How to Spot Wasted Spend in Your Google Ads Account

Your Google Ads bill goes out every month. The leads don't always match it. Somewhere in that account you're paying for clicks from people who were never going to hire you.

Good Google Ads management in Auckland is mostly about cutting the waste, not spending more. The clicks that drain your budget are usually easy to find once you know where to look.

This post shows you the four checks that turn up the most wasted spend for trade and service businesses. You can run all of them in an afternoon.

Read your search terms report first

The search terms report shows the actual words people typed before they clicked your ad. This is different from your keywords. Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what really happened.

In your account, go to the campaign, then Insights and reports, then Search terms. Set the date range to the last 30 or 90 days. Now read the list. You'll see two kinds of problems straight away.

• Searches for a service you don't offer. A roofer bidding broadly might be paying for "roof painting" or "gutter cleaning" when they only do re-roofs.
• Searches with no buying intent. Think "how to fix a leaking tap" or "plumber salary nz" or "free" anything. Those people want information or a job, not a quote.
• Searches from the wrong area. If you only cover West Auckland and you're paying for "plumber Hamilton", that money is gone.

Anything on that list that would never turn into a job is wasted spend. Write it down.

Build a negative keyword list

Once you've spotted the junk searches, you tell Google to stop showing your ads for them. That's what negative keywords do.

Start with the obvious ones almost every trade needs:

• free, cheap, DIY, how to, diagram, salary, jobs, apprenticeship, course
• Suburbs and towns you don't service
• Products or services you don't sell

Add these as negative keywords at the campaign level so they apply everywhere. Then check your search terms report again in a couple of weeks. New junk searches always turn up, so this isn't a one-off job. It's a habit. Ten minutes a fortnight keeps the waste down.

Check where and when your ads run

Two settings quietly burn money for a lot of Auckland accounts. Both are worth checking today.

Location settings

Open your campaign settings and find Locations. There's a target option buried under Location options. The default setting shows your ads to people who show interest in your area, not just people in it. That can mean someone in Australia searching "Auckland electrician" sees your ad. Set it to Presence, so you only reach people actually in the areas you service.

Ad schedule

If you can only answer the phone during work hours, think hard about running ads at 2am. Some trades do fine round the clock because people book online. Others pay for clicks at midnight that ring out and never call back. Look at when your calls and enquiries actually come in, then match your schedule to that.

Match the click to the right page

Wasted spend isn't always a bad click. Sometimes it's a good click that lands on the wrong page. Someone searches "emergency electrician", clicks your ad, and lands on your homepage where they have to hunt for the emergency callout info. Most people won't hunt. They hit back and call the next result.

Send each ad to the page that matches what the person searched for. An ad about hot water cylinders should land on your hot water page, not the homepage. The page should show your phone number, your service area and a clear reason to call, all above the fold. If your site makes that hard, that's a bigger fix than the ads themselves, and a proper

lead-converting website changes what every click is worth. Getting the click is only half the job. The page has to do the rest.

Track which clicks turn into calls

You can't cut waste you can't see. If you don't know which keywords and ads produce actual phone calls and enquiries, you're guessing.

Set up conversion tracking so Google records real actions: form submissions, and calls from the ads. Call tracking matters most for trades, because the phone is where the job gets won. Once that data comes in, you'll often find that a small handful of keywords bring nearly all your calls. The rest is spend you can trim or turn off.

The goal isn't the cheapest click. It's the lowest cost per job that actually books in.

Your next step this week

You don't need to rebuild the whole account. Do these in order and you'll already be ahead of most Auckland trade accounts:

1. Read your search terms report for the last 90 days.
2. Add negative keywords for every junk search and service area you don't cover.
3. Set your location target to Presence, not interest.
4. Check your ad schedule against when enquiries actually come in.
5. Make sure conversion tracking is recording calls and form fills.

If you run through these and the numbers still don't add up, that's usually a sign the account structure needs a proper look. That's the sort of thing we sort out with our Google Ads management, but even doing the five steps yourself will stop money leaking out the bottom of your account.