There's a number that should make every Google Ads advertiser uncomfortable: audits of B2B accounts consistently find that 40 to 60 percent of ad budget goes to traffic that had zero chance of converting. In B2B SaaS specifically — where a single click on a broad keyword can cost ₹1,000 or more — that's not an inefficiency. It's a structural problem.
The uncomfortable reality is that most of this waste is invisible in standard Google Ads reporting. Your campaigns show impressions, clicks, and conversions. They don't show you the job seekers clicking your enterprise software ads, the students researching your industry for a college paper, the competitors checking your landing pages, or the bot traffic draining your budget in the background. You have to go looking for it.
This guide covers 12 specific places where Google Ads budgets leak — not generic advice about "optimising your campaigns," but the precise mechanisms, where to find them in your account, and exactly what to do about each one.
Leak #1: Irrelevant Search Terms From Broad Match
This is the largest single source of wasted spend in most Google Ads accounts, and it has gotten significantly worse as match types have loosened. Broad match keywords today interpret intent far more liberally than the broad match of five years ago. A keyword like "marketing software" will now trigger searches like "what does a marketing manager do," "marketing degree programs," and "free marketing tools for students."
In B2B accounts, the pattern is remarkably consistent: a meaningful chunk of broad match clicks come from job seekers, students, researchers, and people who want something free. These users click — often because the ad looks relevant enough at a glance — but they never convert. They generate cost and corrupt your performance data simultaneously.
Where to find it: Search terms report (Keywords → Search terms). Filter by clicks, sort descending. Look for queries containing "jobs," "salary," "what is," "how does," "free," "course," "template," "definition," "examples," "DIY," and "review." These are the categories that reliably signal non-buyer intent.
How to fix it: Build a master negative keyword list containing intent-exclusion terms across these categories and apply it at the account level so it covers all campaigns simultaneously. Add irrelevant search terms to this list weekly. The goal isn't to eliminate broad match — it's to make broad match smarter by defining its boundaries clearly. Accounts that implement systematic negative keyword management from audit data typically see 25-35% waste reduction within the first 30 days.
Leak #2: Your Own Branded Traffic Inside Performance Max
Performance Max campaigns will, by default, absorb your branded search traffic. This means someone searching directly for your company name — a person who was almost certainly going to convert anyway — gets routed through your PMax campaign instead of your brand Search campaign. PMax gets credit for the conversion. Your brand campaign volume drops. Your PMax ROAS looks exceptional. And you're paying for traffic you would have gotten for free or at near-zero cost through organic results.
This matters because branded conversions are cheap and high-confidence. When PMax absorbs them, it inflates your automated campaign's efficiency metrics in a way that's misleading. You can't tell whether PMax is finding incremental new customers or simply re-capturing customers who were already coming to you.
Where to find it: Check the Insights tab of your PMax campaign. Under Search categories, look for categories that map to your brand name. Compare your brand Search campaign's impression share over the period you've been running PMax — if it dropped when PMax launched, PMax is eating brand traffic.
How to fix it: Add your brand terms to the brand exclusions list inside your PMax campaign settings. This is different from standard negative keywords — it specifically prevents PMax from appearing for branded queries. Your dedicated brand Search campaign should own all branded traffic.
Leak #3: Display Network Traffic in Search Campaigns
By default, when you create a Search campaign and select "Search Network," Google quietly checks a box called "Include Google search partners" and sometimes includes Display Network expansion. Many advertisers never notice this, and many never review where their Search campaign traffic actually comes from.
Search partner traffic and Display expansion traffic often performs significantly worse than pure Google Search traffic — lower conversion rates, higher bounce rates, and fundamentally different user intent. A user on a search partner site is not in the same mindset as someone actively searching on Google. Yet they're served the same ads, at the same bids, from the same budget.
Where to find it: In your campaign statistics, segment by Network (with search partners). This breaks down your performance by Google Search, Search Partners, and Display. Compare the conversion rate and CPA across these three segments.
How to fix it: If Search Partners show significantly worse CPA than Google Search, uncheck "Include Google search partners" in your campaign settings. If Display Network has been opted into, remove it entirely — Display campaigns should be separate, with separate creative, separate targeting, and separate budgets.
Leak #4: Wrong Location Targeting Setting
Google Ads has two location targeting options that sound similar but behave very differently. "People in or regularly in your targeted locations" shows your ads to people physically present in your target area. "People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations" shows your ads to anyone who has shown interest in that location — including people physically located anywhere else in the world.
The second setting is the default. If you're a local business, a regional service provider, or any business that only serves customers in specific geographies, this default setting is actively routing budget to people who cannot become your customers.
Where to find it: Campaign Settings → Locations → Location options. Check which option is selected for each campaign.
How to fix it: Change to "People in or regularly in your targeted locations" for any campaign where geography is a genuine constraint. This is a one-minute fix that can eliminate a meaningful portion of wasted impressions and clicks immediately.
Leak #5: Ads Showing to Your Existing Customers
If 15% of your clicks come from existing customers — common in B2B — you're wasting 15% of your budget. These users are searching for your product to log in, access support, or evaluate additional features. They're not new prospects. You're paying to show ads to people who already pay you.
This is particularly acute for SaaS companies where the product is accessed via a web interface. Existing users search for your brand or product name regularly. Without customer exclusions, your campaigns serve them ads alongside genuinely new prospects, inflating cost with zero incremental return.
Where to find it: This isn't visible in standard reporting because customer match data lives in your CRM, not your Google Ads account. You identify the problem by thinking through your customer behaviour — do existing customers search for you to log in? If yes, the leak exists.
How to fix it: Create a Customer Match audience by uploading your existing customer email list to Google Ads. Apply this audience as an exclusion to all acquisition campaigns. If you want to run upsell or expansion campaigns to existing customers, create separate campaigns specifically for that purpose with dedicated messaging. This single fix can redirect 10-20% of wasted budget back to genuine prospect traffic.
Leak #6: Unmonitored Automated Extensions and Assets
Google automatically generates extensions for your ads — additional sitelinks, callouts, images, and dynamic search ad content — based on your website content. In most cases you never explicitly approve these. Some will be excellent. Others will pull copy from the wrong pages, promote services you no longer offer, link to pages you don't want to drive paid traffic to, or represent your brand inconsistently.
Automatically created assets have become more prevalent in 2025 and 2026 as Google's AI has gained more latitude to generate content. AI Max and Performance Max both have text customisation features that can pull from unexpected places on your site. This is not inherently bad, but it requires active management.
Where to find it: Ads & assets → Assets. Filter by "Automatically created" to see everything Google is generating without your explicit input. Check performance data — impression share, CTR, conversion rate — for auto-generated assets versus your manually created ones.
How to fix it: Review auto-generated assets monthly. Remove any that are inaccurate, outdated, or off-brand. In campaign settings, you can turn off automated asset creation entirely if you prefer full control. For AI Max campaigns, use URL exclusions to prevent Google from pulling copy from pages you don't want used as ad content sources.
Leak #7: Budget Allocated to Low-Converting Hours and Devices
Not all hours of the day and not all devices convert at the same rate. For B2B and professional services, this gap is often dramatic: business hours on desktop may convert at 3-4x the rate of evenings and weekends on mobile. Yet without ad scheduling and device bid adjustments, your budget distributes roughly evenly across all time periods and devices.
The result is that a meaningful portion of your budget goes to time windows and device types where your target audience is not in a buying mindset and your landing pages perform poorly. B2B forms optimised for desktop often have conversion rates 50% lower on mobile — not because the campaign is broken, but because a complex form on a small screen creates friction that kills conversions.
Where to find it: In campaign reports, segment by Hour of Day and Day of Week to identify time-based performance patterns. Segment by Device to compare desktop, mobile, and tablet conversion rates and CPAs.
How to fix it: Apply bid adjustments to reduce bids during low-converting hours. For B2B accounts, reducing mobile bids by 20-40% and reducing weekend bids by 15-30% is often appropriate based on performance data. Don't eliminate these segments entirely — some mobile and weekend conversions are valuable — but stop over-bidding for traffic that statistically underperforms.
Leak #8: Cannibalisation Between Campaigns
When multiple campaigns in an account are eligible to show for the same search query, Google runs an internal auction between them. The winner is based on Ad Rank, which means your campaigns are competing against each other and driving up the effective price you pay for the same traffic.
Campaign cannibalisation is most common when you have both a broad match campaign and an exact match campaign targeting similar themes, when a brand campaign and a non-brand campaign both cover brand-adjacent terms, or when a Performance Max campaign is running alongside Search campaigns without proper exclusions.
Where to find it: Auction insights report — if you see your own domains appearing as competitors, cannibalisation is occurring. Also check the search terms report for the same queries appearing across multiple campaigns with different CPAs.
How to fix it: Use campaign-level negative keyword lists to create clean boundaries between campaigns. If your brand campaign should own all branded queries, those terms should be negatives in every non-brand campaign. If your exact match campaign owns specific high-value queries, those should be negatives in your broad match campaigns. Each query should have a designated campaign — not a competition.
Leak #9: Low-Quality Placement Traffic in Display and PMax
For campaigns running on the Display Network or Performance Max, Google serves ads across an enormous range of placements: websites, apps, YouTube channels, Gmail. Many of these placements are irrelevant to your audience and generate click traffic with near-zero conversion potential.
The worst offenders are mobile game apps (which generate accidental clicks from users trying to navigate the game interface), parked domains (placeholder pages with low-quality content), and YouTube channels with audiences that don't match your targeting. Wasted clicks from irrelevant placements do more than just drain your budget — they pollute your performance data, making it difficult to make informed optimisation decisions.
Where to find it: In Display campaigns: Where Ads Showed report. Filter by placement performance — sort by clicks and cost, then look for placements with high spend and zero conversions. Mobile apps are identifiable by their bundle ID format (com.developer.appname). In PMax: the Insights tab provides some placement visibility, though it's less granular than Display reporting.
How to fix it: Build a placement exclusion list covering mobile game apps, parked domains, and any specific placements that consistently spend without converting. Apply this list at the account level so it covers all relevant campaigns. Google's own "managed placements" feature lets you whitelist specific high-quality placements if you prefer that approach.
Leak #10: Conversion Tracking Gaps and Errors
Every other item on this list assumes your conversion tracking is accurate. If it isn't, none of your optimisation decisions are based on real data — and Smart Bidding is optimising toward the wrong signals entirely.
Conversion tracking issues are more common than most advertisers realise. Duplicate conversion tags fire the same conversion multiple times, inflating your numbers. Broken tags stop counting conversions, causing Smart Bidding to restrict spend on campaigns that are actually performing well. Counting page views or session depth as primary conversions causes the algorithm to optimise for engagement rather than commercial intent. Mismatched attribution windows misallocate credit between campaigns.
Where to find it: Tools → Conversions → Conversion actions. Check the status of each conversion action — "Recording conversions" means it's firing. Check the "Most recent conversion" date — if a conversion action hasn't fired recently, the tag may be broken. Use Google Tag Assistant to audit your tracking implementation.
How to fix it: Audit every conversion action in your account. Remove or demote micro-conversions (page views, scroll depth, time on site) to "Observation" rather than "Conversion" so they don't influence Smart Bidding. Ensure only genuine business-outcome conversions — form fills, phone calls, purchases, demo bookings — are set as primary conversion actions. Implement Enhanced Conversions to improve data accuracy in a privacy-safe way.
Leak #11: Budget Going to Audiences Who've Already Converted
Remarketing is a powerful capability that can also become a waste mechanism if not structured deliberately. If your campaigns show ads to people who have already converted — completed a purchase, submitted a form, signed up for your product — you're paying to acquire customers you already have.
This is distinct from the existing customer problem covered earlier. This specifically covers the window after conversion where a prospect becomes a customer but remains in your general remarketing pools. Without post-conversion exclusions, these new customers will continue seeing your acquisition ads, generating clicks with zero incremental value.
Where to find it: Review your remarketing audience structure. Identify whether you have a "Recent Converters" or "Customers" audience built from your conversion data or CRM list. Check whether this audience is excluded from your acquisition campaigns.
How to fix it: Create a "Converted Users" audience built from your conversion events (purchase, form fill, sign-up). Apply this as an audience exclusion to all acquisition campaigns. Set an exclusion window appropriate to your purchase cycle — for B2B SaaS, 90-180 days is often appropriate. For e-commerce with repeat purchase potential, exclude only for 30 days, then re-include them as prospects for repurchase campaigns.
Leak #12: Blindly Implemented Google Recommendations
Google's optimisation suggestions prioritise Google's revenue, not necessarily yours. The Recommendations tab in Google Ads presents suggestions that appear data-driven and authoritative. Many of them are genuinely useful. Many of them are not — and the ones that aren't can systematically expand your spend without improving returns.
Common recommendations to be sceptical of: expanding to additional search partners, enabling broad match on campaigns that currently use tighter match types, raising budgets on campaigns that are "limited by budget" (they may be limited for good reasons), and adding Google-suggested keywords that are thematically adjacent to your actual targets but commercially irrelevant to your business.
The Optimisation Score — Google's percentage metric suggesting how "optimised" your account is — increases when you accept recommendations regardless of whether those recommendations would improve your business outcomes. Chasing a high Optimisation Score by accepting all suggestions is not account management. It's compliance.
Where to find it: The Recommendations tab, which surfaces proactively. Also check your account's Optimisation Score and the recommendations attached to it.
How to fix it: Review each recommendation against your specific business objectives before implementing. Accept recommendations that align with your strategy. Dismiss recommendations that don't — and use the dismissal reason to tell Google why, which prevents the same suggestion from reappearing. Never accept a recommendation solely to improve your Optimisation Score.
The Audit Process: Turning This List Into Action
Working through all 12 of these leak points simultaneously is overwhelming. The right approach is to prioritise by potential impact and work sequentially.
Start with conversion tracking (Leak #10) — everything else depends on your data being accurate. Then tackle branded traffic in PMax (Leak #2) and existing customer exclusions (Leaks #5 and #11), as these are typically quick fixes with immediate impact. Move to search term review and negative keyword expansion (Leak #1), which takes longer but has the highest long-term value. Then work through location settings, device adjustments, and placement exclusions.
Build a weekly cadence for search term review — 20 minutes every Monday looking for new irrelevant queries and adding them to your negative lists. Many of the best-performing Google Ads accounts are distinguished not by sophisticated strategy but by systematic hygiene. They do the unglamorous work of eliminating waste every week, which compounds into significant efficiency gains over months.
The goal isn't to cut spending. It's to redirect spending from traffic that has no conversion potential to traffic that does. Every rupee stopped from going to a job seeker or a bot is a rupee available for a genuine prospect. That's not cost-cutting — it's reinvestment.
The ClickCatalyst Level 8 Optimization Framework systematically audits all 12 of these waste categories as part of our account health assessment. If you'd like to know where your account stands, explore our audit process.