Don’t look at all campaigns at once. Segment them.

• High Spenders: Which campaigns are eating the budget?
• The Zombies: Which campaigns are spending money but getting zero returns?
• The Stars: Which campaigns are spending optimally and bringing in high returns?

Audit Action:

Look for “Budget Capping.” Are your best performing campaigns limited by budget? If your “Competitor” campaign has an amazing CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) but is losing 50% of impression share due to budget, that is the easiest win you will find all day.

2. The Keyword vs. Search Term Audit

This is where 80% of wasted-spend lives.

You might be bidding on the keyword “SaaS CRM”, but what are you actually paying for?

Go to the Search Terms Report.

• Intent Mismatch: Are you paying for clicks from people looking for “free CRM templates” or “CRM meaning”?
• ICP Mismatch: If you are an Enterprise tool, are you showing up for “cheap CRM for startups”?
• The “Landing Page Handshake”: When they click that search term, where do they go? Is the landing page actually answering the question they asked in Google?

If someone searches for “Healthcare CRM” and you dump them on a generic CRM page, they will bounce.

3. The Ad Copy Check

What are you actually saying to these people?

• Are you using the right jargon?
• Does the ad copy pre-qualify the user? (e.g., mentioning “For Enterprise” or “Starting at $500/mo”).
• Action: Check which ads are resonating. Revisit the ones which aren’t.

A Real-World Case Study on How We Audited a Google Ads Campaign

Let’s look at a real story to see how this audit process works when things go wrong. This is based on a recent audit we did for a Series A/B SaaS company doing $10M-$15M in revenue.

They were doing great, generating qualified leads consistently.

The problem:

• Qualified leads suddenly dropped by 70%.
• Costs (CPL) skyrocketed.
• Clicks dropped.

The Audit Process:

We didn’t panic. We took the “Eagle’s View.”

1. Doing too much: They were doing multiple things at one time, like changing creatives, landing pages, and bids all at once, which screwed up the data clarity.
2. Isolate the Variable: We collated the campaigns that used to perform but were now failing. We ignored everything else. The problem statement was clear: “It was working, now it’s not.”
3. The Drill Down: We looked at the data week-over-week and day-by-day.
4. The Diagnosis: Everything looked decent on the surface. Search terms were fine, ads were fine. But one metric stood out: The CPC had skyrocketed.

The Root Cause:

Because the CPC (Cost Per Click) shot up, their daily budget was being exhausted after just a few clicks.

• High CPC = Fewer Clicks for the same budget.
• Fewer Clicks = Fewer Conversions.
• Impression Share Dropped: They were running out of budget by noon, so they weren’t even showing up for 80% of the searches.

The Fix:

• We didn’t rewrite the ads. We didn’t redesign the landing page.
• We simply controlled the CPC.
• We put bid caps in place to force the CPC down.
• Result: Lower CPC → Budget lasts longer → Impression Share increases → Clicks increase → Conversions return.

We slowly scaled it back up efficiently. This is why you audit data, not just settings. If we had just changed the ad copy, we would have never fixed the problem.

Phase 4: Audit Your LinkedIn Ads (The Visibility Engine)

LinkedIn is a different beast. It’s not about capturing demand (search intent); it’s about generating demand (interruption).

1. The Targeting “Hygiene Check”

This is the most important part of a LinkedIn audit.

• Job Titles: Are you showing ads to “CEOs” (who never click) or “Marketing Managers” (who actually buy)?
• Company Size: Are you wasting money on 1-10 employee companies when your ICP is 500+?
• Visibility Check: Are you showing it to the right ICP accounts?

Audit Action:

Go to the Demographics tab in Campaign Manager. It will show you exactly who is clicking. If you see “Entry Level” or “Interns” eating up your budget, you need to tighten your exclusions immediately.

2. Engagement & Creative Check

Since this is an interruption channel, are people actually stopping to look?

• Engagement Rate: Are they clicking “read more” or just scrolling past?
• Dwell Time: Are they spending time with the ad?
• Creative Formats: What are you running? Single Image? Video? Carousel?

Pro Tip: Segment your performance by ad format. You might find that Carousels drive high engagement but Video drives better brand recall (though harder to track). If your ads aren’t resonating well (low CTR, low engagement), you need to reiterate and come up with an actionable item for creative testing.

3. Audience Penetration Check

Are you reaching a significant percentage of your total addressable market (TAM) on LinkedIn? If your audience size is 50,000 and you’ve only reached 2,000 of them in 3 months, you aren’t penetrating the audience.

Phase 5: Interpreting the Data (The “So What?”)

An audit generates a lot of numbers. Your job is to tell a story with them.

When you are looking at your funnel, you will usually find three types of campaigns:

1. High Spend / No Return:
   • Diagnosis: You are either targeting the wrong people, or your landing page is broken.
   • Action: Check Search Terms first. If those are good, check the Landing Page engagement and conversion rate.
2. Low Spend / High Return:
   • Diagnosis: These are your winners, but they are starving.
   • Action: Check “Lost Impression Share (Budget).” Give these campaigns more money immediately.
3. High Spend / Low ROI (The “Optimization Trap”):
   • Diagnosis: These campaigns are bringing in leads, but they are too expensive.
   • Action: This is where you do CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization). Test new headlines. Tighten the audience. Try to squeeze more juice out of the lemon.

Phase 6: Creating Your Action Plan

An audit is useless if it just sits in a Google Doc. You need to turn your “Eagle’s View” into a “Snake’s Strike” (okay, I made that up, but you get the point).

Group your findings into three buckets:

1. The “Oh Sh*t” Fixes (Immediate)

These are things that are actively burning money.

• Targeting broad match keywords that are pulling in irrelevant traffic.
• Broken 404 links in ads.
• Audience exclusions missing (e.g., current customers clicking your acquisition ads).
• Action: Fix these today.

2. The Optimization Wins (Next 30 Days)

These are hypothesis-driven changes.

• “Our CTR on LinkedIn is low. Let’s test a Video ad vs. the current Image ad.”
• “The ‘Competitor’ campaign has a high CPL. Let’s try a dedicated comparison landing page to improve conversion.”
• “Let’s control the CPC on this campaign to see if we can get more volume.”

3. The Scale Opportunities (Strategic)

Where are we winning?

• “This specific niche (e.g., ‘Healthcare CRM’) is performing 3x better than the generic campaign. Let’s spin it out into its own dedicated budget and double down.”

Conclusion: It’s About Direction And Correction

The goal of a SaaS PPC audit is to answer the big question: Are we going in the right direction?

You need to know:

1. Is the funnel valid? Are we getting MQLs and SQLs and not just junk leads?
2. Are the channels efficient? Is the CPL sustainable?
3. Where do we double down? Which campaign is the winner?

When you audit from the top down, starting with the business goals, moving to the funnel, and then looking at the keywords, you stop being a “SaaS PPC mechanic” and start being a “Revenue Architect.”

And honestly? That’s where the fun (and the money) is.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How often should a SaaS company run a PPC audit?

A full SaaS PPC audit should happen every quarter, with lighter check-ins each month. Quarterly audits give enough data to spot patterns in lead quality, funnel drop-offs, and cost trends. Monthly reviews help catch budget leaks, tracking issues, and sudden performance shifts before they snowball. If you change pricing, ICP, or positioning, run an immediate audit. Major business changes always deserve a fresh look at how paid media supports revenue.

2. What’s the biggest mistake teams make during a PPC audit?

Most teams jump straight into keywords, bids, and ad copy without reviewing strategy first. They optimize settings before confirming who they are targeting and why. That leads to efficient spending on the wrong audience. A strong audit starts with product clarity, ICP definition, and funnel health. Without that context, even perfect Quality Scores or low CPCs can hide the real issue: traffic that never turns into revenue.

3. Should I audit Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads differently?

Yes, because they play very different roles in a SaaS funnel. Google Ads captures demand from people actively searching for solutions, so audits focus on intent, search terms, and conversion alignment. LinkedIn creates demand through interruption, which shifts the audit toward targeting hygiene, creative resonance, and audience penetration. Treating both platforms the same leads to bad conclusions, especially when judging performance only by CPL instead of sales impact.

4. How do I know if my PPC problem is traffic quality or funnel quality?

Start by mapping leads to outcomes. If traffic looks relevant but MQL and SQL rates are weak, the issue usually sits in the funnel, landing page, or offer. If leads are clearly off-target, the problem lies in keywords, targeting, or messaging. A simple test helps: review the last 50 leads with sales. If most were never close to buying, traffic quality needs fixing before funnel tweaks matter.