15/08/2026
AED 400+ recovered from one Google Ads audit. Here's the full breakdown.
This account looked "fine" on the surface. Campaigns were running, clicks were coming in, nothing looked obviously broken.
But when I dug into the search terms report, the picture changed completely.
Here's what was actually happening:
→ A huge chunk of the budget was going to searches for a direct competitor's brand name
→ Broad match was pulling in queries with zero commercial intent
→ There was no negative keyword list at all — not one
I rebuilt the account from the ground up:
→ Switched to manual CPC with a hard cap
→ Applied 60+ negative keywords in the first pass alone
→ Restructured every ad group to exact and phrase match only
Result: AED 400+ in monthly wasted spend recovered, redirected straight into converting traffic instead.
The account wasn't broken. It just had nobody checking the search terms report.
If you've never looked at yours, that's usually where the leak is.
