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.

July 2026: $2,557 in eleven days

The Google Ads change log records exactly who did what and when. On 13 July 2026 a new Search campaign was built inside 581-417-4776 under the login kirklandrooter@gmail.com — one campaign, one ad group, 24 campaign assets, 15 keyword criteria. Thirty-two more keywords were added the next day from the Google Ads mobile app. The campaigns ran until they were paused on 24 July.

• 09 July 2026
  Bulk targeting churn
  47 campaign criteria removed, 15 created, 2 budgets raised, 14 assets added.
• 13 July 2026
  New Search campaign built
  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.
• 15 July 2026
  Logic Inbound Manager Account linked
  Manager account 548-341-8212 gains access.
• 16–20 July 2026
  Status toggling
  Six campaign status changes and six Local Services criteria added.
• 24 July 2026
  Campaigns paused
  Paused by douglas@toolforge.ai. Kirkland Rooter MCC (366-598-7644) 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 has its own problem. In March 2024 it recorded 36 conversions on $330 of spend. From April 2024 onward it recorded zero.

$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.

Disapproved ads

Five of the eight ads in 377-138-5133 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 — 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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, 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.