The 7 places Google Ads accounts leak money.
After ten years of opening up Google Ads accounts and tracing where the money actually went, the same seven leaks show up again and again. Not exotic mistakes: settings nobody touched, reports nobody opened, defaults nobody questioned. Here is the checklist we run first on every audit, and how to run it yourself.
Audits keep finding the same leaks.
Every account is different, but the ways they waste money rhyme.
Audit enough accounts and you stop being surprised. The business, budget, and industry change; the same handful of leaks keep showing up in the same order.
The unglamorous fundamentals separating accounts that print money from accounts that burn it. Fix all seven before you touch a bid or write an ad. That is why we check them first, every time.
Search terms nobody reviews
The queries that actually triggered your ads, and nobody looked.
What it looks like
Open the Search terms report in almost any unmanaged account and you will find spend on queries the owner would never bid on: "hiring," "how to," "cheap," "free." The keywords look fine. The queries do not.
Why it happens
Google's job is more traffic, not better traffic. Close variants, broad expansion, and auto-applied recommendations widen the net quietly, and whoever built the account never came back to check what triggered the ads.
How to check it in your account
- Search terms under Insights and reports, last 90 days, sorted by cost, highest first.
- Read the top 50 queries; mark any that could never become a customer.
- Repeat for every campaign spending real money.
What good looks like
A fixed review cadence, a shared negative list, and one rule: every high-spend query either converts or is negated.
Location targeting set too wide
Your ads are showing to people who cannot buy from you.
What it looks like
Clicks and spend from places you do not serve: travelers searching "near me," out-of-state searches that merely mention your city. The location report shows "Presence or interest" doing exactly what it says.
Why it happens
Google's default, "Presence or interest," sounds reasonable until you realize "interest" means anyone, anywhere, who searched something related to your area. Almost nobody changes it, because almost nobody knows it exists.
How to check it in your account
- Campaign Settings, Locations, advanced options. If it says "Presence or interest," that is the leak.
- Locations report: where clicks actually came from, not where you targeted.
- Spend in places you cannot serve is rarely subtle once you look.
What good looks like
"Presence" only, exclusions for repeat offenders, and a monthly scan of the user location report.
No conversion tracking, or tracking the wrong actions
If you cannot define a conversion, you cannot buy one.
What it looks like
Two versions of the same disease. One: no conversion tracking, so the account optimizes for clicks. Two: tracking that counts everything (page views, button clicks, time on site) and reports a cost per "conversion" with no connection to revenue. Both make the numbers lie.
Why it happens
Real tracking is technical and unglamorous: tags, triggers, call tracking, CRM imports. Counting a page view takes one click. And once the dashboard shows a low cost per conversion, nobody asks what got counted.
How to check it in your account
- Tools, Conversions: ask of each action, would I pay money for this? A page view is not a lead.
- Only revenue-adjacent actions marked Primary: purchases, qualified forms, calls of real length.
- Move everything else to Secondary, or remove it.
What good looks like
One to three primary actions tied to money, call tracking with a minimum duration, and offline import for phone closers.
Broad match without negative keywords
Google's widest net, with no holes patched.
What it looks like
A few broad match keywords spending most of the budget on loosely related queries. Bid on "roof repair" and pay for "roof repair DIY kit," "roofing jobs," "metal roof cost calculator." The keyword report looks clean. The query report tells the truth.
Why it happens
Broad match is Google's default and its recommended setup. At large scale with strong conversion data, it can work well. For most accounts, which have neither, it buys irrelevant clicks at full price.
How to check it in your account
- Segment spend by match type. If broad carries most of the cost, you found the leak.
- Open search terms per broad keyword and score relevance honestly.
- Check for any negative keyword lists at all. Many accounts have none.
What good looks like
Exact and phrase carry the core budget; broad only deliberately (capped budgets, fat negative list, real conversion volume), never for small accounts until exact and phrase profit.
Brand terms cannibalized by generic campaigns
Paying full price for customers who already wanted you.
What it looks like
Your brand name triggering ads inside generic campaigns, or Performance Max quietly absorbing your branded traffic. You pay for clicks from people who typed your company name into Google, and the generic campaign's numbers look better than they are because branded clicks convert well.
Why it happens
Brand terms get added to generic campaigns "just to be safe," and nobody negates in the other direction. Performance Max, left alone, drifts toward the easiest conversions available: your own brand name.
How to check it in your account
- Search the search terms report for your brand name; note which campaigns triggered them.
- Any brand query triggering a non-brand campaign is cannibalization.
- Check Performance Max insights for branded query share where reported.
What good looks like
A dedicated brand campaign, brand terms negated from every generic campaign, and brand exclusions on Performance Max for new-customer goals.
Landing page mismatch
The ad makes a promise the page does not keep.
What it looks like
The ad says "same-day service," the click lands on a generic homepage. The ad quotes a price, the page hides it behind a form. The ad targets mobile, the page loads slowly, the number is not tappable. Full-price clicks, thrown away.
Why it happens
Ads and pages are built by different people at different times. The account launches, the site is "fine for now," and nobody clicks their own ads to see the journey. Google grades the experience too, so mismatch means lower Quality Scores and higher CPCs on top of lost conversions.
How to check it in your account
- Use Ad Preview to see your live ads, then follow each one to its landing page.
- Per ad group, ask: does the headline's promise appear above the fold?
- Load the page on your phone over cellular. If it feels slow, it is losing customers.
What good looks like
Message match between ad and page headline, one page per intent, and the action visible without scrolling: a tappable number or short form, on a fast page.
Bidding on autopilot
Automation is a multiplier. Zero times anything is zero.
What it looks like
Maximize Conversions on a campaign with a handful of monthly conversions. A tCPA target someone wished for, not one the account ever achieved. Portfolio strategies mixing campaigns with different economics. Spend swinging while the owner assumes the machine knows best.
Why it happens
Google pushes automation hard, and "set and forget" is appealing. But Smart Bidding needs conversion data to be smart, and targets must be grounded in what the account actually does. Automation multiplies whatever signal you give it, including noise.
How to check it in your account
- Per campaign: bid strategy and conversions per month. Single-digit monthly conversions cannot train Smart Bidding.
- Compare tCPA/tROAS targets against actual historical cost per conversion. A target never hit is a wish, not a strategy.
- Check the bid strategy report for learning periods that never end.
What good looks like
Manual or capped Maximize Clicks until volume is steady, tCPA/tROAS only after real history exists, set near actuals, reviewed monthly.
How this list was built.
These seven patterns come from repeated observations across more than ten years of managing Google Ads: our own businesses, partner operations, and accounts we were asked to audit or rebuild. A pattern made this list only after we saw the same root cause waste budget across different industries and budget sizes. We describe causes and fixes qualitatively and do not rank leaks by frequency or dollars wasted, because both depend on the account. No client or account data is disclosed here.
What this list is not.
- Observational, not statistical. No controlled sample, and no claim about how common each leak is across all advertisers.
- Frequency and cost vary by industry, budget, geography, and how the account was built. Your account may have three of these, all seven, or different problems entirely.
- Google changes defaults, interfaces, and match-type behavior regularly. Verify specifics against the current interface before acting.
- Nothing here is a substitute for auditing your own account against your own data.
Asked often.
Search terms: weekly if the account spends real money, monthly at minimum. The full seven-pattern check: quarterly, and any time performance shifts without an obvious cause. Accounts drift. An audit is maintenance, not a one-time event.
Most of them. Six of the seven are settings, reports, and lists, not engineering. The hard parts are knowing where to look and being honest about what your tracking actually measures. Work this list top to bottom and you will fix most of what an auditor would find.
Usually it reallocates it. Spend often drops first, then profitable spend scales. The goal was never to spend less. It is to stop paying for clicks that could never become customers.
Partially, and that is the problem. Performance Max hides most search term data, making those leaks harder to see and fix. Brand exclusions, audience signals, and asset quality become your levers. The principle holds: verify where the money went.
Search term and location fixes usually show in the data within days. Bidding changes need a week or two of learning. Tracking fixes pay off slowest and matter most, because every future decision gets better once the numbers are honest.
Find out which leaks
are in your account.
A proper audit checks all seven patterns against your real data and tells you what to fix first. That is what ours does.