If you pay for Google Ads, check one thing first: where your ads are showing. It's easy to pay for clicks from people who will never call you. Some live too far away. Some search at hours when nobody can pick up. Some want something you don't sell.
Each of those is a setting in your account. You can check all three in one sitting. Here's what to look at.
Why your ad can show far from your business
Say you run a restaurant in Doylestown. Your tables fill from Doylestown, Chalfont, Warrington, and the towns around them. Someone in Philadelphia isn't driving an hour for dinner on a Tuesday.
When you set up a campaign, you tell Google where to show your ads. If that area is too big, you pay for clicks from people who can't use you. Each of those clicks costs the same as a click from a neighbor.
Google can also show your ad to people who are only searching about your area, not in it. The setting is called location options. The default, Presence or interest, also reaches people who have only shown an interest in your area. Presence limits ads to people who are in it, or regularly in it. For a restaurant that needs the person at a table, that's the one you want.
Three things to check in your Google Ads account
Where your ads show
Open the location settings for each campaign and look at the map. Ask one question. Would you take a customer from the edge of that area? If not, pull it in.
The right size depends on the business. A Doylestown law firm might serve all of Bucks County. A Lansdale restaurant gets most of its tables from North Penn: Lansdale, North Wales, and Hatfield. Set the area to match where your customers come from today.
When your ads show
Your ads can run all night unless you tell them not to. That's fine if someone answers the phone at 2 a.m. At most local businesses, nobody does.
Think about the person who clicks at midnight. They call, and the phone rings out. By morning they may have called the next restaurant on the list. Set your ads to run when you can answer the phone, or when someone replies to your form fast.
There's one exception. If customers book online and don't need to talk to you, night clicks can still turn into bookings. Leave those hours on and watch what they bring in.
What people searched before they clicked
Google Ads keeps a list of the searches that led to a click on your ad. Read it once a week. It's the most useful page in the account.
You'll find searches that have nothing to do with you. A restaurant might see "restaurant jobs" or "chicken parm recipe." A job hunter costs you a click. So does someone cooking at home. Neither one is booking a table.
You can add words like these as negative keywords. A negative keyword tells Google not to show your ad for any search that has that word in it. Add "jobs" once, and you stop paying for job hunters on every search.
How to tell if the changes worked
Don't judge the account by clicks. After a cleanup, you'll often get fewer clicks. That's fine. It means you stopped paying for the wrong ones.
Judge it by phone calls, form fills, and booked jobs. If those hold steady while you spend less, the cleanup worked. If they go up, even better.
That only works if you can count them. Your account should know when an ad led to a call or a form. If it doesn't, set that up before you change anything else. Without it, you're guessing which ads made the phone ring. It's the same reason to check the phone when search traffic drops.
Why this needs a weekly look
An account doesn't stay clean on its own. People search in new ways all the time, so new junk searches keep showing up. Google also changes how its ads work.
So the check is weekly, and it's short. Read the list of searches and add negatives. Look at what you've spent against your budget. Make sure calls and forms are still being counted. If that tracking breaks, the account keeps spending, but you can't see what it buys.
Where to start
Log in to your account this week. Open the list of searches from the last 30 days. Find five that would never turn into a customer, and add them as negative keywords.
Then open the location map for each campaign. Pull in any edge you wouldn't want a customer from. Check the hours your ads run against the hours you answer the phone.
Do that, and next month's budget goes to people who can become customers. If you'd also like to know how well the website behind those ads turns clicks into calls, our free site audit will tell you in plain English.