Almost every account I audit is losing money in the same handful of places. None of the fixes below need a bigger budget. They need an hour of attention each week and a willingness to turn things off.
1. Check what people actually searched for
Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what real people typed. In most accounts those two lists have drifted far apart, especially with broad match and Performance Max.
Open the search terms report for the last 30 days, sort by cost, and read the top 50 lines. You are looking for three things: searches from people who will never buy (free, jobs, DIY, courses, salary), searches for products you don't sell, and searches from outside the area you serve. Add those as negative keywords. Do this weekly for the first two months of any account, then every fortnight.
2. Make sure you are tracking sales, not clicks
If your conversion action is "page view" or "clicked contact", Google is optimising towards people who browse, not people who buy. I see this in roughly half of the accounts that come to me.
You want one primary conversion that represents real business value: a submitted lead form, a booked call, a purchase with its value, a qualified phone call over 60 seconds. Everything else should be marked as secondary so it is measured but not bid on. If you can send offline conversions back from your CRM when a lead becomes a customer, do it; that is the single biggest bidding upgrade most lead-gen accounts can make.
3. Tighten your ad groups
One ad group holding 40 loosely related keywords cannot have ad copy that matches any of them well. Group keywords by intent, keep each ad group to one tight theme, and write ads that repeat the words in that theme. Relevance lifts click-through rate, click-through rate lifts Quality Score, and Quality Score lowers what you pay per click. It is the cheapest win available.
4. Send the click to a page built for the offer
Sending paid traffic to your homepage is like answering "do you fix leaking taps?" with a company brochure. The landing page should repeat the headline of the ad, explain the single offer, show proof, and make the form short enough to finish on a phone in under a minute.
Two things to check before anything else: the page loads in under three seconds on mobile, and the form works on a real phone. I have found broken forms in accounts spending thousands per month.
5. Bid on a number you actually know
Maximise clicks gets you clicks. It does not care what they cost you in sales. Once you have 15-30 conversions a month you can switch to target CPA or target ROAS, and the target should come from your own maths: your average order value, your close rate, your margin. If you don't know what a lead is worth yet, work that out first. Everything else in the account depends on it.
6. Fix the settings nobody looks at
Location targeting set to "presence or interest" instead of "presence" quietly spends money on other countries. Display Network expansion sneaks into Search campaigns. Ad schedules run at 3am for a business that answers the phone at 9. Device bids never get checked even though mobile converts at half the rate of desktop for many B2B accounts. Go through the settings tab once, properly, and you usually find 10-20% of spend going somewhere you didn't intend.
7. Always have one test running
Accounts that stay flat are accounts where nothing is being tested. Keep it simple: one test at a time, running long enough to matter. A new headline angle, a different offer on the landing page, a new campaign structure for your best product. Write down what you expected, what happened and what you changed. Over a year, those small tests compound into a much cheaper cost per sale.
The weekly routine
If you only have 45 minutes a week: read the search terms report and add negatives, check that conversions are still recording, look at cost per conversion by campaign, pause anything clearly losing money, and note what you will test next. That routine alone puts most accounts ahead of their competitors.
Want a second pair of eyes? I'll go through your account and show you exactly where the budget is leaking, free. Ask for the audit here, or read more about how I run Google Ads management.
