Google Ads doesn't waste money in dramatic ways. It does it quietly, one reasonable-looking default at a time, while the dashboard still shows clicks and the money still leaves your account. These are the seven leaks we pull out of almost every South African account that lands on our desk — and the fix for each.
1. Broad match with no negative keyword list
Broad match lets Google show your ad for anything it decides is “related.” In practice that means free, DIY, how to, jobs, salary and course. Without a negative keyword list built on day one, you pay for every one of them.
The fix: a real negative list from the start, then tightened every week from the search-terms report. It is the single highest-return hour anyone spends in a new account.
2. The wrong location setting
Google's default targets people who are in, or interested in, your area — which quietly buys clicks from other provinces and, on the coast, holiday-planners sitting in Gauteng. For any business that has to physically arrive on site, that is money set on fire.
The fix: switch to “presence” only and set the radius to where your vans actually go. It is one dropdown and often the biggest single saving we make. It matters even more in the towns we cover that sit next to bigger metros.
3. Nobody ever reads the search-terms report
This report shows the actual phrases people typed to trigger your ad — the most useful screen in the entire account — and most owners have never opened it. It is where the waste is literally listed for you.
The fix: read it weekly. Add the junk as negatives, and promote the phrases that convert into their own tightly-targeted ad groups.
4. Ads pointed at your homepage
A homepage invites people to browse. An ad click wants one clear next step. Send paid traffic to a general homepage and most of the clicks you paid for wander off without calling or filling anything in.
The fix: a focused landing page for each core service, with one obvious action. This is exactly why our industry pages and location pages are built the way they are.
5. No conversion or call tracking
If you cannot tell which clicks became leads, and which leads became booked jobs, you are optimising blind. For most trades the lead is a phone call the account never sees, so the numbers you are looking at are the wrong ones.
The fix: conversion tracking and call tracking, so budget can follow what actually books work instead of what merely gets clicked.
6. One campaign trying to do everything
Blend every service, every suburb and every level of intent into one campaign and every bid becomes a compromise — too high for the cheap work, too low for the valuable work, and wrong for both areas at once.
The fix: split by service, by area and by intent, so each gets its own budget and its own bid. A metro and the town next to it should almost never share a campaign.
7. Google's auto-apply and an unwatched Performance Max
Google's “recommendations” can auto-apply changes you never approved, and an unmanaged Performance Max campaign will happily pour budget into your own brand terms and low-quality placements while reporting a flattering headline number.
The fix: turn auto-apply off, and only run Performance Max with tight controls and honest attribution — or not at all.
Every one of these comes back to the same thing: nobody is watching the account every week. Google's defaults are built to spend, not to save, and left alone they will do exactly that. The work of a real manager is mostly the unglamorous business of catching these leaks before they compound.
If you want to know which of these seven are draining your account right now, that is precisely what our free audit reports back — and you can see the method against real numbers on the results page. For the fuller picture on budgets and fees, read what Google Ads really costs in South Africa.