How long does the audit take?

Fifteen minutes of your firm’s time for the Google OAuth grant and booking form. The audit itself runs in the background once access is granted. The written report is typically delivered within one working day, with a live 15-minute review call scheduled at your chosen time.

What access do you need?

Read-only access to your Google Ads account, granted via Google’s standard OAuth consent screen. Read-only cannot make changes — it only lets us see structure, performance, and settings. Billing details and payment methods are not visible to us at any point, and you can revoke access at any time from myaccount.google.com.

What does “pass”, “warn” and “fail” mean?

Pass: the check is in acceptable shape for the account’s stage and spend. Warn: the check passes functionally but has room to improve or shows configuration debt. Fail: the check is actively costing money, breaking tracking, or creating a compliance risk.

What happens if nothing meaningful is found?

We say so, deliver the written pass report, and do not contact you again unless you request it. No invoice, no follow-up, no sales sequence. This is uncommon on first-time audits — typical result is three fails, four warns, five passes — but it does occur on well-managed accounts.

The 12-point Google Ads audit, explained

The LaunchedIn10 Law audit is a fixed 12-point diagnostic of your Google Ads account: campaign structure, match types, negatives, conversion tracking, geo targeting, ad extensions, quality score, search-term waste, device performance, ad schedule, landing-page alignment and budget pacing. It runs in 15 minutes of your firm’s time and is delivered as a written report with a 15-minute review call.

What the twelve checks cover

The audit reads your Google Ads account and returns a pass, warn or fail on twelve diagnostics. The top six — campaign structure, match types, negative keywords, conversion tracking, geo targeting and ad extensions — tend to control fifty to seventy percent of wasted spend in a typical legal account. Broad-match without a phrase or exact layer, conversion actions firing on pageview rather than call or form, and untargeted United Kingdom geo settings on a regional firm are the three most common findings. The next three checks — quality score distribution, search-term waste and landing-page alignment — identify bid-inflation risk and drag on conversion rate. The final three — device performance, ad schedule and budget pacing — are usually in order on established accounts but highlight configuration debt on recently launched ones. No firm passes all twelve on the first audit; the typical result is three fails, four warns and five passes.

What you get back

The deliverable is a four-page branded PDF: a cover with your overall health score (0–10), monthly spend, detected waste, and a headline quote; a checklist page showing every diagnostic with its pass/warn/fail status and a one-line explanation; a priority-fixes page with the top three recoverable items, each with an estimated monthly waste figure and an impact horizon; and an evidence page showing the top ten wasted search queries and the Quality Score distribution of your keywords. The PDF is yours to keep regardless of whether you go on to engage management.

How we compute detected waste

Waste is the sum of ad spend on queries with zero conversions over the last 180 days, plus a conservative sixty-percent credit against the other recoverable figures the audit surfaces. It is deliberately under-stated rather than inflated — a figure we can defend on the review call, not a marketing headline. The “detected” qualifier matters: waste below our detection threshold (single-digit pounds per query) is not counted, because those individual terms are too small to justify the management time of adding them as negatives.

Frequently asked

How long does the audit take?: Fifteen minutes of your firm’s time for the Google OAuth grant and booking form. The audit itself runs in the background once access is granted. The written report is typically delivered within one working day, with a live 15-minute review call scheduled at your chosen time.
What access do you need?: Read-only access to your Google Ads account, granted via Google’s standard OAuth consent screen. Read-only cannot make changes — it only lets us see structure, performance, and settings. Billing details and payment methods are not visible to us at any point, and you can revoke access at any time from myaccount.google.com.
What does “pass”, “warn” and “fail” mean?: Pass: the check is in acceptable shape for the account’s stage and spend. Warn: the check passes functionally but has room to improve or shows configuration debt. Fail: the check is actively costing money, breaking tracking, or creating a compliance risk.
What happens if nothing meaningful is found?: We say so, deliver the written pass report, and do not contact you again unless you request it. No invoice, no follow-up, no sales sequence. This is uncommon on first-time audits — typical result is three fails, four warns, five passes — but it does occur on well-managed accounts.

Match types and the broad-match risk in legal accounts

Broad match without a phrase or exact layer is the most common audit fail we see, and the most expensive. In legal Google Ads it is especially destructive because £8–£20 CPCs amplify wasted spend on tangential queries — "lawyer jokes", "free legal advice forum", "law degree open university" — that share a stem with commercial intent but convert at zero. The structural fix: phrase plus exact layered into separate ad groups, with broad reserved for a single 10–15% experiment ad group ring-fenced behind aggressive negatives. Eighty to ninety percent of well-managed legal accounts run this shape. The Smart Bidding failure mode is specific: without negative-keyword discipline the algorithm interprets sympathy clicks on "no-win-no-fee" content as conversion intent and bids accordingly. Google’s own match-type documentation agrees broad needs guard rails. Most accounts have none. See also our solicitor account-build guide.

Conversion tracking diagnostics — the most common audit fail

Conversion actions firing on pageview rather than on a 60-plus-second call or a completed form submission is the single most common audit fail in UK legal accounts. Roughly seventy percent of accounts we audit have it. The cascade is predictable: pageview-tracked accounts overstate conversions three to five times, Smart Bidding optimises against the false signal, CPL appears artificially low until the CFO reviews the budget against actual matter intake. By the time it is found the firm has burned a quarter and bid the wrong way on every keyword. The fix is GA4 event-based conversions plus call-extension tracking with a 60-second call-duration threshold — configurable inside Google Ads in under thirty minutes. Google’s call-conversion documentation sets out the duration threshold approach. See SRA-compliant tracking.

Geo-targeting for England-and-Wales firms

The UK default — "all locations in United Kingdom" — wastes 25–40% of budget for England-and-Wales-only firms. SRA-regulated solicitors cannot serve Scotland or Northern Ireland on most matters: different jurisdictions, different rules of court, different reserved activities under the SRA’s regulatory framework. The audit’s expected baseline is presence-based radius targeting from the firm’s postcode, plus explicit county and town exclusions for Scotland and NI — Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Belfast, Derry — entered as negative locations rather than left to Google’s default catch-all. The common failure mode is location-of-interest targeting rather than presence: it catches a searcher in Edinburgh researching English property purchases for a London move, the click bills at conveyancing CPCs, and the lead is out of jurisdiction the moment they answer the phone. See the conveyancing playbook for postcode-radius templates.

Ad extensions that move legal CPCs

Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets and call extensions each have a measurable impact on UK legal CTR and Quality Score — and Quality Score moves CPC in the same direction. Specific findings from our internal aggregates: location extensions add 8–12% CTR for office-based firms; call extensions add 15–22% CTR for personal-injury and conveyancing accounts where the buying mode is phone-first; lead-form extensions deliver lower-quality leads in legal verticals and are typically excluded from the audit’s recommended stack. The audit checks for missing extensions on every active campaign and for extension-asset compliance under SRA Rule 8.6 — promotional claims in callouts, fee comparisons in structured snippets, and any "best", "leading" or "specialist" language that triggers the SRA’s standards on misleading information. Missing extensions is configuration debt. Non-compliant ones are regulatory risk.