Find out how much of your Google Ads budget is being wasted.

Pull the Search Terms report, filter Clicks ≥ 10 and Conversions = 0 over the last 30 days, and sort by cost descending — every row at the top is recoverable budget. Smart Bidding treats these terms as inconclusive rather than bad, so it keeps funding them until you explicitly exclude them. Waste also hides in underperforming devices, hours with consistently poor conversion rate, and geos with no customer base. The Waste Audit runs this query across all four dimensions and ranks findings by monthly recoverable spend.

Industry benchmarks place typical waste at 15–30% of total ad spend, with accounts running Broad Match without sufficient negatives or PMax without placement exclusions routinely exceeding 35%. WordStream's study of 15,000+ accounts found an average of $1,127/month wasted per account, and 25% of accounts had never added a single negative keyword. The drivers vary — some accounts leak through search term irrelevance, others through low-quality placements, others through poor mobile performance. The Waste Audit calculates your exact leakage rate and breaks it down by driver so you know where to act first.

In the Google Ads UI, go to Insights → Search Terms, filter Clicks ≥ 10 AND Conversions = 0 over a 30-day window, then sort by Cost descending. The 10-click threshold filters statistical noise — one click without a conversion is not a signal, ten clicks without one strongly suggests the query does not convert for your business. Every row is either a negative keyword candidate (if the query is genuinely irrelevant) or an investigation target (if the query is relevant but the landing page is broken). The Waste Audit automates this and produces a ready-to-upload negative keyword list sorted by recoverable spend per term.

The fastest recovery is adding campaign-level negative keywords for the top 20 zero-conversion search terms from your last 30 days — a 15-minute intervention that typically recovers 8–15% of spend immediately. Negative keywords apply at the next auction, so the effect is observable within 24–48 hours. This is faster than bid adjustments (7–14 days to stabilise), faster than restructuring (resets Smart Bidding learning), and faster than creative changes (require impression volume to measure). The Waste Audit pre-builds this list on the first page of the report so you can act on it in one sitting.

Across benchmarked audits, the average leakage rate falls in the 18–25% range, with ecommerce skewing higher (25–35%) and lead-gen slightly lower (12–22%). Leakage rate is spend on terms, placements, hours, or devices that produced zero conversions over 30 days divided by total spend. Accounts with heavy PMax usage, high Broad Match share, or untracked conversions almost always exceed the average because all three conditions increase algorithmic exploration into unprofitable traffic. The Waste Audit produces your exact rate and benchmarks it against account-size and industry peer groups.

Three diagnostic signals indicate active waste: (1) your Search Terms report contains 20+ terms with 10+ clicks and zero conversions; (2) your Impression Share Lost to Rank is under 20% but your CPA is above target (winning auctions but losing value); (3) your conversion rate varies by more than 3x between your top and bottom performing hours or devices without those segments being budget-throttled. Any one of these, present consistently, means your account has recoverable spend. The Waste Audit checks all three and quantifies the leakage in pounds, not percentages.

Yes, this is a real risk — over-broad negatives (especially single words added as phrase or broad match) can block profitable long-tail queries you never intended to exclude. Adding 'free' as a phrase match negative on a plumbing account blocks 'are Saturday plumbers free today' — a high-intent query. The fix is to audit existing negative lists for single-word negatives and either downgrade them to exact match or replace them with multi-word phrases. The Waste Audit includes a negative keyword collision check that flags any negatives blocking queries with historical conversions.

Monthly for accounts under £10K/month spend, fortnightly for £10K–£50K, and weekly above £50K — because the volume of new unique search terms scales with spend. Between audits, Broad Match expansion and AI-driven query matching accumulate new leakage patterns faster than manual review can catch. The right cadence balances the time cost of auditing against the daily opportunity cost of undetected waste. The Waste Audit can be scheduled to run automatically and email you the diffs from the prior report.

The obvious waste (10+ clicks, zero conversions) is easy — the hidden waste sits just below that threshold (3–9 clicks) and collectively adds up to 10–20% of spend. Google also hides very-low-volume terms for privacy; their aggregate shows as 'Other' in the Search Terms report. If 'Other' exceeds 30% of your clicks, a significant share of your spend is on queries you literally cannot see. The Waste Audit quantifies your 'Other' share, estimates leakage within it using the conversion rate of your visible terms, and surfaces low-volume-but-high-cost terms that are almost always worth excluding.

Not disable — adjust. Completely cutting mobile off blocks potentially high-intent users; the better move is a bid adjustment reflecting mobile's actual conversion rate ratio to desktop. If desktop converts at 4% and mobile at 1.2%, a -50% to -70% mobile bid modifier is warranted. For lead-gen accounts where phone calls are the primary conversion, mobile may actually outperform desktop — check call extensions and call-only conversions separately. The Waste Audit calculates the exact mobile performance delta and recommends a bid adjustment rather than an exclusion.

Negative keywords instruct Google not to show your ads when a search query contains specific words or phrases, and they apply at three levels: campaign, ad group, and account-wide shared lists. Without aggressive negative sculpting, Broad Match and close-variant expansion route 20–40% of budget to queries with zero commercial viability — competitor brands, informational queries, and semantically adjacent but commercially unrelated terms. Negative keywords are now the primary mechanism for steering algorithmic intent, not just filtering peripheral irrelevance. The Waste Audit produces a pre-built negative keyword list ranked by recoverable spend — each entry shows exactly how much your account paid for the matching traffic over the audit period.

AI-driven waste detection works by cross-referencing your Search Terms report against your converting query patterns, flagging terms whose semantic features (length, intent classification, commercial vs informational signals) diverge from your convertors. This is significantly faster than sorting a CSV by cost — a 10,000-row search terms export takes hours manually but minutes algorithmically. The catch is that AI recommendations are only as good as the conversion data they train on, so accounts with polluted conversion signals produce poor recommendations. The Waste Audit runs this analysis against your verified (GA4-matched) conversions rather than raw Google Ads conversions to avoid reinforcing bad signals.

No. The audit uses read-only Google OAuth access. It reads your campaign data, search terms, and conversion records to generate the diagnostic — it cannot modify campaigns, add keywords, change bids, or alter any account settings. You receive the findings as a PDF and apply whatever changes you choose. If you want the system which can take actions, we offer ClickHub workbench which help you take actions

Connecting your account via Google OAuth takes under 5 minutes. The diagnostic queries run against your data in under 3 minutes. You receive a multi-page PDF covering your leakage rate, a device friction analysis, an hourly waste heatmap, and a prioritised negative keyword action list with a monthly savings forecast.