I inherited the Google Ads account. How do I respond to a client audit?

Answer the auditor with what you can verify, what you recommend now, and who will take the next step by when. Be candid about mistakes during your own management. Where the original reasoning is unknown, say so and arrange a specific follow-up. You can take responsibility for getting an answer without inventing one.

For questions about keywords, campaign structure and management, that means doing two jobs before the client call: checking the findings and getting a senior colleague involved. A short handover explains missing historical context. After months managing the account, you also need to explain what you reviewed, what you changed and what you missed.

Prepare a response to findings, not a defence of the whole account

Ask for the auditor's findings in writing, including the affected campaign or keyword, the evidence and the proposed change. Confirm which business outcome the audit is judging: qualified leads, sales, profitability or another agreed goal. A structural preference and a demonstrated problem deserve different responses.

Take the consequential findings to your manager before the meeting. If you're still learning the platform and your team is stretched, ask for named support: a senior practitioner to check the recommendations, someone to own the client conversation, and agreement on what you can approve. Those may be the same person. If the previous manager is about to become unavailable, arrange a replacement reviewer now.

For each finding, prepare one of three responses:

• A confirmed problem: state the evidence, the correction, its owner and timing. Address an urgent harmful error within your authority while arranging any required approval.
• A proposed improvement: state what it would change, what evidence supports it and what needs checking before a decision. Give a date for that decision, rather than promising an unassessed restructure.
• An unanswered historical question: state what the records establish, who can clarify it and when you'll report back. If the reason remains unavailable, report that too.

Keep the list short enough to work through. A date can be a deadline for investigation or approval; it needn't pretend every item is already a fix.

Separate what happened from why it happened

Google Ads change history covers the past two years. It can help establish when recorded edits happened and show a user, system or tool associated with them. Google also documents gaps in what is listed. It cannot reliably reconstruct an account's entire past, and an edit record does not tell you the business reasoning behind it.

Use it to prepare accurate answers. Where history matters, share the relevant dated facts and their limits, rather than handing over a raw export as your explanation. Ask the previous owner about the few unresolved decisions that could change today's recommendation, and look for the associated brief, approval or test record. Avoid guessing a plausible reason and presenting it as remembered history.

Your own review is a separate question. A setup can predate you while a missed check belongs to your tenure. If you should have caught a problem, say what you missed and how you'll correct both the issue and the review that failed to catch it. “I inherited it” does not answer that part of the audit.

When the finding is “Why didn't you isolate the top keywords?”

First clarify whether “isolate” means moving the existing keywords into a separate ad group or a separate campaign. Ask what different treatment the auditor wants those keywords to receive.

Google's Search account-structure guidance recommends grouping keywords by shared budgets and targets at campaign level, and by landing-page and creative themes at ad-group level. A separate budget requirement can justify a campaign; a distinct message or destination can justify a different ad group. A high conversion count alone does not establish either need. When a Search Term Deserves Its Own Keyword explains the treatment question in more detail.

Suppose you hadn't assessed whether those keywords needed different treatment. You could answer:

“I hadn't reviewed that question during my management, and I should have. I'll check whether these keywords need a different budget, bidding goal, ad or page and review the proposal with our senior practitioner. We'll come back on Thursday with a recommendation and, if a test is warranted, how we'd judge it. I haven't established why the original structure was chosen.”

That admits the missing review while leaving the technical decision open. Inspect the current ads and destination for those keywords, the bidding goal, and the client's spending requirements. Say the keywords already use the intended message and page and can share the same budget and goal. You can explain that evidence for retaining the group. If instead the client needs one service's budget kept separate from the others, a separately budgeted campaign addresses a concrete control requirement.

Propose the smallest change that addresses the unmet need. Agree how you'll judge it, when you'll review it and who must approve it before implementing a material intervention.

Leave the meeting with accountable next steps

Confirm the agreed findings, actions, owners, approvals and next update in writing. State any unresolved disagreement with the evidence needed to settle it. Your senior colleague should own questions about the agency's service commitments and capacity, so your dates reflect work the team can actually deliver.

For an audit finding about figures reported to the client, verify any discrepancy against the underlying records and preserve both records. Bring it to an appropriate senior owner for correction; if that person is implicated, use another designated escalation route. A campaign fix cannot resolve inaccurate reporting, and you should not repeat a figure you cannot substantiate.