Is Your Google Ads Account Actually Profitable? A 15-Minute Check

Most Google Ads accounts I am asked to review are not obviously broken. They have impressions, clicks, and a conversion number that looks fine. The problem is that the conversion number is frequently measuring something that is not a sale, and once you correct for that the account is losing money quietly and consistently.

Here is how to check your own account, in the order that finds problems fastest.

1. Check what you are counting as a conversion

Open Tools → Conversions and read the list. You are looking for anything that is not a genuine business outcome: page views, button clicks that do not submit, time on site, scroll depth.

Then check the Count column. If it is set to “Every” rather than “One” for a lead form, one person submitting three times counts as three conversions. Your cost per lead is then a third of the truth.

This single setting explains more flattering-but-false reports than anything else I encounter.

2. Separate branded from non-branded

If you are bidding on your own company name, those conversions are extremely cheap and largely people who were going to find you anyway. Leaving them in the account average hides the real cost of acquisition everywhere else.

Segment them out. Look at your cost per conversion on non-branded terms only. That is your actual customer acquisition cost from ads, and it is usually a considerably less comfortable number.

3. Read the search terms report, not the keywords report

Keywords are what you asked for. Search terms are what you got. On broad match especially, the gap can be enormous.

Sort by cost, descending, and read the top fifty. You are looking for spend on terms with no purchase intent — “free”, “jobs”, “salary”, “DIY”, competitor names you did not intend to bid on, and queries from outside your service area. Every one of those is a negative keyword you have not added yet.

4. Follow the money to actual revenue

A lead is not a sale. If forty leads a month produce two customers and your competitor’s twenty leads produce eight, their more expensive cost per lead is dramatically cheaper per customer.

Ask your sales team or check your CRM: of the leads that came from ads, how many closed, and at what value? Very few small businesses close this loop, and it is the only measurement that answers the question in the title. Without it you are optimising toward leads, and leads are a proxy that can be gamed by lowering quality.

5. Check whether Performance Max is eating your brand traffic

Performance Max campaigns will serve on branded searches unless you actively exclude them, and because branded traffic converts easily, the campaign reports excellent results while largely harvesting demand you already had.

If a Performance Max campaign shows a far better cost per conversion than everything else in the account, that is the first thing to test. Add brand exclusions and watch what happens to its numbers.

The one-page verdict

Take your non-branded ad spend for last month, divide it by the number of customers — not leads — it produced, and compare that to your gross profit per customer. If the first number is bigger, the account is losing money regardless of what the dashboard says.

That calculation takes fifteen minutes and settles arguments that otherwise run for quarters. Common ways an account bleeds without looking broken are covered in 5 Google Ads mistakes quietly draining your budget.

If the numbers here concern you, how to work out a Google Ads budget from your own numbers covers the arithmetic upstream of all of this. More on how I manage accounts is on my Google Ads service page.