Most Google Ads accounts we audit are wasting between 15 and 30 percent of their budget. Not because the campaigns are badly structured, but because nobody has looked at the search terms report recently, or the conversion tracking has a duplicate firing, or the bidding strategy is optimizing toward the wrong goal. Here is where to look.
The search terms report ¶
Open the search terms report for the last 30 days and sort by cost, descending. Look at the top 20 queries by spend. For each one, ask: is this person likely to become a customer? If the answer is no, add the query as a negative keyword. In most accounts, this exercise alone recovers 10 to 15 percent of budget in the first week.
Duplicate conversion actions ¶
Go to Tools and Settings, then Conversions. If you see two conversion actions with the same category, for example two Purchase actions, check whether both are set to 'Include in Conversions'. If so, your Smart Bidding strategy is optimizing toward a number that is double the real conversion count. This is one of the most common and most damaging errors we find.
Match type audit ¶
Broad match keywords without strong conversion data will trigger on queries you never intended. Pull a match type breakdown from your search terms report. If broad match keywords are generating more than 40 percent of your clicks but less than 20 percent of your conversions, they are likely dragging down account performance. Switch them to phrase match and monitor for two weeks.
Ad schedule and device bid adjustments ¶
Check your conversion rate by hour of day and by device. Most accounts have at least one time window where the conversion rate drops to near zero but ads are still running at full bid. A -50 percent bid adjustment during those hours, or a device exclusion for a device type with a conversion rate below 0.5 percent, can recover meaningful budget.
Landing page relevance ¶
A high click-through rate with a low conversion rate usually means the landing page is not delivering what the ad promised. Check your Quality Score for each keyword. A score below 5 on a high-spend keyword is a signal that either the ad copy or the landing page needs to be more closely aligned with the search query.
Running this audit yourself takes about an hour. If you want a second set of eyes, our free account audit covers all five of these areas and delivers a written report within two business days.