Where small budgets actually leak in Google Ads
Most of the waste I find in a new account isn't dramatic. There's rarely one broken campaign burning the whole budget. It's four or five small settings that each quietly take a slice, and together they add up to a third of the month.
Here's the order I check them in.
1. Search terms, before anything else
Broad match is not the villain it's made out to be — but it needs supervision. The search terms report tells you what people actually typed, as opposed to what you thought you were bidding on. On a small budget, a handful of irrelevant terms is enough to matter.
- Pull the last 30 days of search terms, sorted by cost.
- Anything with spend and no conversions gets read, not just skimmed.
- Add negatives at the right level — campaign or ad group, not just account-wide.
2. Performance Max, and the setting everyone misses
Performance Max will happily spend on your own brand searches and report them as wins. If brand traffic was going to arrive anyway, you're paying for something you already had.
Separate brand into its own campaign, or exclude brand terms from PMax, so you can see what the campaign is genuinely adding.
3. Locations that were never intended
The default location setting targets people interested in your area, not only people in it. For a Toronto business that can mean paying for clicks from well outside the service area. Switch to presence-only targeting unless you have a specific reason not to.
4. Conversion actions that count the same thing twice
If a lead form fires both a "Submit" event and a "Thank you page" event, and both are set as primary conversions, every lead is counted twice. Bidding then optimises toward a number that isn't real.
Pick one action per outcome. Mark the rest as secondary so you can still see them without letting them steer the bidding.
5. Ad schedule and device splits
Look at the hours and devices where money goes out and nothing comes back. On a small budget you usually can't afford to be everywhere at once — and you rarely need to be.
None of this is clever. It's just the reading nobody has time to do while the campaigns are running. It's also, reliably, where the money is.