The most expensive line item in a modern PPC account is rarely a keyword. It is trust in automation you cannot see into. Every time a platform removes a control or hides a report, the default behaviour quietly tilts toward the platform's revenue rather than yours. None of this is sinister. It is just the direction the river flows, and your job is to keep paddling against it.

Here are the seven places we most often find the money leaking, and how to plug each one.

1. Performance Max eating your brand and your Search campaigns

PMax bids on queries you are often already winning, including your own brand. Optmyzr's 2025 analysis found keyword overlap between PMax and Search in the overwhelming majority of accounts. Where to look: the campaign insights and search-category data, plus any overlap with your Search campaigns. The fix: use campaign-level negative keywords (now available), exclude brand from PMax, and stop letting it claim conversions you would have won for free.

2. Broad match plus Smart Bidding, with no negatives

The platforms are pushing broad match hard, paired with automated bidding. On its own that can work. Without a disciplined negative-keyword programme, traffic volume rises faster than conversions. Where to look: the search terms report, ideally with an n-gram analysis. The fix: robust shared negative lists, reviewed weekly, not quarterly.

3. Irrelevant search terms you are quietly paying for

Sort the search terms report by cost, then by zero-conversion spend. You will usually find a tail of queries that have nothing to do with what you sell. The fix: mine and exclude them. One caveat worth knowing: the platforms hide low-volume terms, so the report is incomplete by design. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

4. Search Partners and Display, switched on by default

New Search campaigns often ship with the Search Partner network and Display expansion enabled. Both can quietly route budget to far lower-quality inventory. Where to look: segment performance by network. The fix: for a pure search play, turn both off and judge the difference.

5. Bid strategies aimed at the wrong target

A target CPA set too aggressively starves delivery. Set too loosely, it overspends. Target ROAS needs reliable conversion values to work at all. Where to look: the "limited by bid strategy" status, and target versus actual over time. The fix: recalibrate to your real numbers and give the algorithm clean data to learn from.

6. Conversion tracking that is quietly broken

This is the one that makes every other problem worse, because automated bidding optimises against whatever data it has, even when that data is wrong. With Consent Mode and GA4 in the mix, plenty of accounts are feeding partial signals into the bidder without realising it. Where to look: the diagnostics, and any mismatch between GA4 and Ads. The fix: get consent handling right and turn on enhanced conversions, which typically recovers a meaningful chunk of measured conversions.

7. Auto-applied recommendations

Left on, these can switch your match types to broad, add keywords, and raise budgets, all without a human deciding it was a good idea. Where to look: the recommendations auto-apply settings and your change history. The fix: turn off the risky categories and treat recommendations as suggestions, not instructions.

Three myths worth retiring

  • "A high Quality Score means we are fine." Quality Score says nothing about whether the query was relevant or the spend was profitable.
  • "PMax is hands-off." It needs negatives, asset discipline, brand exclusions and placement review like anything else.
  • "More conversions in the dashboard means more revenue." Not if the campaign is claiming credit for sales you would have made anyway.

A PPC Account Audit is essentially this checklist run line by line across your account, with the wasted spend quantified and a prioritised list of what to cut and what to scale. Most accounts we look at are leaking somewhere in this list. The only question is how much.