Estimate how much of your Google Ads budget is being burned by broad match, irrelevant queries, and weak landing pages.
Most service business Google Ads accounts we audit have 30 to 50 percent recoverable waste. That budget, redirected into qualified intent, would generate roughly 15 additional leads per month.
Most wasted ad spend is not dramatic. It is not one obviously broken campaign; it is a steady leak spread across search terms nobody reviewed, locations nobody restricted, and hours when nobody answers the phone. It accumulates quietly because every individual component looks defensible in the interface, and the account continues to report conversions.
The calculator estimates the share of a monthly budget likely being consumed by traffic that cannot convert, based on the patterns that appear in nearly every unmanaged or lightly managed account. It is an estimate, not an audit, and it is deliberately conservative. In accounts we review directly, the actual figure is frequently higher than the estimate this tool produces.
The point of the number is not the number. It is to establish whether the account's problem is efficiency or strategy. An account leaking a quarter of its budget to irrelevant search terms needs housekeeping. An account that is clean and still unprofitable needs a different offer, a different landing experience, or a different channel entirely, and no amount of negative keywords will fix it.
These appear in roughly this order of magnitude across the accounts we audit, though the mix varies by industry and account age.
Broad and phrase match will match queries you would never bid on deliberately. Job seekers, students researching, people looking for free versions, and competitors checking positioning all cost the same per click as a genuine buyer. An account that has not had its search terms report reviewed in a quarter is almost certainly funding all four.
Default location settings target people who show interest in an area, not only those located in it. For a local service business that means paying for clicks from other states, and the traffic converts at a fraction of the rate because the caller is not in your service area.
For phone-driven businesses, clicks at eleven at night are usually pure cost. Some categories genuinely warrant round the clock coverage, but they need after-hours answering to justify it. Running ads into an unanswered phone is the most avoidable waste in any account.
Mobile and desktop behave differently in nearly every industry, and search partner and display placements attached to a search campaign often perform far worse than the search traffic they hide behind. Reported blended performance conceals both.
Counting page views, minor clicks, or every phone call regardless of duration teaches the bidding algorithm to buy the wrong traffic. This is the most damaging leak of all because the account optimizes itself steadily further from revenue while the reports improve.
In lightly managed accounts, a fifth to a third of budget commonly goes to traffic with no realistic chance of converting. Well-managed accounts still carry some waste, because broad matching is genuinely useful for discovery. Zero waste usually means the account is targeted so narrowly it is missing volume.
Cautiously, and only with a substantial negative keyword list and a conversion signal the algorithm can trust. On a small budget, broad match can consume a month of spend on exploratory queries before producing enough data to learn from.
It can, particularly when it is allowed to absorb branded search that would have converted anyway, which inflates its apparent performance. Exclude brand terms where possible and compare incremental results against what the account produced before the campaign existed.
Search terms and budget pacing weekly, structural performance monthly, and strategy quarterly. The weekly review is the one that prevents leaks compounding, and it is the one most often skipped.
It can, temporarily, because reducing volume slows the learning signal the bidding algorithm depends on. Remove clear waste decisively, then make further cuts gradually and watch conversion volume rather than only cost, so you notice if the account is being starved of data.
No. Cheap clicks are frequently cheap because the intent behind them is weak. A term costing four times as much can be the most profitable in the account if it converts at a high rate into large deals. Judge everything on cost per acquired customer, never on cost per click.