Google Ads account audit

The short version

Every figure on this page is read directly from the Google Ads API. Nothing here is estimated.

The four accounts

One plumbing business is spread across four Google Ads accounts. Two of them were running Local Services campaigns for overlapping parts of the same Eastside service area, which means they were competing against each other for the same customers.

Day by day, every dollar

Each column is one calendar day, from the first day an account ever billed to the last. Bar height is what was spent that day, coloured by the campaign type that spent most of it. The dots are conversions recorded that day, on their own scale up the right. Days with no spend are drawn as flat gaps rather than skipped, because collapsing them would let a few days of heavy spending pass for months of steady work.

Each chart is scaled to its own busiest day, and says so underneath. Putting all three on one axis was tried and thrown out: the July 2026 burst is so much larger than anything the other accounts ever did that their whole histories flattened into a line. Read the ceilings, not the heights, when comparing one account to another.

LSA Main Rooter — 581-417-4776

04 Oct 2025 to 17 Jul 2026 · $2,738.80 across 27 billed days · 18 conversions · 260 days in that window with no spend at all. Scroll sideways; it opens on the busiest week. Hover any column for that day's detail.

LSA GC Rooter — 377-138-5133

14 Feb 2024 to 16 Jun 2025 · $3,358.28 across 146 billed days · 38 conversions · 343 days in that window with no spend at all. Scroll sideways; it opens on the busiest week. Hover any column for that day's detail.

LSA Plumber Rooter — 791-982-5019

14 Jan 2024 to 02 Jan 2026 · $424.15 across 7 billed days · 8 conversions · 713 days in that window with no spend at all. Scroll sideways; it opens on the busiest week. Hover any column for that day's detail.

Every billed day in that window, in full — there are only 7:

July 2026: $2,557 in fourteen days

Account 581-417-4776 (LSA Main Rooter) billed on thirteen separate days between 4 July and 17 July 2026. Every action in the record below is logged against the account’s own login, kirklandrooter@gmail.com.

The spending did not start with the campaign built on 13 July. A Search campaign named Shamim_Rooter was already running, and it had spent $1,399.03 — 55% of the entire month — before 13 July arrived. Its worst day, 9 July, cost $577.63 for eighteen clicks. That is $32 a click, on a $50 daily budget. ?

Late that same evening the campaign was paused — and then switched back on two days later. It resumed spending immediately. The pattern is not someone unaware of the spend; it is someone who saw it, stopped it, and restarted it without changing anything about why it was expensive.

On 13 July a second Search campaign, call only, was built from scratch in one sitting: campaign, ad group, budget, 24 campaign assets and 15 keywords. Thirty-two more keywords went in the next day from the Google Ads mobile app. That campaign spent $734.40 for nine clicks in three days — $81.60 every time somebody clicked.

Each of those details is a problem in its own right:

• Built and switched on in a single sitting (a Search campaign needs a build day and then a settling period under a small budget while you watch what it actually matches. Turning a brand new campaign straight on at full budget means the first thing it does is spend, and the first evidence you get that it is wrong is the invoice.)
• One campaign, one ad group, everything inside it (one ad group means every keyword shares the same handful of ads. A person searching for an emergency blocked drain and a person searching for a water line replacement get shown identical copy, so relevance drops, Google charges more per click for the same position, and the reporting cannot tell you which service is actually earning its money.)
• 15 keywords on day one, 32 more the next day, all broad match (broad match is the loosest possible instruction — it authorises Google to match anything it judges related. Adding 47 broad keywords with no negative list is handing over a blank cheque and asking Google to decide what counts as a plumbing customer. It decided that people searching for Roto-Rooter, Ferguson and a plumber in Oklahoma counted.)
• Keywords added from the Google Ads mobile app (the phone app is a monitoring tool. It has no search-terms report, no negative keyword management and no meaningful bid or match-type controls. Adding 32 keywords from it means they were added without ever seeing the queries the existing ones were already matching — the one screen that would have shown the problem on day two.)
• 24 campaign assets created in the same session (assets are the sitelinks, callouts and headline variations Google mixes into the ad. Twenty-four of them generated in one pass, on an account whose landing pages were already failing Google’s crawler elsewhere, is volume standing in for accuracy.)
• Budgets of $300 and $200 per day (this account had never spent more than $98 in an entire month. Setting a daily budget three times larger than the best month on record removes the only safety net a new campaign has. It is why fourteen days cost $2,557 rather than $200.)
• Paused on 9 July, restarted on 11 July, nothing changed in between (the biggest spending day in this account’s history was followed within hours by someone pausing the campaign. Two days later it was switched back on with the same broad keywords, the same absent negative list and the same targeting. Pausing is not a fix — it stops the bleeding for as long as your finger is on it. Restarting without changing the thing that caused the spend guarantees the spend resumes, and it did.)
• Left running for two weeks before it was stopped for good (a new Search campaign needs its search-terms report read daily for the first fortnight, which is exactly when the waste is largest and cheapest to stop. Fourteen days of broad match with nobody reading that report is how $1,039 reached competitor brand names before anyone noticed.)

• 04–07 July 2026
  Spending is already running
  $266.44 across four days, almost all of it through Shamim_Rooter. Nothing in the change log touches these campaigns yet. ?
• 08–09 July 2026
  $1,024 in two days
  $446.54 then $577.63 — the two most expensive days this account has ever had, for 31 clicks between them. ?
• 09 July 2026
  Bulk targeting churn, then a pause
  47 campaign criteria removed, 15 created, 2 budgets edited, 14 assets added — then, at 22:21, Shamim_Rooter was paused. ?
• 11 July 2026
  Switched back on
  At 08:52 Shamim_Rooter is re-enabled, with a budget edit the same day. No keywords changed, no negatives added. It bills again that day. ?
• 13 July 2026
  A second Search campaign built — “call only”
  Campaign, ad group, budget, 24 campaign assets and 15 keywords created in a single session through the web interface. ?
• 14 July 2026
  32 more keywords added from a phone
  Logged as GOOGLE_ADS_MOBILE_APP. All broad match.
  See every keyword that was added ?
• 15 July 2026
  Logic Inbound Manager Account linked
  Manager account 548-341-8212 (Logic Inbound) gains access. ?
• 16 July 2026
  $507.13 in one day
  The Local Services campaign is toggled again. Between 15 and 17 July the call only campaign spends $734.40 for nine clicks. ?
  See every status change
• 17 July 2026
  The Search campaigns are stopped — last billed day
  At 08:56 call only is paused; at 11:08 Shamim_Rooter is paused. Both by kirklandrooter@gmail.com. The account never bills again. ?
• 24 July 2026
  Local Services campaign paused; MCC linked
  douglas@toolforge.ai pauses the Local Services campaign — the last thing still enabled. Kirkland Rooter MCC 366-598-7644 (Kirkland Rooter MCC) is linked the same day. ?

Where the July money actually went

July Search spend was $2,418.32. Google attributes $1,399.47 of that to specific search queries; the remainder falls below Google’s reporting thresholds and cannot be traced to a query. Of the traceable portion:

Put plainly: for every dollar that reached a search Google could identify, about seven cents went to a search that was genuinely about hiring a plumber in your area. The rest paid for people looking up a competitor, a parts counter, or a trade you do not perform.

The most expensive individual searches

Four separate searches for ferguson — a plumbing supply distributor — cost $149 between them. Your own brand name, kirkland rooter sewer & drain cleaning, drew $31.44 across the whole month.

Why it happened: the account was built without brakes

The July result was not bad luck. It follows directly from four configuration choices, each of which is visible in the account today.

1. Every keyword was broad match, and there were no negatives

Broad match lets Google show your ad for anything it considers related. A keyword like plumbing repair is then free to match aurora plumbing phone number. Broad match is a legitimate tool, but it is only safe with an active negative keyword list and daily search-term review. This account had neither.

Two negative keyword lists do exist in the account — one with 427 terms, and one named Junk Cars - Test Aug 2022 with 1,369 terms, left over from an entirely unrelated business. Neither list is attached to a single campaign. They have been sitting there doing nothing.

2. Daily budgets far larger than the account could absorb

3. A campaign with no location targeting at all

The campaign named Search-1 carries a $300 per day budget and has no geographic targeting whatsoever. Its only targeting criteria are device type and language. If it were enabled it would serve nationwide. It is paused today, which is the only thing preventing that.

4. Automated bidding pointed at conversion data that did not exist

The Search campaigns use MAXIMIZE_CONVERSIONS bidding. That strategy works by learning from a history of recorded conversions. These campaigns were brand new, in an account whose conversion tracking had been unreliable for well over a year. Google was told to bid aggressively toward a signal it could not read, which is a large part of how a plumbing click reached $26.63 and a single click for drain pro reached $135.60.

The account that quietly spent $2,516 for nothing

Separately from July, account 377-138-5133 (LSA GC Rooter) has its own problem. In March 2024 it recorded 36 conversions on $330 of spend — 36 of the 38 conversions this account has ever recorded, in a single month. After that it recorded one more, in November 2024, and nothing else. Ten separate months of spending returned nothing at all.

Hover any month for its spend, clicks, conversions and cost per conversion. 10 of the 13 months with spend are hatched: $2,515.66 bought nothing that the account recorded. Four months in the middle — December 2024 through March 2025 — have no bar because the account spent nothing at all.

$2,515.66 across ten months recorded not one conversion. Either conversion tracking broke immediately after March 2024 and nobody noticed for fourteen months, or the spend genuinely produced nothing. Both possibilities point at the same thing: no one was reading the account.

The same account runs a Local Services campaign that is switched on, and has been unable to serve a single lead since it was created. Its background check status has read NO_SUBMISSION since 16 September 2022. Google Local Services will not deliver leads to an unverified business. It is also filed under the general contractor category rather than plumber — the wrong trade for this business.

How can an unapproved account spend money?

It is a fair question, and the answer matters: it did not. The unverified Local Services campaign has spent $0.00 and served zero impressions in its entire existence. Every dollar this account spent went somewhere else.

Campaign-level figures span 1 January 2022 to 6 August 2026. The account roll-up earlier on this page starts in January 2024, which is why the totals differ.

Local Services and ordinary Google Ads are two different products that happen to live in the same account. Verification — background check, licence, insurance — gates Local Services only. It has never gated Search, Smart or Display campaigns, which is why one campaign in this account could run for years and rack up 379,183 impressions while the Local Services campaign sitting beside it stayed frozen at zero.

Two separate mechanisms kept the Local Services campaign at $0.00:

• No verification, so no eligibility. Google will not place an unverified business in the Local Services results at all. Without a passed background check there is nothing to serve, so there is nothing to bill.
• A daily budget of one cent. The campaign carries a $0.01 per day budget. Even if verification were completed tomorrow, it would still be incapable of buying a single lead until that number changed.

The same pattern explains the closed account, 403-649-3148 (closed account), which also holds an enabled Local Services campaign with a $12 per day budget attached. Its background check was cancelled and its insurance and licence checks both failed, so it never served either.

Disapproved ads

Five of the eight ads in 377-138-5133 (LSA GC Rooter) are disapproved. A disapproved ad does not run at all, but it stays in the account looking like part of a live campaign, so an account can appear busy while serving almost nothing.

What each reason actually means

Destination not working

Google’s crawler could not load the landing page the ad points to. It is triggered by a dead URL, a page that has been moved or renamed, a server that times out or blocks Google’s crawler, an expired certificate, or a redirect chain that never resolves. This is the most common cause of a silently dead ad account: the website gets rebuilt, page URLs change, and nobody goes back to update the ads. The ads keep sitting in the account, disapproved, spending nothing and generating nothing.

Trademarks in ad text

The ad copy contains a term someone else has registered as a trademark. In this trade that usually means a competitor’s brand name has been written into the headline or description. Google restricts rather than bans these, but the ad’s reach is limited wherever the trademark holder has filed a complaint.

Symbols

The ad used punctuation or characters in a way Google does not permit — repeated exclamation marks, unnecessary capitals, decorative characters, or symbols standing in for words. It is entirely avoidable and signals ad copy written without reference to the editorial rules.

Stale disapproval

This one is the clearest evidence of neglect. Google applies it to an ad that was disapproved and then left alone. It means the disapproval notice went out, no one acted on it, and enough time passed that Google reclassified the ad as abandoned. Two ads in this account carry it.

How to stop this happening

1. Check the policy column weekly. Google emails disapproval notices, but they arrive in whichever inbox owns the account, and they are easy to lose. A weekly look at the ads table takes two minutes.
2. Re-check every ad URL whenever the website changes. A site rebuild is the single most common cause of destination not working. Any URL change should trigger a pass over every ad, sitelink and callout in the account.
3. Never put another company’s brand name in ad copy. You may generally bid on competitor terms as keywords; you may not write their trademark into the text of the ad.
4. Write to the editorial rules. One exclamation mark at most, no all-caps words, no decorative symbols, no phone numbers in headlines.
5. Fix or remove disapproved ads immediately. A disapproval left unattended becomes a stale disapproval, and a pattern of stale disapprovals raises the risk of account-level suspension.
6. Keep at least two active ads per ad group. If one is disapproved, the group keeps running instead of going silent.

Who currently controls these accounts

Two outside manager accounts still hold active administrative access to 581-417-4776 (LSA Main Rooter) — the account that holds the live budgets. A linked manager account can change budgets, un-pause campaigns and spend money without any further approval.

There is also a redundant layer of individual user access. Administrator rights granted in 2019 and 2022 are still live on three of the four accounts, held by people who are not presently managing them.

Everything that is currently misconfigured

The complete list, by account, as the accounts stand today.

LSA Main Rooter — 581-417-4776 (LSA Main Rooter)

• High $894.60 per day of budget still attached to paused campaigns.?
• High Two third-party manager accounts hold active access.?
• High All 133 keywords are broad match; zero negative keywords are applied anywhere.?
• High Search-1 has no location targeting and a $300 per day budget.?
• Medium Two negative keyword lists exist but are attached to no campaign; one is left over from an unrelated junk-car business.?
• Medium A fully verified Local Services campaign is paused, so the account’s best lead source is off.?
• Medium Automated conversion bidding running against unreliable conversion data.?
• Low Duplicate and unclear campaign names? (Search-1, two separate campaigns both called Plumbing Services).

LSA GC Rooter — 377-138-5133 (LSA GC Rooter)

• High Local Services campaign is enabled but the background check has read NO_SUBMISSION since September 2022. It cannot deliver leads and never could.?
• High Filed under the general contractor category rather than plumber.?
• High $2,515.66 spent across ten months with zero recorded conversions.?
• Medium Five of eight ads disapproved, two of them stale.?
• Low Campaign name misspelt? (kirklnad Rooter); duplicate Plumbing Services campaigns.

LSA Plumber Rooter — 791-982-5019 (LSA Plumber Rooter)

• Medium Fully verified — background check, insurance and licence all passed, licence refreshed October 2025 — but the campaign has been paused since January 2026.?
• Medium Account-level conversion tracking reports NOT_CONVERSION_TRACKED.?
• Low Account had no descriptive name until this audit, which is why it was easy to overlook.?

Closed account — 403-649-3148 (closed account)

• Low Account is closed, yet a Local Services campaign remains enabled with a $12 per day budget attached.?
• Low Verification history shows a cancelled background check and failed insurance and licence checks.?

What to do, in order

1. Strip the budgets off the paused campaigns in 581-417-4776 (LSA Main Rooter), or delete the campaigns outright. This removes $894.60 per day of accidental exposure and costs nothing.
2. Remove the two third-party manager links. One accountable owner.
3. Turn LSA Plumber Rooter back on. It is verified, it worked, and it was producing leads at $47–$73. This is the fastest route back to lead flow.
4. Fix conversion tracking before spending another dollar on Search. Automated bidding without reliable conversion data is what produced the $26.63 click.
5. Decide what happens to the general contractor Local Services campaign. Either complete the background check and move it to the plumber category, or switch it off. Right now it is neither.
6. Consolidate. Four accounts for one plumbing business splits the data, splits the budget and hides problems. Two Local Services accounts targeting the same Eastside postcodes compete with each other.
7. Rebuild Search properly when you return to it: phrase and exact match to start, a real negative keyword list applied from day one, a weekly search-term review, and daily budgets sized to the account rather than to ambition.
8. Clear the disapproved ads and put the weekly policy check in place.

How this was produced

Every number on this page was read directly from the Google Ads API on 6 August 2026, covering 1 January 2024 to 6 August 2026. No figure is estimated, modelled or taken from a screenshot.

• Spend, click, impression and conversion figures come from campaign-level reporting segmented by month.
• The July search-query analysis comes from the search terms report for 1–31 July 2026. Query classification uses fixed, named lists so the figure can be re-derived independently.
• The timeline comes from the Google Ads change history, which retains 30 days. Events before 8 July 2026 are therefore outside the window and are not shown — their absence is not evidence that nothing happened.
• Ad policy states come from the ad policy summary, including the specific policy topic on each disapproval.
• Manager account names were read from the account access screens, because the API does not expose the name of a manager account you do not own.

Action checklist

Everything above, reduced to a working list. Tick items as they are completed — your progress is stored in this browser only.