You don’t need a full account review to find wasted spend. You need thirty minutes and the right seven checks. Most Google Ads accounts we open for the first time are leaking budget in the same handful of places, and every one of them is visible without touching a bid.
This isn’t a substitute for a proper audit, it’s the fast version — the one you can run yourself before deciding whether a deeper look is worth paying for.
Start with the search terms report
Pull the last 90 days of search terms against your active keywords. Broad and phrase match drift over time, and what started as a tight list of relevant queries slowly picks up near-matches that technically qualify but never convert. This is almost always the single largest source of wasted spend in an account, and it’s the fastest to fix.
The seven checks, in order
- Search terms, last 90 days. Flag anything irrelevant or already covered by a better-performing exact match, and add negatives.
- Device performance split. Compare CPA by device. A large gap that’s gone unaddressed for months is budget sitting in the wrong place.
- Ad schedule by hour. Look for hours with spend but no conversions across a meaningful sample. Dead hours rarely fix themselves.
- Duplicate keywords across ad groups. Overlapping keywords in different ad groups or campaigns can end up competing against each other in auction, driving your own CPCs up.
- Auto-applied recommendations. Check what Google has quietly turned on in the “Recommendations” tab. Not all of it is wrong, but none of it should be running without you knowing.
- Performance Max search term insights. PMax hides a lot, but the search term insights panel shows some of what’s actually converting inside it. Worth a look before assuming it’s all working.
- Conversion actions. Check for double-counting, most commonly both “Purchase” and “Add to Cart” set as primary conversions, which quietly inflates reported volume and makes CPA look better than it is.
“Most wasted spend isn’t hiding. It’s sitting in a report nobody opened this month.”
What we do with what we find
The instinct is to cut everything that shows up. We don’t do that first. Every one of these seven checks gets logged, then weighed against what the campaign is actually there to do, before anything gets paused. A device gap might be a targeting problem, or it might be a landing page problem that has nothing to do with the media. Cutting the wrong thing is its own kind of waste.
Once the real leaks are identified, that’s where budget for scale comes from, before we ever ask a client for more of it. It’s the same principle behind the results we’ve reported for clients like First National Real Estate, where cost per lead dropped 25% by removing waste first, not by increasing spend.
If none of the seven turn anything up
That’s rare, and it’s a good sign. It usually means the account is already being run tightly, or it’s small enough that these issues haven’t had time to accumulate. Either way, it’s worth checking again in three months. Accounts drift, even well-run ones.