Last updated: February 10, 2026
Most Google Ads graders lie to you. Not deliberately, but structurally. They're built to do one thing: show you a list of problems and then sell you a subscription to fix them. The grade itself is designed to make you feel just worried enough to open your wallet.
WordStream's Performance Grader pioneered this playbook back in 2011. It's been used to audit accounts representing over $3 billion in total ad spend across 16,000 campaigns, and it remains the most well-known free audit tool in paid search. But here's what's changed since 2011: Google Ads has become an entirely different platform. Performance Max, AI Max for Search, Demand Gen, Smart Bidding Exploration, ads in AI Overviews, brand guidelines, channel-level reporting. The platform has evolved at an extraordinary pace. Many grading tools haven't kept up.
The groas Google Ads grader was built from the ground up for the 2026 advertising landscape. It evaluates your campaigns against the metrics and strategies that actually determine profitability today, not the checklist items that mattered five years ago. And unlike every other grader on the market, it doesn't just tell you what's wrong. It can fix it.
That distinction matters more than most people realise. A diagnosis without treatment is just anxiety with a score attached.
To understand why the groas grader exists, you first need to understand what's wrong with the tools most advertisers currently rely on.
Traditional graders like WordStream's evaluate your account against a static set of best practices: Quality Score distribution, click-through rate against industry benchmarks, impression share, negative keyword usage, account activity frequency, mobile optimisation, and ad text quality. These are all real metrics that matter to some degree.
The problem is that checking boxes doesn't tell you whether your advertising is profitable. An account can score beautifully across every checklist item and still lose money on every conversion. Conversely, an account can have mediocre Quality Scores and below-average CTR but generate exceptional returns because it's targeting the right audiences with the right offers at the right margins.
Checklist graders measure activity and compliance with general best practices. They don't measure the thing you actually care about: whether your ad spend is generating profit.
Most graders compare your metrics against "industry benchmarks" derived from aggregated data across thousands of accounts. Your CTR is above the industry average of 6.66%? You get a good grade. Your CPA is below the median of $23.74? Another green checkmark.
But industry benchmarks are averages that include everything from expertly managed accounts spending $100,000 per month to abandoned accounts spending $500. They blend brand campaigns with prospecting campaigns, remarketing with cold traffic, ecommerce with lead gen. The resulting "average" is so diluted that comparing yourself against it tells you almost nothing about your specific performance.
Your CTR being above average is meaningless if those clicks aren't converting. Your CPA being below the median doesn't matter if your margins can't support it. The groas grader evaluates your account against your actual business economics, not an abstract statistical average that may have nothing to do with your situation.
Every traditional grader gives you a point-in-time snapshot. You run the audit, get your report, and it's immediately stale. Your account changes daily. Competitor behaviour shifts hourly. Auction dynamics fluctuate constantly. A grade from last Tuesday tells you nothing about what's happening in your campaigns right now.
This is like getting a physical exam once a year and assuming you're healthy for the other 364 days. The most dangerous problems in a Google Ads account, like gradual CPA creep, slowly declining conversion rates, or increasing waste from irrelevant search terms, are trends that a single snapshot won't catch. They need continuous monitoring to detect and address.
The groas grader is designed around a fundamentally different philosophy: grade the things that determine whether you're making money, not the things that make a nice report card. Here's what it analyses and why each element matters.
This goes beyond the basic "do you have negative keywords?" check that most graders perform. The groas grader digs into your actual search term reports to identify specific queries that are consuming budget without generating conversions. It quantifies the exact dollar amount being wasted on irrelevant traffic and flags the search term patterns that represent the biggest leaks.
In a typical small business account, 15% to 30% of monthly ad spend goes to clicks that never had any realistic chance of converting. On a $5,000 monthly budget, that's $750 to $1,500 per month, or $9,000 to $18,000 per year, simply evaporating. Most account owners have no idea this is happening because they never look at their search term reports, and their grader tool doesn't quantify it in dollar terms.
Is your current bidding strategy appropriate for your campaign maturity, conversion volume, and business goals? Are you using Target ROAS with only 12 conversions per month (not enough data for the algorithm to work)? Are you on Maximize Conversions when you should have graduated to value-based bidding? Did you set a Target ROAS of 600% when your historical performance is 320% (which is why your campaigns stopped spending)?
The groas grader evaluates your bidding strategy against your actual conversion data and campaign characteristics. It identifies mismatches between your bidding approach and your account's reality, something no checklist-based grader can do because it requires understanding the relationship between your data volume, your targets, and Google's algorithm requirements.
Google Ads in 2026 rewards certain campaign structures and punishes others. Performance Max campaigns with too many asset groups competing against each other cannibalise performance. Search campaigns with AI Max enabled but no proper negative keyword guardrails bleed budget to irrelevant queries. Campaigns targeting both brand and non-brand traffic in the same structure inflate apparent performance while hiding weak prospecting results.
The grader evaluates whether your campaign architecture is working for or against Google's algorithms. It flags structural issues that are invisible in surface-level metrics but quietly undermine performance: overlapping targeting that causes your campaigns to compete against each other, budget allocation that starves your best-performing campaigns while overfeeding underperformers, and conversion tracking setups that send Google's AI misleading signals.
Your conversion tracking is the foundation that everything else is built on. If it's misconfigured, every metric you see is wrong, and every automated bidding decision Google makes is based on faulty data.
The groas grader checks for common tracking issues that silently corrupt campaign performance: duplicate conversion counting, misattributed values, conversion actions that fire on page loads rather than actual completions, missing conversion actions that leave valuable signals untracked, and value tracking that includes tax and shipping (which inflates reported ROAS by 10% to 25% in many accounts).
Industry research suggests that nearly 30% of Google Ads accounts have at least one meaningful conversion tracking error. For accounts using Smart Bidding strategies, even a small tracking error compounds into significant performance degradation because the algorithm optimises against the wrong data continuously.
This is the metric that no other grader calculates because it requires understanding your business, not just your Google Ads data. Based on your reported margins and conversion values, the groas grader estimates whether your campaigns are actually profitable after accounting for product costs and ad spend, not just whether they're generating revenue.
A campaign showing a 350% ROAS might look healthy on a standard grader. But if your margins are 25%, your break-even ROAS is 400%. That campaign is losing money on every conversion, and a traditional grader would give it a passing grade because 350% is "above average." The groas grader catches this because it evaluates performance against your economics, not against an arbitrary industry benchmark.
After auditing thousands of accounts, clear patterns emerge that separate the accounts generating genuine profit from those slowly burning money while appearing successful on the surface.
A well-managed Google Ads account in 2026 typically shows several characteristics that go beyond surface metrics. Wasted spend sits below 10% of total budget, meaning over 90% of clicks come from searches genuinely relevant to the business. Conversion tracking is accurate within 5% of actual revenue as reported by the payment processor or CRM. Bidding strategies match the campaign's data maturity, with enough conversion volume (30 or more per month per campaign) for Smart Bidding to optimise effectively. Campaign structure separates brand from non-brand traffic, making it possible to evaluate true prospecting performance independently. Non-brand ROAS sits meaningfully above the account's calculated break-even ROAS, indicating genuine profit from customer acquisition. Negative keyword lists are actively maintained and growing, reflecting ongoing attention to search term quality. Landing page experience scores are high across campaigns, keeping Quality Scores above 6 on average and reducing cost per click.
Struggling accounts share their own patterns, and they're not always obvious from standard metrics. Wasted spend exceeds 20% of total budget, with search term reports full of irrelevant queries that have accumulated over weeks or months without attention. Bidding strategy is mismatched: Target ROAS set far above historical performance (causing the campaign to stop spending), or Maximize Conversions running indefinitely without a CPA or ROAS target (causing Google to chase volume at any cost). Brand and non-brand performance is blended together, masking the reality that prospecting campaigns may be generating a below-break-even ROAS while brand campaigns prop up the overall average. Conversion tracking has errors: duplicate transactions, inflated values, or missing conversion actions that leave the algorithm blind to important signals. Budget allocation is static: the same budget splits across campaigns month after month regardless of which campaigns are performing and which aren't. No campaign experiments are running. No ad copy tests. No landing page variations. The account is on autopilot, and autopilot without autonomous intelligence is just slow decay.
Many accounts live in a middle ground that's more dangerous than outright failure. They show acceptable surface metrics, positive ROAS, reasonable CPA, decent CTR. Everything looks fine. But underneath, 20% to 30% of spend is wasted on irrelevant clicks, the bidding strategy isn't optimal for the campaign's data profile, and the account is generating perhaps half the profit it could with proper management.
These are the accounts where a traditional grader does the most damage, because it confirms that things are "good enough" and removes the urgency to improve. The groas grader is specifically designed to expose these hidden opportunities by evaluating against profitability potential rather than competency thresholds.
Here's the truth that every Google Ads grader manufacturer knows but won't say out loud: the vast majority of people who receive an audit report never implement the recommendations.
WordStream's own data over the years has shown that their grader is primarily a lead generation tool. You run the audit, see your score, feel concerned, and then either sign up for WordStream's paid services or do nothing. The audit itself rarely leads to meaningful improvement because implementing the recommendations requires the same expertise and time that caused the problems in the first place. If you knew how to fix your Quality Scores, you would have already done it. If you had time to review search term reports weekly, they wouldn't be full of irrelevant queries.
This is the diagnostic-only trap. It's like a doctor who gives you a thorough exam, identifies five health problems, hands you a sheet of paper listing them, and then shows you the door. You leave the office knowing more about your problems but with zero additional capacity to solve them.
The groas grader was designed to break this pattern. It doesn't just identify what's wrong with your account. It shows you exactly what groas's autonomous AI would do to fix each issue, and it can begin implementing those fixes immediately when you choose to activate it.
Negative keywords that should be added? groas identifies them and can add them automatically, continuously, as new irrelevant terms appear. Bidding strategy that needs adjustment? groas evaluates your conversion data in real time and dynamically optimises bids without the learning phase penalties of manual target changes. Budget allocation that's suboptimal? groas continuously shifts spend toward your highest-performing campaigns and away from underperformers, every hour of every day.
The difference isn't just philosophical. Accounts that receive a standard grader audit and attempt to implement recommendations manually see an average performance improvement of 8% to 15%, assuming they have the expertise to implement correctly and the time to follow through. Accounts that connect to groas's autonomous optimisation typically see 30% to 50% improvement because every identified issue is addressed immediately, continuously, and with a level of data-driven precision that manual implementation can't match.
When you run the groas grader on your account, you'll receive scores across multiple dimensions that combine into an overall account health rating. Here's how to interpret what you see.
This quantifies how much of your monthly budget is going to clicks that aren't relevant to your business. A score of 90 or above means less than 10% waste, which is excellent. Between 70 and 89 means 10% to 20% waste, indicating room for improvement through better negative keyword management. Between 50 and 69 means 20% to 30% waste, which is common in accounts that haven't been actively managed in the past 60 to 90 days. Below 50 means over 30% of your budget is being consumed by irrelevant traffic, and immediate attention is needed to stop the bleeding.
This evaluates whether your bidding strategy is appropriate for your data volume and business goals, and whether your current targets align with your account's actual performance capabilities. A high score means your strategy matches your situation. A low score often indicates a mismatch, like using Target ROAS with insufficient conversion data, setting targets that are unrealistically high or dangerously low, or staying on basic bidding strategies when your account has matured enough for more sophisticated approaches.
This assesses your campaign architecture, conversion tracking setup, and account configuration. It checks for common structural problems like cannibalising campaign overlap, blended brand and non-brand reporting, missing conversion actions, and tracking errors that send wrong signals to Google's bidding algorithms.
This is the metric that matters most and the one no other grader calculates. Based on your conversion values, reported margins, and total ad costs, the profitability score estimates whether your campaigns are generating genuine profit or creating an illusion of performance that doesn't survive contact with your bank statement.
Your overall score combines all dimensions into a single rating that represents how well your account is performing relative to its potential. A high overall score doesn't mean there's nothing to improve. It means the foundations are sound and optimisation will compound on a solid base. A low overall score means there are fundamental issues that need addressing before fine-tuning will make a meaningful difference.
WordStream's Performance Grader has been the default Google Ads audit tool for over a decade. It grades accounts across nine areas including wasted spend, Quality Score, CTR, impression share, mobile optimisation, landing page assessment, long-tail keyword usage, ad text quality, and account activity. It benchmarks your performance against data from 16,000 campaigns across 23 industries, and it's genuinely useful as a starting point for advertisers who've never audited their account.
But it was designed in an era when Google Ads was a fundamentally simpler platform. Manual CPC bidding was standard. Exact match actually meant exact match. Performance Max didn't exist. AI Max wasn't a thing. There were no ads in AI Overviews. The platform's complexity has increased by an order of magnitude since WordStream's grader was first built, and while it has received updates over the years, the core evaluation framework remains rooted in a simpler time.
The groas grader evaluates your account through the lens of 2026's Google Ads reality. It understands Performance Max campaign dynamics, AI Max implications, Smart Bidding requirements, and the interplay between campaign types that defines modern account performance. It goes beyond surface metrics to evaluate profitability, which WordStream's tool doesn't attempt. And it connects directly to autonomous AI optimisation that can act on its findings, which no other grading tool offers.
Other tools in the space, like SEMrush's PPC toolkit and Google's own Recommendations tab, each have their strengths. SEMrush excels at competitive analysis but is built for PPC professionals, not business owners seeking a quick health check. Google's Recommendations are useful but famously biased toward strategies that increase your spending with Google, which isn't always aligned with your profitability goals. Research has consistently shown that blindly accepting Google's recommendations can increase spend without proportional returns.
The groas grader sits in a unique position: sophisticated enough to catch real profitability issues, accessible enough for non-experts to understand, and connected to an autonomous system that can actually resolve the problems it identifies. No other tool combines all three.
The groas Google Ads grader is free to use, requires no credit card, and generates your report within minutes. You connect your Google Ads account through secure OAuth authentication (groas never stores your login credentials), and the system analyses your campaigns, search terms, bidding configuration, conversion tracking, and spend patterns.
Your audit report identifies your biggest opportunities for improvement, quantifies how much budget is being wasted on irrelevant traffic, evaluates whether your bidding strategy matches your account's data maturity, and estimates your campaigns' real profitability based on your margins and costs.
From there, you have two paths. You can use the audit findings to guide manual optimisation, taking the insights and implementing changes yourself or with your current manager. Or you can activate groas's autonomous AI management, which begins implementing the identified improvements immediately and continues optimising 24/7 going forward.
Either way, the audit itself is genuinely free, genuinely useful, and gives you something that most grading tools don't: an honest picture of whether your Google Ads are making you money or just looking like they are.
Run your free audit now at groas.ai/google-ads-grader
A Google Ads grader is a free tool that audits your advertising account and scores it across key performance areas. Traditional graders like WordStream's evaluate metrics such as Quality Score, click-through rate, impression share, and wasted spend. The groas grader goes further by evaluating bidding strategy alignment, campaign structure health, conversion tracking accuracy, and estimated real profitability based on your actual margins.
Yes. The groas grader is completely free to use with no credit card required. You connect your Google Ads account through secure OAuth authentication, and the system generates a comprehensive audit report within minutes. groas never stores your login credentials or modifies your account during the grading process.
WordStream's grader evaluates your account against general PPC best practices and industry benchmarks across nine checklist areas. The groas grader evaluates against actual profitability metrics, assesses whether your bidding strategy matches your data volume and business goals, and identifies specific dollar amounts of wasted spend. Most importantly, the groas grader connects to autonomous AI that can fix the problems it identifies, while WordStream's grader is diagnostic only.
The groas grader uniquely evaluates real profitability estimation (based on your margins, not just ROAS), bidding strategy alignment with your actual conversion volume and campaign maturity, specific dollar quantification of wasted spend on irrelevant search terms, and conversion tracking accuracy that could be corrupting your Smart Bidding performance. Traditional graders focus on compliance metrics like Quality Score and CTR benchmarks without connecting them to whether you're actually making money.
A grader alone can only diagnose. The performance improvement depends on whether the findings get implemented. Research across thousands of accounts shows that manual implementation of grader recommendations produces 8% to 15% improvement on average, assuming correct execution. The groas grader bridges the gap between diagnosis and treatment by connecting directly to autonomous AI management that implements optimisations automatically and continuously, typically producing 30% to 50% performance improvement.
On the groas grader, an overall score above 80 indicates a well-managed account with solid fundamentals. Scores between 60 and 79 indicate meaningful opportunities for improvement, particularly in areas like wasted spend reduction and bidding strategy optimisation. Scores below 60 typically indicate fundamental issues such as conversion tracking errors, significant budget waste, or mismatched bidding strategies that need immediate attention.
Google's Recommendations tab provides optimisation suggestions directly in your account, but these recommendations are designed to align with Google's priorities, which often means increasing your ad spend. Multiple studies have shown that blindly accepting Google's recommendations can increase costs without proportional performance improvement. An independent grader provides a more objective assessment of your account health and identifies opportunities that Google's own system may not flag because they don't serve Google's revenue interests.
A comprehensive audit should happen at least quarterly, with lighter performance reviews monthly. However, the biggest limitation of periodic audits is that account problems accumulate between reviews. Wasted spend builds up. Bidding mismatches persist. Conversion tracking errors compound. This is why continuous autonomous monitoring, like what groas provides after the initial grading, produces significantly better results than periodic snapshots.
No. The groas grader is read-only during the auditing process. It analyses your account data and generates a report but does not make any changes, adjust any settings, or modify any campaigns. Changes only happen if you explicitly choose to activate groas's autonomous management after reviewing your audit results.
You need an active Google Ads account with at least 30 days of campaign data. The groas grader works best on accounts with active campaigns that have accumulated meaningful click and conversion data. Brand new accounts with minimal activity won't generate enough data for a meaningful audit. The connection process takes less than two minutes through secure Google OAuth, and your full report is typically ready within minutes.
