Most Google Ads accounts have problems hiding in plain sight. Not small problems either. We are talking about wasted budget, broken tracking, and campaigns that actively work against your business goals.
The worst part? These problems are easy to find if you know where to look. You do not need special tools or years of experience. You just need 15 minutes and a checklist.
Here are the six checks we run on every account we audit. You can do the same thing right now.
Check Your Conversion Tracking
This is the most important step because everything else depends on it
If your conversion tracking is broken, Google has no idea what a good click looks like. It will optimize for noise instead of results.
Go to Tools > Conversions in your Google Ads account. Look for these red flags:
- No conversions recorded in the last 7 days. If your site gets traffic but shows zero conversions, tracking is broken. Full stop.
- Conversion counts that do not match your CRM. If Google says you got 50 leads last month but your CRM shows 20, something is double-counting or misconfigured.
- "Inactive" or "No recent conversions" status. Google tells you right in the interface. Most people just never check.
- Conversions tracking page views instead of actions. We see this constantly. Someone set up a "page view" conversion instead of a form submit or purchase. Google then optimizes for people who visit your site, not people who buy.
- Active conversion actions that fire on real business events (purchases, form submits, calls)
- Conversion counts within 10% of your CRM numbers
- All conversion actions show "Recording conversions" status
- No duplicate or redundant conversion actions
If your tracking is broken, stop here and fix it before touching anything else. Optimizing campaigns with bad tracking is like steering a car with a blindfold on.
Review Your Search Terms Report
See the actual words people typed before clicking your ad
The search terms report shows you the actual words people typed before clicking your ad. This is different from your keywords. Your keywords are what you told Google to target. The search terms are what Google actually matched you to.
Go to Campaigns > Insights & Reports > Search terms. Sort by cost (highest first) and read through the list.
- Searches that have nothing to do with your business eating up budget
- A B2B company showing for "free" downloads or consumer queries
- Service businesses paying for "how to DIY" searches
- Competitor brand searches that never convert
- 90%+ of search terms are directly relevant to your products or services
- High-spend terms have strong conversion rates
- Report is reviewed and cleaned at least monthly
In our experience, 15-30% of ad spend goes to irrelevant search terms in accounts that have not been cleaned up in the last 90 days. That is real money disappearing every month.
Check Your Negative Keywords
The single most effective way to stop wasting money
Negative keywords tell Google what not to show your ads for. They are the single most effective way to stop wasting money, and most accounts either have none or have a list that has not been updated in months.
Go to Keywords > Negative keywords at the campaign and account level. Ask yourself:
- No negative keywords at all across any campaign
- Negative keyword list has not been updated in 90+ days
- No account-level negatives for obvious junk terms like "free," "jobs," "salary," "reddit"
- Shared negative keyword lists applied across relevant campaigns
- Account-level negatives blocking universal junk terms
- List updated monthly alongside search terms review
- Campaign-specific negatives for cross-campaign conflicts
If your negative keyword list is empty, your account is guaranteed to be wasting money. There is no business on earth where every possible search term is relevant.
Review Your Audience Settings
A critical setting most advertisers overlook
This one catches people off guard. Google lets you layer audiences onto your campaigns, and there is a critical setting that changes how they work: Targeting vs. Observation.
"Targeting" means your ads only show to people in that audience. "Observation" means your ads show to everyone, but you can see how that audience performs and adjust bids.
- Existing customers seeing your acquisition campaigns (paying to acquire people you already have)
- No customer lists uploaded or applied as exclusions
- "Targeting" set when you meant "Observation" or vice versa
- Running "new customer" offers that existing customers can see
- Customer lists uploaded and refreshed regularly
- Existing customers excluded from prospecting campaigns
- Audience setting (Targeting vs. Observation) matches your intent for each campaign
- Separate remarketing campaigns with tailored messaging
Go to Audiences at the campaign level. Check whether you have customer lists uploaded. Check whether those lists are set as exclusions on your prospecting campaigns.
Check Your Geographic Targeting
A five-second check that catches a surprisingly common mistake
Go to Campaigns > Locations and look at where your ads are actually showing.
We regularly find accounts that are set to target the entire United States when the business only serves three states. Or businesses targeting "people interested in" a location instead of "people in" a location - which means someone in another country who googled your city name can see your ad.
- Targeting entire countries when you only serve specific regions
- Using "Presence or interest" instead of "Presence" for location targeting
- Clicks coming from locations you do not serve
- No location exclusions for areas with poor performance
- Targeting method set to "Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations"
- Locations narrowed to your actual service area
- Geographic report reviewed for out-of-area clicks
- Bid adjustments for high and low performing locations
Check the location settings for each campaign. Then look at the geographic report. If you are a local business and you see clicks from the other side of the country, your targeting is wrong.
Review Your Budget Allocation
Make sure your money is going to the right places
The final check is about whether your money is going to the right places. Look at your campaigns side by side and compare:
- Worst-performing campaigns getting the same budget as your best ones
- Best campaign shows "Limited by budget" while weaker campaigns have unspent budget
- Most spend going to Display or Video instead of Search (unless intentional)
- No budget reviews in the last 30 days
- Top performers never limited by budget
- Budget allocated proportionally to campaign performance
- Regular rebalancing based on cost-per-conversion data
- Clear budget rationale for each campaign type
A good rule of thumb: your best campaign should never be limited by budget while worse campaigns still have spend to give. If it is, shift budget from the underperformers immediately.
What to Do With What You Find
If you ran through all six steps and found problems, you are not alone. More than half of the accounts we audit have at least three of these issues. Some have all six.
The good news is that every one of these problems has a straightforward fix. The bad news is that they compound. Broken tracking means Smart Bidding cannot work. Missing negatives means your budget leaks. Bad geographic targeting means your metrics are inflated by junk clicks.
Start with conversion tracking (Step 1). Everything else is downstream of that. Then work through the list in order. Most accounts see measurable improvement within the first two weeks of cleanup.