When we take over a Google Ads account, we do not start by writing new ads. We start by finding out where the current budget is going, because in almost every account we have audited, somewhere between twenty and forty percent of spend is going somewhere it should not be. Recovering that money costs nothing. It is the cheapest performance improvement available to you.
Here are the seven places to look, in the order we look at them.
1. The search terms report
Open it, set the date range to the last ninety days, sort by cost descending, and read the top hundred terms. Not the keywords — the actual queries people typed. In most accounts, the first five minutes of this exercise turns up terms like "free", "jobs", "salary", "diy", "how to do it yourself" and competitor brand names that were never going to convert.
Add these as negative keywords at the campaign or account level. Then set a recurring calendar reminder to do it again every week, because broad match will keep finding new ways to spend your money on adjacent nonsense.
2. Performance Max eating your brand
This is the single most common problem we find. Performance Max will happily serve on searches for your own company name, convert people who were already coming to you, and report a spectacular return on ad spend for doing it.
The fix is a brand exclusion list applied at the campaign level. Add it, then compare your branded search volume before and after. If Performance Max spend drops and total conversions stay flat, you just found out what it was really doing.
3. Conversions counted more than once
Check your conversion actions. If you have both a thank-you page view and a form submission event firing for the same action, you are double counting. If a phone call conversion is set to count "every" rather than "one" per click, a customer who calls three times to reschedule is being reported as three conversions.
Smart bidding optimises toward the numbers you give it. Give it inflated numbers and it confidently bids more for the traffic producing them.
4. Location settings on "presence or interest"
Google's default location option targets people who are in your area or have shown interest in it. For a local service business, that second half is a budget leak. Someone in another state reading about your city is not going to book a plumber in it.
Change the setting to "presence" only. This one takes thirty seconds and often removes several percent of wasted spend immediately.
5. Display Network expansion left on
Search campaigns with "include Google Display Network" enabled will quietly spend a portion of your search budget on display placements, usually at a much worse conversion rate. Check every search campaign and turn it off. If you want display, run it as its own campaign where you can judge it on its own numbers.
6. Ad schedule and device bid gaps
Pull your performance by hour of day and by device. Many service businesses find that clicks between midnight and 6am convert at a fraction of daytime rates, or that tablet traffic converts at half the rate of mobile. Neither is a rule — it is specific to your account — but you cannot adjust for it until you have looked.
7. Landing pages that answer a different question
This is the expensive one. Click your own ads. If the ad promises emergency same-day service and the landing page is a general homepage with a menu of nine services, you are paying for the click and then losing the person in three seconds.
Every ad group with meaningful spend deserves a landing page that continues the sentence the ad started. This is usually the highest-leverage change in the whole list, and the only one that takes real work.
What to do with the money you recover
Do not immediately spend it. Run the account at the lower spend for two or three weeks first and confirm that conversions held. Once you have proved the waste was genuinely waste, reinvest it into the campaigns and keywords that are already producing — that is where an extra dollar has the best chance of behaving like the dollars before it.
If you want a second pair of eyes on this, we do this audit for free and send the findings in writing. No call required unless you want one.