A 24-item self-audit checklist peptide brand founders can run on their own Google Ads account in about an hour — covering policy health, campaign structure, keywords, ad copy, tracking, and budget red flags.
If you sell peptides or research chemicals, you already know Google Ads is not a "set it and forget it" channel. It is a restricted-category minefield where one policy misstep can pause a campaign overnight, one sloppy negative keyword list can burn a month of budget on junk clicks, and one landing page claim can trigger an account suspension that takes weeks to unwind. Most brands in this space inherited their account from a freelancer, a previous agency, or a founder who taught themselves Google Ads on YouTube — and nobody has done a full top-to-bottom review since.
This is a peptide brand Google Ads audit checklist you can run yourself, in about an hour, using nothing but your own account access. It covers six categories that mirror how we actually audit accounts for clients: Account & Policy Health, Campaign Structure, Keywords & Negatives, Ad Copy & Landing Pages, Conversion Tracking & Attribution, and Budget & Bidding — twenty-four items total. Work through them in order and be honest about what you find, and by the end you will know whether your account needs a tune-up or a teardown.
A fair number of these items end with some version of "if you're not sure, that's a sign you need a second set of eyes." That is not a sales pitch dressed up as a checklist — it is the honest reality of restricted-category advertising. Half the value of an experienced peptide-vertical media buyer is knowing which settings are invisible until they cost you money.
Everything else in this checklist is irrelevant if your account is one strike away from suspension. Start here.
Go to Policy Manager and look at the last 12 months. Good looks like zero suspensions and a small, explainable number of individual disapprovals. A red flag is any account-level suspension, even a reversed one — reversed suspensions still leave a risk flag that affects how aggressively Google reviews future changes. Suspended and reinstated more than once is an emergency, not a checklist item.
Peptide and research-chemical advertisers frequently need advertiser verification and, depending on positioning, healthcare-adjacent certification. Good looks like a verified badge with no pending items on your account status page. A red flag is anything sitting in "action required" for more than a few days — unverified accounts get throttled in the auction even while ads are technically live, so impressions crater with no warning that verification is the cause.
A shaky payment history — declined charges, an expiring card, disputes — draws extra scrutiny from Google's automated systems on top of disrupting your own spend pacing. Good looks like a current, non-expiring payment method and no open billing threads. A declined charge in the last quarter should get fixed today.
Individual ad disapprovals happen to every advertiser and are not alarming on their own — the pattern is what matters. Pull the last 90 days and sort by reason. Good looks like disapprovals clustered around one or two policies you already understand and fixed once. A red flag is disapprovals scattered across many policies, recurring after you thought you fixed them, or ones you genuinely cannot explain — that usually means whoever wrote the copy did not fully understand this category's compliance boundaries, worth a specialist look.
Structure problems are quiet. They do not throw errors. They just make every other lever in the account harder to pull.
Good looks like clear separation between brand campaigns, non-brand category campaigns, and any product-specific or competitor campaigns, each with its own budget and bid strategy. A red flag is a single sprawling campaign mixing brand and non-brand traffic, or one campaign with fifteen unrelated ad groups competing for the same shared budget — you cannot tell what is working when everything is lumped together, and neither can Google's bidding algorithms.
Open your three largest ad groups and read the keyword lists inside. Good looks like each ad group built around one tight theme — a single compound or use case — with ads written specifically to it. A red flag is ad groups with 40+ keywords spanning unrelated products, which forces generic ad copy that cannot speak precisely to any one search and drags down quality score and click-through rate.
Compare your geo-targeting against where you can actually legally ship and sell. Good looks like targeting matching your real shipping footprint, with location options set to "presence" rather than the looser "presence or interest" default. A red flag is national targeting when you have state-level restrictions, or the default option quietly serving people merely interested in a location rather than physically in it — both burn budget on clicks that can never convert and can create compliance exposure.
Check whether your "Search" campaigns actually have Display Network and Search Partners toggled off. Good looks like pure Search Network only, unless you deliberately built and separately track a Display strategy. A red flag is a Search campaign quietly picking up Search Partner or Display impressions with no review of where that traffic lands — one of the most common sources of wasted spend we find on a first audit, and a five-minute fix once you know to look.
This is where restricted-category accounts leak the most money, and where a strong negative keyword practice pays for itself fastest.
Look at the ratio of broad, phrase, and exact match keywords across the account. Good looks like a deliberate mix — exact and phrase typically carrying the bulk of spend, broad used narrowly and only once Smart Bidding has enough conversion data to control it responsibly. A red flag is an account that is almost entirely broad match with a thin, stale negative list underneath, which in this category means your ads are showing for dosing questions, side-effect questions, and other queries with no purchase intent.
Good looks like a maintained negative list — account, campaign, and ad group level — clearly updated in the last month or two based on real search term data. A red flag is a list built once at launch and never touched again, or no shared list at all. This is exactly the gap we cover in our complete negative keyword list for peptide brands, because the terms that need blocking here are specific to research-chemical search behavior, not the generic negatives every other industry uses.
When did you last read the Search Terms report line by line, not just skim the top ten? Good looks like a weekly or biweekly review where new negatives get added as routine habit. A red flag is not remembering the last time you opened it — in a restricted category, this report is also your first warning system for compliance risk, since it shows exactly what language is triggering your ads.
Check whether competitors are bidding on your brand name, and whether your own non-brand campaigns are accidentally triggering on other companies' brand terms. Good looks like clean separation on both sides. A red flag is either direction going unmonitored — both waste money, and the second can create legal exposure you did not intend.
This is the category most likely to determine whether your account stays live at all, and it is also the category founders are most likely to underestimate.
Read your live ad copy the way a Google policy reviewer would, not the way a marketer would. Good looks like ads that describe the product factually — what it is, research-use framing where applicable — without efficacy claims, health outcome promises, or language implying human consumption where that is not permitted. A red flag is any claim you would not be comfortable defending in a policy appeal, or copy written years ago and never rechecked against current policy, which shifts more often in this category than most.
Click through your top three highest-spend ads yourself, today, on desktop and mobile. Good looks like the landing page delivering exactly what the ad promised — same product, same offer, same language — within the first screen. A red flag is an ad sending traffic to a generic homepage, a different product than advertised, or a page that takes multiple clicks to reach what the searcher wanted. Message mismatch quietly kills conversion rate and quality score together.
Good looks like required disclaimers, research-use language, and any age-gating or terms-of-sale acknowledgment present and easy to find on every landing page you send paid traffic to — not just your homepage. A red flag is any paid landing page missing a disclaimer that appears elsewhere on your site, because reviewers and your own legal exposure care about the specific page the ad links to. We cover this in depth in our landing page compliance audit checklist, worth running alongside this one.
Load your top landing pages on your own phone, on mobile data, not office wifi. Good looks like a page that loads in a couple of seconds, with a clear above-the-fold call to action and no layout shift or intrusive pop-ups. A red flag is a page taking five-plus seconds or requiring pinch-zooming — most search traffic in this category is mobile, and a slow page throws away spend before the visitor sees your offer.
If this section is broken, every other section in this checklist is being optimized against bad data. This is usually the single most valuable category to get right.
Open Conversions under Goals and check what is marked "Primary." Good looks like purchase (and qualified lead submissions, if relevant) set as primary, with softer signals like page views or add-to-carts set as secondary so they inform but do not dominate bidding. A red flag is page views or button clicks counted as primary alongside actual purchases — this quietly tells Smart Bidding to optimize toward cheap, low-value actions instead of revenue, one of the most common issues we find in first audits.
Check whether Enhanced Conversions is turned on and Consent Mode is correctly implemented alongside your cookie banner. Good looks like both active and reporting cleanly in the diagnostics panel. A red flag is a warning icon on either, or not being sure they are set up at all — in a cookie-restricted environment, missing enhanced conversions means undercounting real conversions, which then skews your bidding and your read on what is actually working.
Good looks like a data-driven attribution model, or a documented reason for using something else, with a lookback window that reasonably matches your actual purchase consideration cycle. A red flag is a window far too short for a category where people often research before buying, or so long it credits conversions to clicks from months earlier with no real connection to the purchase. Not being able to explain why the account is set to its current attribution settings is worth flagging — it is exactly the kind of setting that sits quietly wrong for a year.
If meaningful revenue closes through phone calls, email follow-up, or a sales conversation rather than straight checkout, check whether that path is tracked at all. Good looks like call tracking and, where relevant, offline conversion imports feeding back into Google Ads. A red flag is real revenue closing through channels Google Ads has zero visibility into — the bidding algorithm is then working from an incomplete picture no matter how clean the online tracking looks.
The last category is where strategy meets reality — you can have perfect structure and tracking and still be lighting money on fire here.
Check the status column on each campaign for a "Limited by Budget" label. Good looks like your best-performing, highest-ROAS campaigns having enough budget to run the full day uncapped. A red flag is your strongest campaign showing "Limited by Budget" while a weaker one has budget to spare — a straightforward reallocation that often produces an immediate lift with zero new spend.
Good looks like a bid strategy matching how much conversion data the account actually has — manual or Maximize Clicks while volume is thin, moving to Target ROAS or Target CPA once there is enough history (generally 30-plus conversions in the relevant window) for the algorithm to learn from. A red flag is Target ROAS turned on with a trickle of monthly conversions, which usually produces wildly inconsistent, feast-or-famine delivery because there is not enough signal to bid confidently.
Pull the "Search Lost IS (budget)" and "Search Lost IS (rank)" columns for your key campaigns. Good looks like a clear read on which one is holding you back, and a deliberate decision about which to fix first. A red flag is a large share lost to rank alongside claims of "we just need more budget" — the fix there is ad relevance, quality score, or bid competitiveness, and pouring extra budget into a rank problem will not solve it.
Segment your last 90 days of spend by device, campaign, and keyword, and look for meaningful spend sitting on segments with zero or near-zero conversions. Good looks like spend broadly tracking conversions, with underperforming segments already excluded or under active review. A red flag is a device, geography, or keyword theme absorbing real budget with nothing to show for it, unflagged. If you find one and cannot tell whether it is a tracking issue, a targeting issue, or a genuine dead end, that ambiguity is itself a sign this account would benefit from a full audit rather than a spot fix.
Do not try to fix all twenty-four items in one sitting. Run through the list once, end to end, and just take notes — a simple green, yellow, red rating per item is enough. Then triage: anything in Account & Policy Health that came back red gets fixed today, because that category threatens the account's ability to run at all. Anything in Conversion Tracking & Attribution comes next, because every other decision in the account is being made on top of that data. Everything else can be prioritized by estimated spend impact — start with your highest-budget campaigns first.
If you worked through this checklist and came out with mostly greens, that is a genuinely good sign — keep the review cadence going monthly, because policy and platform mechanics in this category shift often enough that a clean account today is not a guarantee for next quarter. If you came out with a long list of yellows and reds, or you found yourself repeatedly unsure whether something counted as a red flag, that uncertainty is itself useful information. It usually means the account has been managed reactively rather than strategically, and it is exactly the situation where bringing in a specialist agency pays for itself quickly.
We built Oney Studio specifically around the problem this checklist exposes: peptide and research-chemical brands need Google Ads expertise and restricted-category compliance expertise in the same room, not as two separate hires who occasionally sync up. Our founder came out of Google, which means we read policy changes the way most agencies read industry newsletters — early, and with an understanding of the "why" behind the rule, not just the letter of it. That combination is what lets us move fast on the parts of this checklist that are genuinely time-consuming to get right, like rebuilding a negative keyword architecture or restructuring campaigns around real product segmentation, without triggering the compliance reviews that slow down agencies unfamiliar with this category.
We recently walked through a similar rebuild for a supplements brand carrying comparable compliance constraints, and the account health, tracking accuracy, and spend efficiency gains followed a pattern a lot like what this checklist is designed to surface — you can read the details in our supplements case study. If you found more red flags than you expected, or simply want a second set of eyes before sinking another month of budget into an account you are not fully confident in, we offer a free audit call to walk through exactly what we would find and fix.
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