The 60-minute Google Ads audit that usually finds wasted spend

1. Search terms, last 90 days, sorted by cost

Not by clicks — by cost. Read the top 200. You are looking for terms that are irrelevant, informational when you want transactional, or job-seeker traffic.

In accounts running broad match with automated bidding, this single check regularly finds 15–30% of spend going somewhere nobody intended.

2. Performance Max brand leakage

Check whether PMax is harvesting your brand searches and reporting them as conversions it created. Add brand exclusions and compare — if PMax volume falls sharply and total revenue does not, it was taking credit for traffic you already had.

3. Conversion actions and double counting

Open the conversions view. Count how many actions are set as primary. If a lead form, a phone click and a WhatsApp click all count, you may be counting the same person three times, and your bidding is optimising toward the illusion.

Check conversion windows too — a 90-day window on a same-day purchase business inflates recent performance.

4. Location settings

The default 'presence or interest' setting shows ads to people merely interested in your target location. For a local service business that is often a large share of wasted spend. Set it to presence only unless you have a specific reason.

5. Ad schedule and device performance

Segment by hour and device against your actual conversion data. Many lead-gen accounts spend heavily overnight when nobody answers the phone.

6. Landing page match

Click through your top ten spending ad groups. If more than two land on a generic page rather than one matching the promise in the ad, you have found your cheapest available improvement.

7. Asset and copy freshness

Check when responsive search assets were last changed. Accounts running the same three headlines for eighteen months are usually paying more per click than they need to.