Google Ads can spend money every day without bringing your business the customers you expected. You may lose confidence in advertising or keep paying for another round of optimisation when some of the problems are already visible inside your account.
When I review an account, I start with mistakes that directly affect spending: irrelevant searches, weak ad quality and overlooked network settings. Then I check the account controls that help prevent those problems from recurring.
Three checks to find wasted ad spend
In audits, I have seen advertisers lose 20%, half their budget or more through these mistakes. That is not a forecast for every business. The purpose of these checks is to identify your own unnecessary costs so more of your budget reaches people who could actually become customers.
Check 1: Search terms and their cost
Use the search icon at the top of Google Ads and enter “Search terms”. You can also open “Insights and reports” and select “Search terms”. This report shows the searches that triggered your ads.
Read at least the first few pages. I regularly find searches that have nothing to do with the advertiser’s business. For each clearly irrelevant term, check the “Cost” column. Add those amounts together to see how much you have paid for unwanted visits.
Check 2: Keywords and Quality Score
Open “Keywords”, using the account search if needed. Select “Columns”, then “Modify columns”, find “Quality Score”, tick it and apply the change. You can now review the score beside your keywords.
A score below 5 out of 10 is my cue to examine how well the keyword, ad and landing page fit together. Poor quality deserves attention because weak relevance can make acquiring customers unnecessarily expensive.
However, a low score does not prove that exactly half your budget is wasted. Treat it as a diagnostic signal. Judge the financial effect of improvements by what happens to your actual costs and results.
Check 3: Campaigns and ad networks
Open “Campaigns”, select “Segment” and choose “Network (with search partners)”. This separates activity on Google Search, search partners and the Google Display Network where applicable.
Check how much went to search partners and what that spending produced. Do the same for Display. If you expected a campaign to generate search enquiries, overlooked expansion into other networks can explain why some of the budget is not delivering the results you wanted.
To keep a campaign on Google Search only, open its settings, find “Networks” and clear the search partner and Display Network options. Make that decision using your campaign’s results. Switching off search partners is not automatically an improvement.
Three important Google Ads account settings
It is tempting to jump straight into building a campaign. Account settings are easy to overlook, yet they let you establish controls that apply beyond a single campaign. I review them before getting into detailed optimisation.
Why I test broad match separately
I do not introduce broad match while also rewriting ads, changing budgets and replacing landing pages. First, I set up a controlled experiment, define acceptable categories of search terms and decide when I would roll back the change. That lets me distinguish useful additional reach from the effects of other edits.
Google explains the mechanics in its guide to setting up a custom experiment.
To review the account itself, open “Admin”, then “Account settings”. Alongside the general account details, pay particular attention to the following controls.
Setting 1: Negative keywords
Negative keywords tell Google which searches you do not want to advertise against. For example, if I run a law firm offering paid services, adding “free” can help exclude searches for free legal advice.
Why add negatives at account level when you can add them to a campaign? Campaign negatives only affect that campaign. Performance Max also allows campaign negatives without a support request. Account negatives are useful when the same exclusions should apply to search and Shopping inventory throughout the account, including current and future Performance Max campaigns.
In account settings, open “Negative keywords”, select the plus button, enter the words and save. Reserve this level for exclusions that make sense across your business.
Setting 2: IP exclusions
Open “IP exclusions” in account settings, enter the addresses you want to exclude and save. There are two practical reasons to check this setting.
- You are investigating suspicious clicks. Your website or server logs show repeated ad visits from the same IP addresses. After reviewing that activity, you can add the relevant addresses to your exclusions.
- Employees search for the company website and click your paid ad. Adding office IP addresses can help reduce spending on these internal visits.
Setting 3: Automatically applied recommendations
When auto-apply is enabled, Google can make certain changes without asking you to approve each one. Depending on the selected recommendation types, those changes can affect keywords, ads, targeting and bidding. An unnoticed edit can change what you are paying for.
To take back control of those decisions, open “Auto-apply” in account settings and review its settings. Clear the recommendation types that are allowed to run automatically, then click Save. You can then assess proposed changes individually against your business goals.
An additional setting: Customer lists
Another setting I check is Customer Match. Look for the “Conversion-based customer lists” option in its settings. This relates to automatically building customer lists from data collected when people convert on your website. These lists use conversion data submitted together with user data through enhanced conversions.
These people have already interacted with your business. As with a list of customer email addresses, you can use the segment to distinguish existing customers from new prospects, exclude them from general acquisition advertising or prepare a different offer for them.
The key distinction from ordinary remarketing is the basis for matching. Customer data can help connect a person across devices, while a cookie-based segment is tied to a browser. You should therefore be careful about treating a segment’s size as a count of distinct people.
For example, 1,000 device records might represent 500 people who each visited from a phone and a computer. Customer lists focus on customer information rather than only on a particular website visit.
A quick account review checklist
Work through these questions inside Google Ads. They help expose problems that can disappear inside overall campaign totals.
- Search terms over the last 30 days: how much went to clearly irrelevant searches?
- Quality Score: do any keywords score below 5 out of 10?
- Search partners and Display: did ads run there, and how much did you spend?
- Account negatives: is the list populated, and does it cover the usual irrelevant topics in your niche?
- Location targeting: are you targeting presence in the area, or presence or interest? Someone interested in your city may be somewhere else entirely.
- Ad schedule: do round-the-clock ads make sense when only a daytime team handles enquiries?
- Auto-apply: clear the recommendation types you want to approve manually, then click Save.
- Devices: is one device type producing weaker conversion rates despite comparable spending?
Make account checks a routine
The better you understand where mistakes occur, the easier it becomes to control advertising costs. Review search terms, quality and networks regularly, and use account settings to establish consistent rules across campaigns. Effective optimisation starts with knowing where the money has already gone.
For unwanted clicks, revisit your IP exclusions. If you are building a new account, check its core settings before launch. Once you have reviewed Quality Score, dynamic keyword insertion is another topic to investigate when improving the relevance of your ads.
When this does not apply
- These three checks do not replace a full audit of conversion tracking, search terms, locations, devices and lead quality.
- A low Quality Score does not automatically mean that a fixed share of your budget is wasted.
- Turning off search partners does not always improve performance. Use the results of the individual campaign.
If these checks reveal unnecessary spending, the next step is to trace it to its cause. A structured Google Ads audit can connect the warning signs across your account and help you decide what to fix first.
My e-book “19 Google Ads Secrets”: how to get the most out of Google Ads without draining your budget, drawn from real campaigns and tests.
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