Wasted spend rarely looks dramatic. It’s a lot of small leaks: a search term here, a loose setting there. Together they can eat a real share of the budget. Here are the seven places I check first in every audit, and how you can check them yourself.
1. The search terms report
Your keywords aren’t what people searched for. The search terms report is. Sort by cost, look for terms that have spent money with no conversions, and ask whether a real customer would ever type that. Add the bad ones as negative keywords.
2. Match types with no guardrails
Broad match can work well with good conversion data and a strong negative list. Without them it wanders. If most of your spend is on broad match and your negative list is short, start there.
3. Location settings
In campaign settings, check whether you target people “in or regularly in” your locations, or also people “interested in” them. For a local service business, the second option often pays for clicks from outside your service area.
4. Conversion tracking
Open your conversion actions and check what’s counted as a primary conversion. Page views, button clicks or duplicate form fires inflate the numbers, and Smart Bidding then optimizes toward things that aren’t leads.
5. Ad schedule
Look at performance by hour and day of the week. If nobody answers the phone on Sunday and calls are your main conversion, you may be paying for clicks you can’t convert.
6. Campaigns nobody revisited
Old campaigns, paused-then-unpaused experiments and duplicate keywords across campaigns all split budget and data. If you can’t say why a campaign exists, it’s a candidate to cut or merge.
7. Auto-applied recommendations
Under Recommendations, check auto-apply. Some recommendations can expand keywords, raise budgets or change bidding without anyone reviewing them first.
Want a second set of eyes?
This is the checklist I go through in a free wasted-spend audit. If you’d rather have someone go through your account with you, book a free audit call.