You'll walk away with a repeatable process for finding and cutting the search terms, placements, and targeting settings that burn budget without converting. Estimates on how much of a typical PPC budget goes to waste vary widely depending on the source and methodology, so don't anchor to a specific percentage. What matters is that the leaks are findable and fixable with the right process. Before you start, you need active campaigns with at least a few weeks of data and access to the search terms report, since a handful of days won't tell you anything reliable.
In Google Ads, the search terms report shows the actual queries that triggered your ads, as opposed to the keywords you bid on. Pull 30 to 90 days of data, not the default 7-day window most people check out of habit. Export it, sort by spend descending, and look at conversions next to each term. In Meta Ads, run the equivalent check on placements, specifically Audience Network and any Facebook/Instagram placement breakdown, since spend can quietly drift into low-performing inventory there too.
Flag anything with meaningful spend and zero or near-zero conversions first. If a term has burned $400 over 60 days with no conversions, that's your biggest immediate opportunity. Don't get distracted by low-spend terms yet; you're triaging, not auditing every row.
The most common mistake here is reviewing only the last 7 days of data. Short windows hide slow-converting terms, particularly in industries like legal or healthcare where the path from click to signed client can take weeks. A 7-day view skews decisions toward pausing keywords too early, right before they would have converted. Pull the longer window first, then use shorter windows only to spot recent trend changes once your baseline is set.
Once you've flagged the losing terms, sort them into three buckets. The first is irrelevant intent: searches like "plumber jobs," "how to fix a garbage disposal myself," or "free legal consultation template" that signal the searcher isn't a buyer. The second is competitor brand names you don't want to bid against, especially if your ad copy doesn't mention them and your click-through rate on those terms is low. The third is near-duplicate queries already covered by a tighter keyword in another ad group, which don't need to be blocked so much as consolidated (more on that in Step 3).
Apply these negatives at the campaign level or, better, through a shared negative keyword list attached to multiple campaigns. A negative added only inside one ad group protects that ad group and nothing else. If you're running several campaigns for the same business, a shared list means every new campaign you launch inherits the same protection automatically.
The mistake to avoid is over-broadening your negatives. Adding a single-word negative like "free" or a brand modifier without checking what legitimate queries contain that word can quietly block high-intent traffic for weeks before anyone notices the drop in impressions. Before adding any negative, search the term in Google's Keyword Planner or check what other queries in your account contain that same word. This matters more as of 2026 than it did five years ago: Google's broad match plus automated bidding systems give you less granular control over which queries actually trigger your ads, so a sloppy negative list does more damage than it used to, and a precise one does more good.
Match type controls how closely a search query has to resemble your keyword before your ad is eligible to show. Broad match casts the widest net and, when paired with automated bidding strategies that haven't accumulated enough conversion history, tends to generate the most waste. It's not that broad match is bad; it's that Google's algorithms need conversion data to optimize it well, and a new or low-volume campaign hasn't given the system enough signal yet.
Audit your broad match keywords specifically. Pull the search terms they've triggered and compare cost per conversion against your phrase and exact match keywords in the same account. If broad match is spending disproportionately without matching that performance, it's a candidate for tightening.
At the same time, check for near-duplicate keywords sitting in different ad groups. If "emergency plumber" lives in one ad group and "24 hour emergency plumber" lives in another, they're likely competing against each other in the same auction, which inflates your own cost-per-click. Consolidate these into one ad group with one clear keyword theme.
Once you've mined the good queries out of a broad match keyword, that's, the terms that actually converted, add them as new phrase or exact match keywords in a tighter ad group, and let the original broad match keyword's negatives absorb the rest. This gives you the exploration benefit of broad match without permanently footing the bill for its imprecision.
Bad keywords aren't the only leak. Targeting settings that don't match how customers actually behave burn budget just as fast, and they're easy to overlook because they don't show up in the search terms report.
None of these fixes require touching a single keyword, which is exactly why they get missed when the audit stops at the search terms report.
Wasted spend isn't only about bad clicks. Plenty of accounts pay for good, relevant clicks that land on a page that doesn't match what the searcher was looking for, and that mismatch tanks conversion rate and Quality Score at the same time.
Check Google Ads' Landing Page Experience and Ad Relevance diagnostics at the keyword level. As of 2026, these still show as "Below average" flags in the keyword status column when Google's system detects friction between the ad, the query, and the page. A below-average Landing Page Experience rating often means the fix isn't a bid change or a new negative; it's the page itself.
A common pattern: a dental practice runs one campaign for implants, one for Invisalign, and one for emergency care, but sends all three to the same homepage. The searcher clicks an ad promising same-day emergency appointments and lands on a generic "Welcome to our practice" page with no obvious next step. That's paid spend converting at a fraction of what it should, and no amount of keyword or negative work fixes it.
Build a dedicated landing page per core service line, with a headline and call to action that mirror the ad the visitor clicked. This is one of the highest-leverage fixes on this list because it improves conversion rate and Quality Score simultaneously, which lowers your cost per click going forward as well as your cost per conversion today.
A one-time cleanup buys you a few good months and then the same leaks reopen as new queries, new competitors, and seasonal shifts change what's triggering your ads. Treat this as a cadence, not a project.
The log matters more than it sounds like it should. In accounts managed by more than one person, or handed off between agencies, the single biggest source of repeated waste is nobody remembering why a setting was changed in the first place.
Run this process monthly, not as a one-time cleanup you do when spend feels off. The accounts that stay lean are the ones where someone owns the cadence, not the ones that get a deep audit once a year. If you've read through these six steps and know your team won't sustain the weekly and biweekly reviews on top of everything else on their plate, that's usually the clearest sign it's time to bring in a dedicated paid media team. Learn more about our services.
