I Managed Google Ads for 110+ Small Businesses at Once. Here's Where the Money Leaks.

For a few years I worked inside a digital agency where my job was to run Google Ads for more than 110 small businesses at the same time. Retail shops. Tradies. Service businesses. Restaurants and venues. Accounts landed on my desk weekly, and most arrived with the same note attached: set up by someone else, owner thinks it's not working, have a look.

The owner was almost always right.

Not because Google Ads doesn't work. It works fine. But nearly every account I inherited had at least one leak quietly draining the budget, and when you've opened the bonnet on that many accounts, you stop seeing one-off problems and start seeing patterns. The same handful of leaks, again and again, across completely different industries. A florist and an electrician can have the identical problem and never know it.

If you're spending $1–5k a month on Google Ads right now, I'd put money on at least one of these being in your account. Here's how to find them.

Leak 1: Your conversion tracking is broken — or lying to you

This one goes first because every other decision in the account depends on it.

I lost count of the accounts I opened where "conversions" meant something useless. A trades business counting every visit to the contact page as a lead. A retailer tracking add-to-carts as purchases. Accounts with no tracking at all, running for years, optimised purely on clicks.

Here's why it's the most expensive leak of the lot: Google's bidding system optimises toward whatever you've told it a conversion is. Tell it a page view is a conversion and it will go and buy you page views. Efficiently. At scale. You'll get exactly what you asked for and none of what you wanted.

Broken tracking doesn't look broken. That's the trap. The dashboard still fills up with green numbers, the monthly report still shows a healthy conversions column, and everyone nods along. Meanwhile the phone isn't ringing.

The check: open your conversion actions in Google Ads and ask one question about each one. Would I pay actual money for this event? A real enquiry, a booked job, a sale? Keep it. Anything else shouldn't be a conversion. Then fix the plumbing properly, so every lead and touchpoint is mapped and you're not guessing what's working.

Leak 2: You're paying for searches you'd never want

Go to your search terms report. This is the list of actual things people typed before clicking your ad — not your keywords, the real searches. For most small business owners, reading it for the first time is a grim little afternoon.

The classics: an emergency electrician paying for "how to become an electrician". Retailers paying for searches with "free", "cheap", "DIY" and "jobs" in them. Service businesses spending on suburbs they don't service. Broad match keywords plus an empty negative-keyword list is the standard setup, because it's Google's default posture, and it quietly spends your budget on adjacent nonsense.

Across the whole portfolio this was the most common leak. Not the biggest, that's tracking, but the most universal. I don't think I inherited a single account with a properly maintained negative list. Not one.

The fix is boring and it works: pull the search terms report for the last 30 days and read every term you paid for. Anything you wouldn't want a customer to have typed, add as a negative. Repeat monthly.

Leak 3: Set-and-forget bidding

Most small business accounts get built once, by a setup person, a previous agency or the owner on a weekend, and then nobody with real skin in the game touches the bidding again.

Smart Bidding is genuinely good now. But it's a system you steer, not one you abandon. Target CPAs set years ago and never revisited. Campaigns capped by budget so the algorithm can't breathe. Seasonal businesses running the same settings in their quiet months as their peak. Performance Max left on defaults, spending wherever Google fancies. None of these ever shows up as an error message. They just cost you, slowly, every day.

Here's my bias, and I own it: I spent close to a decade building my own e-commerce brand from nothing to 7-figure annual revenue, and every dollar of ad spend was my own money. That teaches you to optimise harder than anyone working with someone else's budget. When it's your money, set-and-forget isn't a strategy. It's a donation.

Want to know if this is you? Open the change history in your Google Ads account and find the last time a human adjusted a bid strategy, a target or a budget. If the answer is "months ago" and results have drifted, you've found your leak.

Leak 4: The ad writes a cheque the landing page can't cash

The ad says "same-day emergency call-outs". The click lands on a generic homepage with a slider, a mission statement and a phone number hiding in the footer. The visitor arrived urgent and left confused.

You pay at the click. You earn at the page. When those two don't match, you've bought the traffic and thrown away the sale, which is worse than not advertising at all. At least doing nothing is free.

This one hurt to watch at the agency because it's invisible inside the ads account. Everything upstream looks fine — decent click-through rate, sensible cost per click. The leak is one click downstream, where nobody's looking.

Quick test: read your own ad, then click it like a stranger would. Within five seconds, can you see the exact thing the ad promised and an obvious way to act on it? If not, every dollar upstream is working at a discount.

Why nobody catches this

Because the dashboard is designed to reassure you. Impressions, clicks, click-through rate — the report always has something green in it. Small business owners don't have time to dig, and the person who built the account rarely audits their own work.

And I'll say the quiet part. When an agency runs dozens of accounts on monthly retainers, attention flows to whoever complained loudest that week. That's not malice, it's maths. I was inside that machine, fixing broken accounts that were bleeding money, and the accounts that bled longest belonged to the owners who never asked questions.

So ask questions. The four checks above take about an hour, and you don't need to be technical. You need to be suspicious.

If you'd rather have a second set of eyes

I do a free personalised 30-Day Growth Plan. Send me your website URL and within 48 hours you'll get a plan built for your business, including where I'd look first for the leaks above. There's no lock-in and no obligation — I work month-to-month with everyone anyway, so I've got no incentive to invent problems that aren't there.

Ten-plus years and 110+ businesses in, I can usually spot the leak fast. Finding it is free. Ignoring it is the expensive option.

— Ripan Singh