How much are you wasting on Google Ads? A rupee-by-rupee breakdown

The honest answer to “how much am I wasting” is a distribution, not a number. But a distribution is not useless. Across the Google Ads accounts Admiral has audited, the median account was sending about a third of its spend to places that could not produce a customer — and the leaks were the same five, in roughly the same order, almost every time.

So here they are, worked through on a ₹50,000-a-month account, with the built-in report that finds each one. Nothing on this page needs a tool. A well-run account will come in far under these figures; an account nobody has opened since it was set up will come in over.

The table

These rows are mutually exclusive. When a cost line matches more than one leak, Admiral assigns it once to the primary cause, so the five rows add to the 35% fleet median without double-counting.

₹17,500 a month is ₹2.1 lakh a year. On a ₹2 lakh month it is ₹8.4 lakh a year. The shares hold roughly steady with account size; the rupees do not.

1. Search terms that never converted — ₹9,000

The biggest line, everywhere. A phrase or broad-match keyword matches in searches its owner never imagined — “free”, “jobs”, “salary”, “how to”, a competitor’s brand, a city you do not serve. Each one costs a click. On the median account, 18% of spend had gone to search terms with zero conversions in 90 days. The fix is a negative keyword list, and the report that finds it is the one nobody opens.

2. Search Partners and Display, left on — ₹3,000

Both are ticked by default when a Search campaign is created. Search Partners puts your ad on sites that are not Google; Display puts it on apps and pages across the web. Both convert far below Google Search itself, and on the median account they took 6% of spend for under 1% of conversions. Two checkboxes.

3. Location set to interest, not presence — ₹2,500

“People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations” is the default. Interest means someone in Dubai searching “CA in Patna” sees your ad. If you serve a place, you want presence only. On the median account, 5% of spend went to people outside the service area.

4. Hours and days that never convert — ₹2,000

Most accounts run 24×7. Most businesses convert 9 to 9, six days. The night clicks are real money and, for a business that needs to answer the phone, almost never customers. An ad schedule is a five-minute change and 4% of the median account.

5. Junk placements on Display and Performance Max — ₹1,000

Smaller, because fewer small accounts run these formats, but when they do the placement report shows children’s games and wallpaper apps eating the budget in accidental taps. Exclusions.

The leak that hides the other five

There is a sixth line that is not on the table because it does not cost spend directly: a junk conversion goal. If a page view, or every button on the site, is set as a primary conversion, then the cost-per-conversion in your report describes nothing, Smart Bidding optimises for the wrong thing, and every leak above looks like it is converting. On the median account with the problem, the “real” conversion count was 40–60% of the reported one. Check it first; the other five are invisible until you do.

Find each one yourself, tonight

Or let the audit do it

Admiral runs these six checks and twenty more on every sync, prices each one from your own account’s history rather than a median, and files the fix as a proposal you approve or decline. QRCodeStack’s first audit came out at 40% — the write-up is here, with the before and after.