Most Google Ads accounts carry some waste. That isn’t a sign of a bad account. It’s what happens when broad matching, automated campaigns and busy teams meet. The good news is that the biggest leaks tend to sit in the same handful of places. Set aside 30 minutes, open your account and work through this checklist in order.
1. Confirm what counts as a conversion (5 minutes)
Before judging any campaign, check what Google is optimising toward. Go to Goals → Conversions → Summary and look at which actions are marked as Primary.
Common problems:
- Soft actions counted as primary. Page views, scroll depth or “clicked phone number” actions inflate conversion counts and teach Smart Bidding to chase cheap, low-intent traffic.
- Duplicate tracking. The same form fill tracked by both a Google tag and an imported GA4 event doubles your numbers.
- No values. If every conversion is worth “1”, the system can’t tell a $50 lead from a $50,000 one.
If any of these apply, fix them first. Every other optimisation sits on top of this signal.
2. Mine the search terms report (10 minutes)
Open Insights and reports → Search terms, set the date range to the last 90 days and sort by cost.
Look for three patterns:
- Irrelevant queries with spend and no conversions. Job seekers, “free” searches, DIY how-tos and competitor support queries are classic examples.
- Wrong-intent queries. Someone searching for a definition of your product category is researching, not buying, and may convert poorly on a sales page.
- Geographic or product mismatches. Queries for locations you don’t serve or products you don’t sell.
Add clear offenders as negative keywords at the right level (campaign or shared list). Be careful with very broad negatives; one wrong word can block good traffic.
Tip: Export the report and filter for terms with spend above your target cost per acquisition and zero conversions. That list is usually your quickest win.
3. Check Performance Max and Display placements (5 minutes)
Automated campaigns can spend outside search. Review where your ads appeared:
- For Display and Video, check the Where ads showed report for mobile apps, made-for-advertising sites and placements that never convert.
- For Performance Max, review the search-term insights and use account-level negative keywords and brand exclusions where appropriate.
You won’t get full transparency, but you can usually spot obvious mismatches.
4. Review location and schedule settings (5 minutes)
Two quiet settings cause a surprising amount of waste:
- Location options. “Presence or interest” can show ads to people who are merely interested in your area. If you only serve people physically there, switch to “Presence”.
- Ad schedule. If your sales team can’t answer calls overnight, consider reducing bids or pausing call-focused ads outside business hours, but check the data first, because some audiences research late at night.
5. Find budget-limited winners and unlimited losers (5 minutes)
On the campaigns view, compare each campaign’s cost per conversion (or return on ad spend) with whether it is limited by budget.
A common pattern is that the best campaign is capped while a weaker campaign has room to spend freely. Moving budget from the weaker campaign to the stronger one is often the highest-return change you can make in a day. No new ads or keywords needed.
What to do with your findings
Write down three numbers:
- Spend on irrelevant search terms or placements in the last 90 days
- The share of total spend that number represents
- The budget gap between your best-performing and worst-performing campaigns
Those three figures tell you how much budget can be redirected and where it should go. Make changes gradually, give automated bidding time to adjust, and re-check the search terms report every week or two.
When to get a second opinion
If you find conversion tracking you can’t untangle, campaigns you can’t explain, or simply don’t have time to repeat this every week, a structured audit can help. RankYield’s free Yield Audit runs this checklist and more against your own data, then ranks the fixes by expected return.