Most accounts we audit are not broken. They are leaking. The campaigns run, the clicks arrive, the monthly spend clears – and somewhere between 20% and 40% of the budget goes to traffic that was never going to enquire — a range drawn from the accounts we have audited since 2009.
The leaks are rarely exotic. After 17 years of audits, the same five turn up again and again. Here is how to check for each one in your own account, and roughly what it is costing you.
1. Your conversions are not conversions
This is the big one, and it invalidates everything downstream. Open Google Ads and go to Goals → Conversions. Look at what is actually in the list.
If you see page views, button clicks, email-link clicks, time on site or scroll depth counted as primary conversions, your cost per conversion is fiction. Those actions do not produce a lead. Someone who clicks your phone number on desktop, sees the digits and closes the tab has cost you a conversion and given you nothing.
A conversion should be a form submission or a phone call of meaningful length. Everything else is a soft signal – useful for diagnostics, dangerous as an optimisation target. And it is an optimisation target: Smart Bidding spends your money chasing whatever you tell it to count. Feed it button clicks and it will find you the cheapest button-clickers on the internet.
How to check: the Conversions table, filtered to primary actions. Anything that is not a form or a call should be secondary.
2. Broad match has quietly taken over
Broad match is not the villain it was ten years ago, but it needs supervision, and Google’s recommendations nudge you towards it relentlessly. The failure mode is slow: you accept a recommendation, a few keywords convert to broad, performance holds for a fortnight, and three months later most of your spend sits on queries you never chose.
Segment your keyword report by match type. If broad accounts for the majority of spend and you did not deliberately design it that way, you have drifted.
The tell is the gap between what you bid on and what you buy. A tightly matched account shows search terms that look like its keywords. A drifted one shows a long tail of near-misses: adjacent services, competitor names, research queries and the vague informational phrases that never convert.
3. Your negative keyword list is thin or absent
Negatives are unglamorous, which is why they get skipped. They are also the fastest lever in the account.
A managed account accumulates negatives continuously – every week a few more queries get excluded. If your negative list has not been touched in six months, you are paying for the same irrelevant clicks over and over.
Start with the universal offenders: free, cheap, jobs, salary, DIY, how to, courses, template. Then add the ones specific to you. If you serve businesses, exclude consumer language. If you have a geographic radius, exclude the places you cannot reach.
Rough sizing: on the accounts we take over, the first serious negatives pass typically removes a tenth of monthly spend without touching a single lead, based on the accounts we have audited since 2009.
4. Nobody reads the search terms report
The three problems above are all visible in one place. The search terms report shows the actual phrases people typed before they clicked. It is the only honest record of what you are buying.
Most accounts we inherit have not had it opened in months. When we do open it, the pattern is consistent: a handful of queries produce nearly all the enquiries, a long tail produces clicks and nothing else, and a few obvious mismatches have been running for a year.
Set aside twenty minutes a week. Sort by cost, descending. For each expensive query with no conversions, decide: is this a term I want, badly served by my landing page? Or a term I should never have bid on? The first gets a page fix, the second gets a negative.
5. Your reporting metrics do not agree with each other
The last sign is not in the account. It is in the way people talk about it.
If your monthly report says cost per acquisition, your agency says cost per lead, and the dashboard says cost per conversion – and all three show different numbers – nobody can tell whether performance is improving. Arguments about strategy become arguments about arithmetic.
Pick one definition, write it down, and hold every report to it. We cover the distinction properly in CPA vs. cost per lead, but the principle is simple: the metric matters less than using it consistently.
Where to start
In order of return: fix conversion tracking first, because it makes every other number trustworthy. Then work the search terms report and build negatives. Then review match types.
You can do all of it yourself with an afternoon and the reports above. If you would rather have someone else look, that is what the audit is for.
Get a free Google Ads audit
We check all five of these and send you the findings – whether or not you work with us. No commitment, response within one business day.