A PPC audit for a British advertiser, the five passes over the account and the CAP Code price rules your ad copy has to clear

A PPC audit is five passes over an advertising account, in a fixed order: tracking, structure, search terms, bidding and landing pages. For a British advertiser there is a sixth pass that most audits skip entirely, which is whether the price claims in the ad copy clear the CAP Code rules on price statements. That pass costs nothing to run, it catches the complaint that nobody budgets for, and the rules behind it are published with named rulings you can read yourself.

Harvested against the United Kingdom geo target on its own on 22 October 2026, ppc auditing service draws 110 searches a month in the United Kingdom, and against the India target on its own on the same day it draws 20 a month in India. Two countries, two separate readings.

The five passes, and why the order is fixed

1. Tracking. Does a conversion fire, once, for the right action. Every later judgement rests on this, which is why it is first. An account with broken conversion tracking cannot be audited, only described.
2. Structure. How many campaigns, how the budget is split, whether brand and non brand are separated. Brand traffic mixed into a general campaign inflates every performance figure in the account.
3. Search terms. The actual queries, not the keywords. This is where the money is leaking, and the report should name the ten worst spenders with no conversions.
4. Bidding. Which strategy, and whether it has the conversion volume it needs to work. A conversion steered strategy with almost no conversions is an instruction the system cannot act on.
5. Landing pages. Message match, load speed, and whether the page answers the query the ad was bought on.

Before any of that, read the bill. A British advertiser has two charges on the invoice that do not appear in the ads interface, and the two charges on a UK Google Ads invoice sets out what they are and how they attach to a budget. An audit that reports a cost per acquisition from the interface alone is reporting a number lower than what you paid.

The sixth pass, the price claim in the ad copy

Paid search ads are non broadcast advertising and the CAP Code applies to them in the same way it applies to a poster. The claims that attract complaints are price claims, because they are compressed into a headline with no room for the qualification. We read the ASA own advice on general price claims at asa.org.uk on 22 October 2026, HTTP 200, with the page itself dated 06 October 2026.

The ASA states the scope in its own words: "Rules 3.17 - 3.22 relate to price statements (which includes statements about the way the price will be calculated, as well as definite prices)." Six rules, and five of them are directly reachable from a search ad headline or a sitelink.

This is advice from a regulator about advertising rules and not a legal opinion. The ASA page carries that note itself: "Note: This advice is given by the CAP Executive about non-broadcast advertising. It does not constitute legal advice." Nothing on this page is legal advice either, and a question about your own liability goes to a solicitor.

The five obligations, quoted

Each of these is quoted from the ASA advice as read on 22 October 2026, because a paraphrase of a rule is not the rule.

• Rule 3.17. "Price statements must relate to the product featured in the ad and should not mislead by omission, undue emphasis or distortion".
• Rule 3.18. "Quoted prices must include non-optional taxes, duties, fees and charges that apply to all or most buyers".
• Rule 3.19. "If it is not possible to calculate the charge in advance, for example because it depends on the consumer's circumstances, the ad must make clear the charge is excluded from the advertised price and state how it will be calculated".
• Rule 3.21. "If the price of one product depends on another, marketing communications must make clear the extent of the commitment the consumer must make to obtain the advertised price".
• Rule 3.22. "price claims such as "up to" and "from" must not exaggerate the availability or amount of benefits likely to be obtained by the consumer".

Rule 3.22 is the one that catches search advertising hardest, because a from price is the most natural way to fit a price range into a thirty character headline. The ASA sets out the test it applies: when using from or up to to advertise a saving, a significant proportion of sale items has to be discounted at the maximum saving, and what counts as significant is considered case by case.

Named rulings worth reading before you write a headline

Read three of them. They take ten minutes each and they will change how you write a price extension.

The law underneath moved, and the date matters

The ASA foreword records the change in its own words: the Unfair Commercial Practices provisions in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 replaced and updated the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, and relevant amendments were made to the CAP Code which came into force on 7 April 2025. The ASA also notes that some of its published advice rests on rulings that predate those provisions, and has kept that advice where the underlying principles still align.

On one point the ASA says openly that there is no ruling yet. Its understanding is that the information required under rule 3.19 needs to be set out with as much prominence as the advertised price, and in the absence of precedent it advises marketers to seek legal advice on that specific point. If your ads rely on an excluded charge disclosed in small print, that is the sentence to take to your solicitor.

What the audit document should contain

An audit is only worth what you can act on the same week. Four things make it actionable.

• A dated reading per finding. Every figure with the date it was taken, because an account changes while the audit is being written.
• Ten named search terms to exclude, with their spend. Not a recommendation to review search terms.
• A price claim check per active ad, against the six rules above, with the exact headline quoted.
• One thing to do first. An audit with forty findings and no order produces no change at all.

For the cost side that the audit is measuring against, what you actually pay in Google Ads and what sets the price is the companion read, because an audit judges the account against a figure you can afford rather than against an industry average.

Questions about auditing a paid search account

How often is an audit worth running

A full pass twice a year, and the search terms pass monthly. Search terms change every week as match types pull in new queries, and that is where spend leaks fastest.

Can the agency running the account audit it

They should run the monthly checks. For the full pass, somebody who did not build the structure will see the structure. Ask for the raw data export so the second reader is auditing the account rather than a report about it.

What does a PPC audit usually cost

It varies with account size and a figure quoted here without a dated source would be invented. Ask three providers to price the same scope and compare what each one includes, since the scope varies more than the price does.

Does the CAP Code really apply to a search ad

The ASA advice we read is given by the CAP Executive about non-broadcast advertising, and paid search sits inside that. The practical test is simpler than the jurisdictional one: if a member of the public could complain about your headline, assume somebody eventually will.

Which pass finds the most money

Search terms, almost every time, followed by brand and non brand separation. Those two together usually account for the majority of recoverable spend in an account that has not been reviewed for a year.

The query that never reaches your account

An audit can only examine the queries that reached an ad. The same buyer increasingly asks the question of an assistant instead, gets a short answer naming two suppliers, and never arrives in a search terms report. There is no headline to write for that answer and no bid to adjust. At AI Knows Us we take that reading across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews with a date against it, so an advertiser who has just tightened every match type in the account can also find out what share of the question is now being answered somewhere the account cannot see.