Google Ads Audit Checklist for Mortgage Brokers

Use this Google Ads audit checklist for a mortgage broker in order: define the product and jurisdiction, inspect financial and housing policy scope, verify disclosures and pages, test calls and applications, reconcile funded stages, and compare collected fees with advertising cost. Keep sensitive borrower information in approved systems.

This is an educational checklist, not lending, financial, fair-housing, legal, privacy, or automated adz.so advice. Review Google Ads Help, financial products policy, and compliance requirements.

1. Define scope and stages

[ ] Record dates, jurisdictions, licenses, products, lenders, loan officers, pages, phone numbers, forms, application system, campaigns, budgets, and conversions.
[ ] State whether the decision concerns purchase, refinance, home equity, commercial, referral, marketplace, or branch demand.
[ ] Separate click, inquiry, contact, qualified conversation, prequalification, application, document-complete file, approval, closing, funding, fee collection, decline, withdrawal, and duplicate.
[ ] Record currency, time zone, attribution window, source systems, consent assumptions, and recent rate, page, staff, or lender changes.
[ ] Mark unavailable stages unknown rather than estimating revenue.

2. Review financial and housing policy

[ ] Identify the financial product and any housing-advertising scope.
[ ] Review current financial-product, housing, and personalized-advertising requirements for each target location.
[ ] Inspect location targeting, exclusions, presence assumptions, audiences, customer lists, remarketing, and creative.
[ ] Record policy sources, evidence, and a compliance owner for each uncertainty.
[ ] Do not assume an available interface control is permitted.

3. Validate queries, ads, pages, and disclosures

[ ] Classify searches as purchase, refinance, home equity, rates, qualification, calculator, debt, existing borrower, job, vendor, competitor, or irrelevant.
[ ] Follow representative searches to the product page, disclosures, form, phone, calculator, and application path.
[ ] Check broker or lender identity, licensing or jurisdiction coverage, rate and fee language, eligibility, privacy notice, and next step.
[ ] Flag guaranteed approval, lowest-rate, no-credit-check, expired-rate, unsupported savings, or unclear payment claims.
[ ] Confirm downloads and calculators are not counted as completed applications.

4. Test calls, forms, and application handoffs

[ ] Use an approved test identity; do not enter fabricated sensitive financial data into live underwriting.
[ ] Test mobile and desktop routes during advertised operating hours and check phone ownership, routing, response, voicemail, and loan-officer assignment.
[ ] Verify form fields, consent, privacy notice, validation, confirmation, source value, duplicate handling, CRM creation, and application handoff.
[ ] Distinguish inquiry, rate request, prequalification conversation, application, and document-complete file.
[ ] Confirm identity, credit, income, assets, and property information stays in approved systems.

5. Reconcile loan stages

[ ] Compare ad events with contacted, qualified, prequalified, applied, document-complete, approved, closed, funded, declined, withdrawn, and duplicate outcomes.
[ ] Break down by product, jurisdiction, campaign, query, page, device, lender, loan officer, and cohort.
[ ] Check source IDs, consent, stage definitions, deduplication, time zone, import timing, and value timing.
[ ] Mark recent cohorts immature when the funding window has not elapsed.
[ ] Do not send offline values into bidding before their definitions and joins are proven.

6. Review funded-loan economics

[ ] Record 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 loan amount, approved amount, expected revenue, and collected fee distinct.
[ ] Identify out-of-license leads, duplicate marketplace traffic, unavailable products, poor placement, and slow response queues.
[ ] Mark missing collection, cost, or cohort assumptions unknown.

7. Check disclosures, privacy, and consent

[ ] Review ad and page disclosures, rate and fee claims, qualification language, housing language, form notices, and licensing information.
[ ] Inspect call tracking, analytics, customer lists, remarketing, lead-provider transfers, CRM imports, access, retention, and consent.
[ ] Keep credit, income, assets, identity, property, and application records in approved systems.
[ ] Escalate lending, financial, fair-housing, licensing, legal, privacy, and consumer-protection questions.

8. Close findings and retest

For each failed item, capture product, jurisdiction, campaign, query or page, device, evidence, impact, owner, priority, action, proof condition, retest result, and limitation. Prioritize broken tracking, missing consent, noncompliant claims, wrong-jurisdiction routing, missing disclosures, unusable forms, and lead-distribution failures.

After each repair, repeat the original approved journey and compare mature cohorts. Annotate rate changes, lender mix, seasonality, staffing, page releases, and policy changes.

Mortgage-broker handoff

End with what is proven, what must be corrected, what requires compliance review, what should be tested, and what remains unknown. For context, see how to audit Google Ads for mortgage brokers, free Google Ads audit for mortgage brokers, and best Google Ads audit tools.