Find your wasted Google Ads spend in 10 minutes

Google Ads spends money in small amounts, all day, which makes waste easy to miss. You don’t need an audit tool to find most of it. Open your account, set the date range to the last 30 days, and work through these six checks.

01 · The search terms report (4 minutes)

Your keywords are not what you pay for. You pay for the searches your keywords match, and with broad and phrase match those can drift a long way.

Go to Campaigns → Insights and reports → Search terms. Sort by cost. Look for terms that spent money and brought no conversions, and terms that are plainly not your customers: job seekers, people looking for free versions, other cities, competitors’ brand names.

Tick them and choose Add as negative keyword. Google adds negatives from this report as negative exact match by default (Google Ads Help). One thing to know: negative keywords don’t match close variants, so if you exclude “jobs”, also exclude “job”.

02 · Location settings (1 minute)

In campaign settings, check Locations. Two things to confirm: that the area matches where you actually serve, and the targeting option. “Presence or interest” can show your ads to people who are only interested in your area. If you only serve people who are actually there, “Presence” is usually the safer choice.

03 · Networks (1 minute)

Search campaigns can also show on Google’s search partners and, if the option is ticked, on the Display Network. Check the Networks setting. Display traffic behaves very differently from search traffic, and for a small search budget it’s usually better switched off.

04 · Ad schedule (1 minute)

Open the When and where ads showed report and look at the day and hour view. If calls are your conversion and nobody answers the phone at night or on Sunday, those clicks are wasted. Lower bids or pause ads for those hours.

05 · Conversion tracking (2 minutes)

Go to Goals → Conversions → Summary and check that each conversion action is recording, and that it counts what you care about: a call, a form or a WhatsApp click. Not page views.

This matters more than any other check. If you use automated bidding, Google is optimising towards whatever it is told is a conversion. If that’s wrong, every other fix is working against the bidding.

06 · The keyword itself (1 minute)

Finally, look at keywords with spend and no conversions over the whole period. Sometimes the search terms are fine and the keyword simply doesn’t bring buyers. Pause it and move the budget.

Make it weekly

This takes ten minutes the first time and five minutes a week after that. The search terms check is the one that saves the most money, because new irrelevant searches appear all the time.

If you’d rather have someone do it for you, that’s what Google Ads management covers. Or book the free 15-minute review and I’ll show you the biggest leak in your account.

You pay for the search, not the keyword. The search terms report is the only place that shows what you actually paid for.