How to find the wasted spend hiding in your Google Ads account

Most ecommerce Google Ads accounts waste somewhere between 20 and 40% of their budget. Not through incompetence, but through drift: settings that made sense two years ago, campaigns nobody has audited since launch, and a measurement setup that hides the leak. We once took a client from £10,000 a month down to £3,000 with no drop in leads, and almost all of that saving came from finding spend that was never going to produce a customer.

Here is where the waste usually hides, and how to find it yourself in an afternoon.

Start with the search terms report, not the dashboard

The dashboard shows you what Google wants you to see. The search terms report shows you what people actually typed before your ad appeared. In almost every account we audit, this report contains queries that have nothing to do with what the brand sells: job seekers, DIY researchers, people looking for a competitor, people looking for something free.

Sort by cost, work down the list, and ask one question of each term: would a person typing this ever buy from us? Every “no” becomes a negative keyword. In a typical account this single exercise reclaims 10 to 15% of spend.

Check what a conversion actually means

Wasted spend is often a measurement problem wearing a budget costume. If your account counts a newsletter signup, a page view and a purchase as equal conversions, Smart Bidding will happily optimise towards the cheapest of the three. Google’s own guidance on conversion tracking is clear that bid strategies follow whatever you tell them success is.

The storage client above is the sharpest example we have seen: their leads arrived by phone, their tracking counted clicks, and the account had been optimising towards the wrong event for years. If your lead model involves calls, forms or anything offline, fixing the definition of a conversion comes before any optimisation. It is the difference between tuning the engine and tuning the wrong engine.

Look for the overlap you are paying for twice

Broad match keywords, Performance Max and Shopping campaigns all fish in overlapping water. Without deliberate structure, you end up bidding against yourself: two campaigns competing for the same query, with Google collecting either way. Check the insights and reporting tabs for cannibalisation, and give each campaign a job description narrow enough that you can say what it is for in one sentence.

Question the month, not the day

Paid accounts breathe in monthly cycles, and judging changes too quickly is its own form of waste. We have written before about why the third month of a paid programme tells you everything: month one is setup, month two is luck, month three is the first read you can trust. Cutting something that needed three weeks to settle is as wasteful as funding something that should have been cut in week one.

When the answer is spending less

The uncomfortable truth is that some accounts should simply be smaller. If the profitable demand for your product at your margins supports £3,000 a month, spending £10,000 does not buy you £7,000 of extra growth, it buys you £7,000 of vanity traffic. An agency paid a percentage of your spend will rarely tell you that. It is one of the reasons our paid media work is priced on a flat retainer: the recommendation to spend less costs us nothing, so you actually get it.

If you suspect your account is leaking and want a second pair of senior eyes on it, that is exactly what our fit call is for.