An advertising budget doesn't vanish all at once. It trickles away. Every day, a fraction goes to searches that have no chance of turning into customers, and because the account shows clicks, impressions and a decent average cost, nothing catches your eye.

Leak #1: searches with no intent

Someone typing “how to fix it yourself” isn't looking for a professional: they're looking for a tutorial. Someone typing “salary” followed by your trade is looking for a career change. Yet these searches trigger your ads if your keywords are too broad.

The fix is well known and often neglected: regularly read the actual search terms. Not the keywords you chose, but what people really typed, and exclude whatever doesn't fit.

The keywords you buy are not the searches you pay for. The gap between the two is your first source of savings.

Leak #2: the geographic area

A tradesperson who works within a 30-kilometre radius has no reason to pay for clicks on the other side of the country. Default settings are broader than most people realize, and often include people who “show interest” in the area, not just those who are actually there.

Leak #3: the landing page

Sending all your traffic to the home page is the costliest mistake, because it's invisible in the ad account: campaign metrics stay healthy while conversion collapses further down the funnel. An ad that promises a specific service should land on the page that covers that service.

Leak #4: missing measurement

Without tracking of real inquiries (calls, forms, orders), the tool optimizes blindly. It will push volume toward whatever produces clicks, not whatever produces customers. Many accounts run for months with poorly configured tracking, and nobody notices.

  • Check that every inquiry is counted, including phone calls.
  • Check that it's counted only once: duplicates flatter your results and skew your decisions.
  • Tell a contact from a sale: a hundred inquiries with no signed quote are worth less than ten qualified ones.

The right metric

Not the number of clicks, not the cost per click, not the click-through rate: what matters is the cost of acquiring a real customer, compared with what that customer brings in. Everything else is an intermediate metric, useful for diagnosis, dangerous as a goal.

Thirty days of search terms, line by line

Open the search terms report for the last thirty days and read it line by line. It's the most profitable exercise there is in an ad account: in one hour, you'll see exactly what you're paying for, and some of what you see will make you cut spending on the spot.

An ad account isn't something you set once. You have to keep watching it, or it drifts, always in the same direction.