Almost every Google Ads account we inherit is spending real money on searches that were never going to buy. Not because anyone was careless — because Google’s defaults quietly widen your reach, and nobody has opened the search terms report in months. Here is where the money goes, in the order we usually find it.
Broad match with no minder
Broad match can work, but only with tight conversion tracking and a human reading the search terms weekly. Left alone, it matches your ad to loosely related searches — “free,” “jobs,” “DIY,” competitor names you cannot service — and bills you for every click. The fix is not to fear broad match; it is to feed it clean conversion data and prune relentlessly.
A thin negative keyword list
The single highest-return hour in most accounts is spent reading the search terms report and adding negatives. “Free,” “salary,” “how to,” and a dozen industry-specific time-wasters drain budget every day they are allowed to match. A mature account has hundreds of negatives, grouped into shared lists.
Conversions that are not conversions
If your account counts every form submit and phone tap as a conversion, the algorithm optimizes toward volume, not revenue — and cheerfully buys you more of the wrong leads. Counting booked revenue instead of raw submissions changes what Google chases, and it is usually the difference between a busy account and a profitable one.
None of this requires a bigger budget. It requires someone whose job is to find the waste and redirect it. If you want a second set of eyes, our PPC audit lays out exactly what a wasted-spend cleanup would recover in your account, before you pay us anything.