Google Ads guide

Free Google Ads Audit for Mortgage Brokers

A free Google Ads audit for a mortgage broker should show whether paid traffic reaches a product and jurisdiction the broker can serve, whether the team handles inquiries correctly, and whether applications become funded business. Use a focused worksheet and approved records; do not equate a cheap form with a loan.

This is an educational self-service review, not lending, financial, fair-housing, legal, privacy, or automated adz.so advice. Review current Google Ads Help, financial-products policy, and the broker’s compliance requirements.

Choose the lending scope

Set the date range and decision: purchase, refinance, home equity, commercial, marketplace, referral, or branch performance. Record target jurisdictions, licenses, products, lenders, loan officers, pages, phones, forms, application system, campaigns, budgets, and conversion definitions.

Separate click, inquiry, contact, qualified conversation, prequalification, application, document-complete file, approval, closing, funding, fee collected, decline, withdrawal, and duplicate. Keep rate shoppers, calculators, existing borrowers, vendors, jobs, and support separate.

Build a safe worksheet

Use rows for product, jurisdiction, campaign, page, or loan officer. Include spend, clicks, search themes, calls, forms, response time, qualified leads, applications, approvals, fundings, fee collected, missing joins, compliance question, owner, action, proof condition, and retest date.

Use event IDs and timestamps, not names, income, credit, assets, property details, or application documents. If CRM and application stages cannot be joined safely, record the gap and do not estimate funded value.

Check financial and housing targeting

Identify the product promoted and whether the campaign also falls within housing advertising. Review current financial-product, housing, and personalized-advertising requirements for every target location. Inspect location settings, exclusions, presence assumptions, audiences, customer lists, remarketing, and creative.

Record the policy source and reviewer for each uncertainty. Do not assume a control is allowed because it is available in the interface. A free worksheet can surface a question; a compliance or legal owner must decide it.

Review search terms, ads, and pages

Group searches into purchase, refinance, home equity, rates, qualification, calculator, debt, existing borrower, job, vendor, competitor, and irrelevant. Follow representative terms through ad, product page, disclosure, form, phone, and application path.

Check lender or broker identity, licensing or jurisdiction coverage, rates, APR or fee language where applicable, eligibility statements, privacy notice, and next-step clarity. Flag “guaranteed approval,” “lowest rate,” “no credit check,” expired rates, and unsupported savings claims for review.

Test calls, forms, and applications

Use an approved test identity and do not submit fabricated sensitive data to live underwriting. Test mobile and desktop routes during advertised operating hours. Check phone routing, response time, voicemail, loan-officer ownership, disposition, recording notice, form validation, consent, source value, duplicate handling, CRM creation, and application handoff.

Distinguish an inquiry, rate request, prequalification conversation, application, and document-complete file. Keep identity, credit, income, assets, and property information in approved systems.

Reconcile the loan funnel

Compare ad events with contacted, qualified, prequalified, applied, document-complete, approved, closed, funded, withdrawn, declined, and duplicate stages. Break down by product, jurisdiction, campaign, query, page, device, lender, loan officer, and cohort.

Check source IDs, consent, deduplication, stage definitions, timing, currency, time zone, and import maturity. A funded outcome can take months. Mark recent cohorts immature rather than judging them on closing value.

Check funded economics

Collect ad spend, contact and application rates, approval and funding rates, broker fee or commission collected, lender or referral split, lead fees, refunds, clawbacks, processing effort, and loan-officer time. Keep expected revenue, approved amount, loan amount, and collected fee separate.

Flag leads outside licensing, duplicate marketplace traffic, applications for unavailable products, and slow response queues. Do not use loan principal as broker revenue or an estimated lifetime value without a documented definition and collection window.

Review disclosures and consent

Check ad and page disclosures, form notices, call tracking, analytics, customer lists, remarketing, lead-provider transfers, CRM imports, access, retention, and vendor ownership. Review rate, fee, qualification, housing, and savings claims with compliance.

Escalate financial, lending, fair-housing, licensing, privacy, or consumer-protection questions. This free audit is a risk screen, not a legal conclusion.

Prioritize and retest

Prioritize broken tracking, missing consent, noncompliant claims, wrong-jurisdiction routing, missing disclosures, unusable forms, and lead-distribution failures. Then test search-term exclusions, product-page alignment, call coverage, response routing, budget distribution, and offline-stage definitions.

For each test, record the original state, owner, expected result, comparison cohort, proof condition, and retest result. Annotate rate changes, lender mix, seasonality, staffing, and policy changes.

Free mortgage-broker audit handoff

Deliver the worksheet, sources, test results, limitations, compliance questions, prioritized actions, and next review date. For a deeper process, see how to audit Google Ads for mortgage brokers and best Google Ads audit tools.