Find the ad spend that is doing nothing
An audit that cross-references your Google Ads spend against real leads, finds the budget producing nothing, and rebuilds the account around what converts.
The problem
How it works by hand
Google Ads accounts rot quietly. Campaigns set up years ago keep spending, broad match drifts onto searches nothing to do with your business, and the platform’s own recommendations exist to raise your budget, not to find your waste. The monthly agency report shows clicks and impressions, which tells you nothing about whether any of it became a customer.
A worked example
What a working version looks like
We pull the full account history through the API: spend, search terms, conversions as the platform counts them. Then the step that changes the answer: cross-referencing that spend against your real lead and revenue records, not the platform’s conversion column, which routinely counts things that are not customers. Spend with zero downstream pipeline gets flagged and killed. What remains gets restructured into tight campaigns matched to what you actually sell, with negative keywords doing real work. After the rebuild, a recurring search-term review stops the rot coming back.
The exact tools change per business. The shape does not.
What it needs
Honest inputs, nothing exotic
- 01Google Ads account access
- 02Your lead records, wherever they live: CRM, inbox, spreadsheet
- 03A view of which leads became customers, even a rough one
- 04Willingness to switch off campaigns that feel busy but produce nothing
The payoff
What you get back
The same budget starts buying customers instead of clicks. For most accounts we look at, the waste found in the first pass covers the cost of finding it.
Do it yourself
How you would build this yourself
No course, no upsell. This is the order we would build it in, with the tools named, and a prompt to start from.
- 1
Export the search terms report from Google Ads for the last twelve months. Not the keywords report, the search terms: what people actually typed before they cost you money.
- 2
Read it. You will usually find spend on searches that have nothing to do with your business within ten minutes.
- 3
Cross-reference spend against your own lead records, not the platform’s conversion column. Google counts plenty of things that are not customers.
- 4
The fiddly bit: matching clicks to real leads needs UTMs on your landing pages and forms that capture them. If that is not in place, fix it first or the cross-reference is guesswork.
- 5
Kill the campaigns and terms with zero downstream pipeline, add the junk searches as negative keywords, and rebuild tight campaigns around what is left.
- 6
Repeat the search terms review monthly. Broad match drifts and the rot comes back.
I am going to give you a Google Ads search terms export (CSV) and my lead records for the same period. Cross-reference them: which campaigns and search terms produced real leads, and which spent money and produced nothing. Flag everything you would pause, list the negative keywords to add, and propose a tighter campaign structure around what converts. Before judging anything, ask me which of these leads actually became customers.
Copy it into Claude Code, fill the brackets, and it will plan the build with you before writing a line of code.
We would rather show you how than bill you. The whole ladder of free help, answers, guides and the weekly build-along, is on the do-it-yourself page.