How much are you wasting on Google Ads?

Published PPC industry research consistently shows that 20–30% of search spend ends on queries that never convert. This free calculator uses that baseline — combined with industry and campaign-count adjustments — to estimate your own monthly leak in 10 seconds. Below the tool, a detailed breakdown of where the waste actually hides, plus a 5-step checklist to surface it in your own account.

Where Google Ads budget actually leaks — by category

Every account is unique, but after you strip away the edge cases the waste ends up in the same four buckets. Here's each one, sized against spend, and how to recognise it before it compounds.

1. Non-converting search terms — 40% to 60% of the waste

This is the biggest single source of leakage and the easiest to prove. On a broad-match or phrase-match keyword, Google matches user searches that are semantically close but often commercially irrelevant. The classic pattern: a keyword like [boiler installation] pulls in "free boiler installation", "diy boiler installation youtube", "boiler installation jobs" — all clicks, zero conversions, often at the same CPC as your buyer-intent queries.

How to check: Google Ads → Insights & reports → Search terms. Filter last 30 days, sort by spend, zero conversions. Any term that has burned more than 2× your target CPA without converting is a candidate for an exact-match negative.

2. Quality Score decay on top keywords — 15% to 25% of the waste

Quality Score is Google's rolling estimate of how well a keyword, ad and landing page match a searcher's intent. When it drops, your CPC goes up 20–40% for the same ad position. Many accounts bleed here quietly after a landing page change, a new responsive search ad, or a headline pin that lost the keyword theme.

How to check: add the Quality Score column (and its components Expected CTR, Ad relevance, Landing page experience) to your Keywords view. Filter "Top 50 by spend". Anything that dropped to 5 or below on a keyword that was an 8–10 a month ago is an urgent fix — usually a new ad variant that doesn't mention the keyword theme, or a landing page slower than 3s.

3. Budget stranded in the wrong campaigns or hours — 10% to 20% of the waste

Two patterns dominate this bucket:

• Over-constrained campaigns that hit their daily cap by 2pm and stop showing during the high-converting evening window. Google reports this as "Lost IS (budget)" — if you see anything above 15% on a high-ROAS campaign, the fix is a budget increase or a tighter hour-of-day bid schedule.
• Under-performing campaigns eating budget that should move elsewhere. E-commerce accounts routinely over-fund a legacy brand campaign with a CPA of €12 while starving a product-category campaign converting at €9. Shifting 20–30% of budget — without changing creative — can lift total revenue 10–15% at the same spend.

4. Disapproved or paused ads no one noticed — 5% to 10% of the waste

Ads get disapproved overnight — a policy update, a new restricted keyword, a trademark claim. If you're not looking at the Ads tab, every hour those ads aren't serving is lost traffic. In an account with, say, 12 ad groups and 3 RSAs each, losing 2 ads in one group cuts that group's eligible-auction count by 60%. The same applies to ads paused intentionally months ago and never replaced.

How to check: filter Ads tab by Status ≠ Eligible. Anything in Disapproved for more than 48 hours needs a rewrite. Anything in Limited for more than a week means a policy tweak (often a specific trademark word you can drop without losing meaning).

A 5-step weekly checklist to find your own leaks

You don't need a tool to do this — every Google Ads UI gives you everything below. It takes 40–60 minutes the first time, 15–20 minutes every week after that.

1. Search-term sweep — Insights → Search terms, last 7 days, sort by spend. Add 5–10 negatives.
2. QS drop check — Keywords → add QS + component columns, sort by spend desc, filter anything ≤ 5. Identify whether it's the ad, the LP, or the CTR that's failing.
3. Lost IS (budget) audit — Campaigns view, add Search lost IS (budget) column. Anything > 15% on a ROAS-positive campaign → raise budget.
4. Auction insights delta — pick your top 10 revenue keywords, open Auction insights, compare this week vs last. Who gained impression share? What did they likely change?
5. Ad status — Ads tab, filter Disapproved + Limited. Fix or replace within 48 hours of detection.

Or let AdsBrain do the checklist for you, every morning

The 5-step loop above is what a senior PPC manager runs on every account once a week (or daily, for their best clients). AdsBrain automates it: we connect via Google's read-only OAuth, run the same five checks plus competitor movement and change-history analysis every few hours, and email you the prioritised action list each morning.

$49 for the first full analysis, then $199/month for daily reports. We never touch your account — you apply the fixes yourself. See what a daily report looks like →