Why Your Google Ads Account Is Wasting 30% of Its Budget
We audit a lot of ad accounts. The same five leaks show up in almost every one — here is how to find and fix them.
Across the last 50 Google Ads accounts we audited, the median account wasted about 30% of spend. Not on bad strategy — on mechanical leaks that take an afternoon to fix.
1. Broad match without guardrails
Broad match with smart bidding can work, but only with tight negative lists and conversion data the algorithm can trust. Check your search terms report monthly; you will find queries that have nothing to do with your business.
2. Broken or double-counted conversions
The most expensive problem in paid search is invisible: conversion actions firing twice, thank-you pages indexed and visited organically, or micro-conversions (scrolls, calls under 10 seconds) treated as primary. Your bidding is only as good as the data feeding it.
3. Location settings set to 'interest'
The default 'presence or interest' setting quietly shows your Thane service-business ads to people researching Thane from other countries. Switch to presence-only unless you have a reason not to.
4. One landing page for every ad group
Message match drives Quality Score, and Quality Score drives your actual CPC. Ten ad groups pointing at one homepage is a tax you pay on every click.
5. No experiment cadence
Accounts that improve run one structured experiment at a time — a bid strategy test, a landing page variant, a new creative angle. Accounts that stagnate change ten things at once or nothing at all.
Fix these five and most accounts fund their own management fee several times over.
