If you have ever stared at your Google Ads dashboard and felt like it was built to confuse you, you are not alone. The good news: most of the money leaking out of a local-services account leaks in a handful of predictable places, and you can check every one yourself in an afternoon. No bid-strategy expertise required.

You just need to know where to look. Below are five checks any owner can run this week, roughly in order of how much money they tend to save. Open your account on a desktop and keep a notepad handy.

Check 1: Read your search terms report

This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do, and almost nobody does it. Go to Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms. This shows the actual phrases people typed before clicking your ad — which is different from the keywords you chose.

Scroll through and look for the obvious junk: jobs you do not do, "free" or "DIY" queries, the wrong city, a competitor's name. Every one is a click you paid for that was never going to call you.

The numbers are blunt. A 2025 WordStream study of more than 15,000 accounts, reported by PPC Land, found the average Google Ads account wastes about $1,127 a month — and that roughly a quarter of businesses had never added a single negative keyword.

For each bad term, add it as a negative keyword so you stop paying for it. Done monthly, that one habit quietly recovers budget for the rest of your life as an advertiser.

The cheapest win in Google Ads is refusing to pay for clicks you never wanted. The search terms report hands you that list for free.

Check 2: Sanity-check your match types

Match types control how loosely Google interprets your keywords. Broad match — plain words, no punctuation — lets Google show your ad for anything it considers related, which is where a lot of the junk in Check 1 comes from.

Open your keyword list and notice how many are broad versus phrase match ("in quotes") or exact match ([in brackets]). If most of your budget sits in broad-match terms with no negatives reining them in, that is a flashing warning light.

The fix is not to ban broad match — it has its place — but to fence it in with the negatives from Check 1, and to put your most valuable keywords on phrase or exact match.

Check 3: Confirm your conversion tracking actually fires

Here is the uncomfortable question: when Google says you got a "conversion," do you know what it is counting? Go to Goals, then Conversions, then Summary, and read the "Status" column.

You want to see "Recording conversions." If you see "No recent conversions" or "Inactive" on something important, your tracking is broken — and every decision built on that number is guesswork.

Then the harder question: is it counting the right thing? A conversion should be a real lead — a phone call, a booked appointment, a form submission — not a misclick on your number. If you cannot tell whether your conversions represent actual booked jobs, that is the gap to close first.

A conversion number you cannot trust is worse than no number at all. It makes every decision feel informed when it is really a guess.

Check 4: Look at where and when your ads run

Two settings quietly waste money in local accounts. The first is geography. Open a campaign, go to Settings, then Locations, and confirm you are targeting the radius you actually serve — not the whole state, not a default that crept in.

While you are there, check the location options. The default can show ads to people merely "interested in" your area — for a plumber in Tulsa, that might mean someone in Texas researching Tulsa. You almost always want "presence": people actually in your service area.

The second is timing. If your phones are only answered nine to five, ads running at 2 a.m. buy clicks that ring an empty office. Align your ad schedule with when someone can pick up.

Check 5: Split your branded and non-branded spend

Branded searches are people typing your company name — they already know you. Non-branded searches are people looking for the service. These differ enormously in value, and lumping them together hides the truth.

Filter your campaigns to separate the two. Branded clicks are cheap and convert well, which can make a whole account look healthier than it is. The real test is whether the non-branded side — the strangers — is profitable on its own.

If you cannot tell which is which, you cannot tell whether Google Ads is growing your business or just taking credit for customers who would have found you anyway.

Branded clicks flatter the report. Non-branded clicks tell you whether your advertising is actually working.

What to do with what you found

None of these checks requires you to touch a bid strategy or understand an algorithm. They are about visibility — seeing where the money goes and whether the numbers you trust are telling the truth.

Run all five and feel good about the answers? Your account is in better shape than most. If a few made your stomach drop, that is normal — and exactly the kind of thing worth a second set of eyes.

If you would like a second set of eyes on your account, we will walk through all five with you for free. Request a consultation →