The five leaks we find in almost every ad account

First, the disclosure that makes the rest of this article worth reading: AMC does not manage ad accounts. We do SEO, AI-search visibility, and content systems. The ad audit we offer is free, and there is no ad-management retainer waiting behind it — which means we have no incentive to tell you your account is broken when it isn't, and no incentive to hide the fixes so you'll pay us to do them. Everything below is the checklist. Use it yourself.

One more thing before the list: these leaks compound. Broad targeting sends the wrong people to a weak landing page, tracked by a conversion setup that can't tell the algorithm what a good lead looks like, funded by a budget nobody is watching. Fixing one helps. Fixing all five is usually the difference between an account that spends money and an account that makes it back.

Leak 1: Targeting so broad you're paying for strangers

Ad platforms default to broad. Google's broad match and Meta's Advantage+ audience expansion both exist to spend your budget smoothly, and both will happily show your plumbing ad to someone researching a career in plumbing. Broad targeting isn't automatically wrong — the algorithms have gotten genuinely good — but it only works when your conversion tracking is feeding them accurate signals (see leak 2). Broad targeting plus bad tracking is the single most expensive combination in paid media.

The subtler version of this leak is traffic that looks like success. Clicks are up, impressions are up, and none of it is from people who can buy from you. High volume from the wrong visitors is a leak wearing a growth costume.

• Check it yourself: In Google Ads, open Insights & Reports → Search terms and sort by cost for the last 90 days. Read the top 50 terms and ask one question per line: "Would I pay for this click at this price, knowingly?" In Meta, open Ads Manager breakdowns by age, region, and placement and look for spend going to segments you'd never brief a salesperson to call.

Leak 2: Conversion tracking that isn't tracking conversions

This is the most expensive leak on the list, because every automated bidding strategy optimizes toward whatever you've defined as a conversion. Tell the algorithm nothing, and it optimizes for clicks. Tell it the wrong thing — a page view, a button hover, a "thank you" page anyone can visit directly — and it gets very good at delivering the wrong thing at scale, with your money.

The failure modes we see most: no conversion action at all (the account is flying blind), a conversion that fires on page load instead of form submit (every visitor "converts"), double-counted conversions from a duplicated tag, and lead-gen accounts that count form fills but never tell the platform which fills became customers. Each one quietly corrupts every bidding decision the platform makes.

• Check it yourself: In Google Ads, go to Goals → Conversions and look at two columns: status ("recording conversions" vs. "inactive" or "no recent conversions") and the definition of each action. Then run the honest test — submit your own form or start your own checkout, and confirm exactly one conversion shows up within a day. If you can't make your own tracking fire, neither can your customers.

Leak 3: Landing pages that drop the click you just bought

Every click has already been paid for by the time your landing page loads. If the page is slow, or the headline doesn't match the ad's promise, or the form asks for eleven fields before earning any trust, you're paying full price for visits that end in three seconds. Ad platforms will sell you more traffic forever; they will never fix your page.

Three things to hold your page against: speed (mobile especially — most paid clicks are on phones), message match (the ad said "same-day service" — does the page say it above the fold, or does it open with your founding story?), and proof (reviews, real numbers, a real address — anything that separates you from the other four tabs the visitor has open).

Speed alone is measurable and fixable, and the payoff shows up fast. One of our e-commerce clients had been online since 2014 with a site that was heavy enough to hurt every paid and organic visit. Part of the rebuild was pure page weight: 8,988 images converted to WebP.

Those are organic-search numbers, not paid — but the page doesn't know where the click came from. A page that loads faster and matches intent converts better for every channel you pay for.

• Check it yourself: Run your actual landing URL — not your homepage — through PageSpeed Insights and note the mobile score. Then click your own ad from your phone, on cellular, and time how long before you can read the headline. Finally, put the ad and the page side by side: does the page's first sentence keep the ad's promise?

Leak 4: No negative keywords — the search terms you never meant to buy

On search campaigns, negative keywords are the drain plug. Without them, you're bidding on every interpretation of your keywords: "free," "jobs," "salary," "DIY," "how to become a," and every competitor name you have no realistic chance of converting. Individually the clicks are small. Added up over a quarter, they're rarely small — and because each one is a search you never intended to buy, every dollar there is a dollar with a zero percent chance of converting.

This leak is pure maintenance debt. Negative keyword lists aren't a setup task; they're a habit. Every account accumulates new junk terms as the platform explores, and an account where nobody has added a negative in six months is an account where nobody has read the search terms report in six months.

• Check it yourself: Two looks. First, in Google Ads go to Keywords → Negative keywords — if the lists are empty or haven't changed since launch, that's your answer. Second, open the search terms report for the last 90 days, sort by cost, and count the terms containing "free," "cheap," "jobs," or a service you don't offer. Multiply their combined cost by four for the annual leak.

Leak 5: Set-and-forget budgets

The last leak isn't a setting — it's an absence. Someone launched the campaigns, split the budget across them in a way that made sense at the time, and then life happened. Twelve months later the split is identical, the seasonal campaign is still running in the off-season, and the campaign producing 70% of conversions gets the same daily budget as the one producing none.

The tell is in the account's change history. A healthy account shows a steady rhythm of small adjustments: budgets following performance, ads being swapped, negatives being added. A leaking account shows a burst of activity at launch and silence since. (The opposite failure exists too — panicked daily edits that never let automated bidding settle — but in the accounts we open, neglect outnumbers meddling ten to one.)

• Check it yourself: Open Change history in Google Ads (or the activity history in Meta) for the last 90 days and count meaningful changes. Then build one small table: for each campaign, its share of total spend next to its share of total conversions. Any campaign taking 30% of the money and producing 5% of the results is your leak, found.

What to do with what you found

If you ran all five checks, you now know more about your ad account than most owners ever do — and you likely found at least one leak. Fix the tracking first (nothing else can be trusted until it's right), then negatives, then the landing page, then reallocate budget. Targeting last, because targeting decisions made on top of bad tracking data just relocate the leak.

If you'd rather have a second set of eyes: our free audit runs your account and your site against our internal audit system — 250+ checks with scoring — and sends you the 20 findings that matter for your account, prioritized, in plain English, within 48 hours. We don't sell ad management, so the audit has no upsell behind it. If the honest answer is that your account is in good shape, that's what the audit will say.

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