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Catching wasted ad spend
Posted by on September 24, 2025 at 7:06 pmFor those running Google Ads, how often do you catch problems like CPC spikes, budgets running over (or set incorrectly), conversion tracking breaking, or keywords spending heavily without converting – before they’ve already cost you (or your clients) money? Do you usually spot these right away, or is it more common that you only notice in a weekly report or when performance drops? Be honest.
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1 Reply
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We check all client accounts in the morning to catch conversion tracking breaking and other issues… especially if we are coming back from a long weekend. I think everyone will be different. Some will spot it within a few days and others won’t for a week or more. Really depends on what SOPs are in place.
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when your clicks are not converting, optimize via negative KWs pr switch out LPs
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Set automated rules and alerts for CPC spikes, budget pacing and zero conversion spend so issues get flagged daily instead of waiting for weekly reports.
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I like to monitor the campaigns daily to spot any possible anomalies. That includes search terms the ads are showing up for, how well the keywords are doing & their CPCs, tags are firing correctly & landing page is doing fine. If there is anything abnormal, that’s where more digging comes in to make sure everything is up & running again.
As most of the big optimizations happen bi-weekly & monthly, that’s all to be done on a day to day basis.
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Great question! Tasks like negatives management is a key part of keeping waste under control. In the age of automation it has been a challenge to keep it under control. Call it a cost of having Google *learn* your audience or *learn* how to scale your ads. Clients often get frustrated when jumps in spend don’t translate into big ROAS right away. Waste is part of the issue while scaling but what is acceptable? (Figuratively speaking)
A small % of budget will end up going to poor matches or low quality targets no
matter how often you check the account, unfortunately. Most agencies and PPCers will be in the account 1-2 times a week on average, depending on ramp up or ramp down plans / schedule.If spend mismanagement or neglect is an issue it will usually be apparent after a month or two. Some agencies take a set and forget approach so you really need to be careful who you hire!
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If you’re being diligent about your clients performance than it should be caught within a day or two and at max a week but if that’s the case you should be checking your clients accounts more often lol..
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Daily morning first task is to check last days metrics, search term analysis, negative keyword addition, keyword review to assess the spend, checking conversion tracking if working well, last days budget spend as per daily ad budget.
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Depends how much time you have on your hands. You can spend 24/7/365 and still not get everything done, so choose your battles and focus on what moves the needle or is recoupable in terms of troubleshooting ad spend waste.
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By staying on top of your campaigns, over time, you detect anomalies quickly. You can also use scripts to alert you of any discrepancies
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Depends on the gravity of the issue.
If you’re overspending 10% it’ll take a lot longer to figure it out compared to if you’re overspending 1000%.
On some occasions it’s been spotted within a few hours, on others it’s been a week or so…
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Well use alerts through Optmyzr, or you can set up scripts, to scan for these anomalies so ad groups go dead for more than 1 day, cpc spikes or tanks a certain %, conversions increase or decrease a certain % etc.
This helped us not always have to be in the accounts daily and catch things a bit quicker even over the weekend we could hop in real quick since most accounts are fine and usually only a few may have an odd issue every now and then.
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