Free checklist
Find out where your ad budget is leaking.
The Wasted Ad Spend Checklist is the same check we run on every Google Ads and Meta Ads account we take over. Answer quick yes-or-no questions on your Google Ads, Meta Ads, landing pages and email marketing, get a score, and see what every problem is costing you, with real numbers from real accounts.
- ✓ Takes about 5 to 10 minutes
- ✓ Tailored to lead generation or online sales
- ✓ Your results on screen, plus the full checklist as a PDF
What it checks
Google Ads31 checks +−
Conversion tracking
- ☐ Your ads count only real results as conversions: submitted forms, real phone calls, bookings or purchases. Not page visits, button clicks or taps on a phone number.
- ☐ Phone calls from your ads only count as a conversion after a minimum length (for example 30 seconds), so hang-ups and wrong numbers don't.
- ☐ Engagement actions such as video views, channel subscriptions, scroll depth or time on site are NOT set as primary conversions.
- ☐ Your purchase conversion passes the real order value, and the revenue Google reports is within about 10% of what your store shows.
- ☐ Enhanced conversions are set up in Google Ads, so conversions blocked by browsers and ad blockers still count.
Budget and structure
- ☐ Each Google Ads campaign has enough budget to generate at least 50 conversions a month. No campaign is living on crumbs.
- ☐ Your own business name is protected with its own brand campaign.
- ☐ Someone moves budget toward the campaigns with the best cost per lead or ROAS at least once a week.
- ☐ Location targeting is set to people IN your area ("Presence"), not people who are merely "interested in" it.
- ☐ Your ads run on a schedule, only when you can actually answer the phone or take the job.
Keywords and search terms
- ☐ Someone reads your search terms report at least every two weeks and adds negative keywords.
- ☐ Your negative keywords don't block searches for your own services.
- ☐ Searches for jobs, salaries, free stuff, DIY and how-to are excluded.
Performance Max campaigns
- ☐ Your Performance Max campaigns optimize for specific conversion goals you chose, not the account default.
- ☐ Your Performance Max campaigns bid with Maximize conversions, not Maximize clicks.
- ☐ Your Performance Max campaigns target search partners and the Display Network.
- ☐ Your Performance Max campaigns use text, image and video enhancements (asset optimization).
- ☐ Your Performance Max campaigns run on all devices: computers, mobile phones, tablets and TV screens.
- ☐ Your Performance Max campaigns have demographic exclusions, for example by age or household income.
- ☐ Any of your Performance Max campaigns has more than one asset group.
- ☐ Your Performance Max asset groups have audience signals: search themes, your own data, interests and detailed demographics.
- ☐ Every asset group is complete: 15 headlines, 5 long headlines, 5 descriptions, at least 4 images in every ratio, at least one video and one animated clip, plus call and callout assets.
- ☐ Each Performance Max campaign's listing groups contain only the products it was built for (one brand or product line), not your whole product feed.
- ☐ Performance Max is kept off your brand name (brand exclusions), so it can't take credit for people who were already searching for you.
- ☐ You've checked where Performance Max and Display ads actually run, and excluded junk apps and sites.
- ☐ Products that spend without selling are reviewed regularly, and competitor or irrelevant brand searches are excluded.
Local visibility
- ☐ Your Google Business Profile is linked to Google Ads, and your ads can send people to your Business Profile, not only to your website.
- ☐ Each service area has its own campaign or ad groups, with local ads and a landing page for that area.
Google bidding
- ☐ Your campaigns bid on conversions or conversion value (Maximize conversions, target CPA, Maximize conversion value or target ROAS), not on clicks.
- ☐ Someone reviews and adjusts your target CPA or target ROAS every two weeks to a month, based on what the campaigns are actually delivering.
- ☐ Broad match keywords only run with Smart Bidding that is trained on real conversions.
Meta Ads12 checks +−
Meta tracking
- ☐ Your Meta Pixel and the Conversions API both send your main conversion, deduplicated, and Events Manager shows a good Event Match Quality.
- ☐ Your Meta ad sets use click-through attribution only: no view-through and no engaged-view attribution.
Meta budget and structure
- ☐ Each Meta Ads campaign has enough budget to generate at least 15 conversions a week. No campaign is living on crumbs.
- ☐ Your Meta campaigns use ad set budgets (ABO), not campaign budget optimization (CBO).
- ☐ The number of active ads in each ad set fits its budget. A $20-a-day ad set runs one or two ads, and even $100 a day supports no more than three or four.
- ☐ Your Meta budgets are changed in small steps. Nobody raises or cuts them by 50 to 100% at a time.
Meta creative
- ☐ You run video ads on Meta, not only static image ads.
- ☐ You launch new ad creative at least every month and retire ads that have run out of steam (rising frequency, falling click-through rate).
- ☐ Fully automated Advantage+ campaigns aren't carrying your account.
Meta campaigns
- ☐ Your Meta campaigns optimize for leads or purchases, not traffic, link clicks or engagement.
- ☐ Someone checks Meta leads for quality (real names, working numbers, real interest), not just the count.
Meta bidding
- ☐ Your Meta bid strategy is chosen on purpose and reviewed every few weeks: highest volume while an ad set is learning, then a cost per result or ROAS goal once it has steady conversions.
Landing and product pages11 checks +−
Landing and product pages
- ☐ Every ad goes to a page about that exact service or product, not your homepage.
- ☐ The page headline repeats the promise of the ad that sent the visitor.
- ☐ Every landing page has one clear call to action above the fold (call, book or get a quote), repeated down the page, with a tap-to-call number on mobile.
- ☐ Reviews, ratings, guarantees and real photos of your work are on the landing page, close to the call to action.
- ☐ Your form asks only what you need: name, phone, email and one or two qualifying questions.
- ☐ Checkout is short: guest checkout, express payments like Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and no surprise costs at the last step.
- ☐ Your homepage and category pages lead with best sellers and clear navigation, and search and filters work well on mobile.
- ☐ Your landing pages load in under about 3 seconds on mobile.
- ☐ You can see the conversion rate of each landing page, so you know which pages to fix first.
Testing
- ☐ Someone runs A/B tests on your landing pages every month: headlines and copy, images and video, and calls to action, one change at a time.
- ☐ You've tested different conversion actions on the page, like a call button, a quote form or online booking, and kept the one that brings the most real leads.
Email marketing(online sales)7 checks +−
List health and deliverability
- ☐ Campaigns go to engaged segments (people who opened or clicked recently, recent buyers), never to your entire list.
- ☐ Unengaged subscribers are suppressed regularly, and bounced addresses are removed.
- ☐ Your emails are sent from your own authenticated domain (SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up), not a shared sending domain.
Flows and campaigns
- ☐ All core automated flows are live: welcome series, abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, browse abandonment, post-purchase and win-back.
- ☐ You send campaigns to your engaged segments at least every two days.
- ☐ Your site collects emails with a signup form or popup that gives visitors a reason to join.
- ☐ Your email segments are synced to Google and Meta as audiences: buyers excluded from prospecting, engaged non-buyers retargeted.
61 checks in total. You only answer the ones that apply to your business.
Why these checks
5% to nearly 30%
of Tiger Town Movers' ad clicks became a lead once tracking counted only real calls and quote requests. Read the case study
$50 to $25
cost per lead for Balloons and Beyond after 20+ thin campaigns became two, on the same budget. Read the case study
19,800 vs 3,236
the "conversions" one campaign reported for HD Esthetique, against the real consultation leads. Read the case study