How to check if Google Ads is wasting your budget

Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what people actually typed. In Google Ads, open Insights and reports, then Search terms, sort by cost and read the fifty most expensive.

Every term that could never lead to a sale is money spent on the wrong person: job seekers, students, people after something free, or a different product with a similar name. Add each one as a negative keyword.

Campaign settings include a location option with two choices. The default, “Presence or interest”, shows ads to people in your area and to people elsewhere who have shown interest in it. The other, “Presence”, shows them only to people who are in the area or regularly there.

A business that serves a fixed area usually wants “Presence”. Then read the report of where the ads were shown, and exclude the places you do not serve.

Each keyword carries a match type, which decides how far a search can stray from the keyword and still trigger the ad.

• Exact match: searches with the same meaning as the keyword.
• Phrase match: searches that include that meaning.
• Broad match: anything Google judges to be related.

Broad match is the default for new keywords and spends fastest. It works when conversion tracking is sound and negatives are kept up to date, and wastes money when neither is true.

Open the address your ad leads to on a phone, on mobile data. Type the address in, since clicking your own ad costs you a click. Three questions decide whether the page is earning its traffic.

• Does the first screen repeat what the ad promised?
• Does the page load within a few seconds?
• Is the next step, whether a call, a form or a purchase, visible without scrolling?

An ad that leads to a general home page asks the visitor to search a second time, and many will leave.

Open Goals, then Conversions, and read what the account counts as a result. Each conversion should be recording, and each should be something worth paying for: an enquiry, a call or a sale.

An account that counts every visit to the contact page as a conversion is telling Google’s bidding to buy visits, and it will.

Order the fixes by how quickly they stop the waste. Negative keywords and locations take minutes and work at once. Tracking comes next, because every later decision depends on it. Landing pages take longest and matter most: a page that is slow or off the subject loses the click however well the account is run. Our guide to checking your website speed covers the first of those.