The €4K audit: 5 places Google Ads quietly wastes your money

The apparel brand had been running Shopping and Performance Max for two years. ROAS was stuck at 2.1x. Their agency swore they had optimized every corner. Then Scaley's first audit surfaced €4K a month of pure waste in under an hour. Here is where it was hiding.

1. Low-intent search terms

Google stuffs your Performance Max and Search campaigns with search terms that technically match your product but have zero purchase intent. Stuff like "how does shipping work", "is X worth it", "X vs Y comparison". They look harmless in the search terms report. They burn budget.

On the apparel brand's account, low-intent terms were eating about 18% of Shopping spend at a 0.9x ROAS. The fix was running a daily negative keyword mine instead of the agency's monthly cadence. Twenty-one new negatives the first week. Waste dropped.

2. Display placements that never convert

Performance Max loves to spray display placements. Most of them have a CTR near zero and zero conversions. On many accounts, 60-80% of display inventory never earns a cent, yet still eats 10-15% of the PMax budget.

The audit flagged every placement with more than 1,000 impressions and zero conversions over 90 days, then excluded them via a placement exclusion list. You can do this manually in Google Ads UI: Tools -> Shared Library -> Placement exclusion lists.

3. Bleed SKUs you forgot were live

Almost every large catalog has 5-20% of SKUs that lose money every single time they sell: low margin, high return rate, low velocity, or all three. They sit inside Shopping campaigns pulling budget away from your real winners.

Scaley's labelizer tags every SKU by margin tier and velocity. Bleed products get capped at 5% of spend or excluded entirely. On the apparel brand's catalog, 240 SKUs were quietly bleeding. Capping them freed up budget without touching the hero products.

4. Target ROAS set by vibes, not margin

If you have one Target ROAS across your whole catalog, you are telling Google to bid the same on a 70% margin hero SKU and a 12% margin long-tail item. Your bidding ignores the one variable that matters most.

The fix is tiered ROAS: 4.0 on hero margin SKUs, 3.0 on workhorses, 2.2 on low-margin filler. You need labeled products to do this. Without labels, Google is guessing.

5. The CSS fee you are still paying

Google charges a 20% Shopping CPC markup in the EU and UK unless you route through a Comparison Shopping Service. Every month you stay direct, you hand Google 20% of your Shopping budget for nothing.

Switching to a CSS takes one day of setup and activates same-day. Scaley bundles this in the Suite plan, but you can find independent CSS providers too. Either way: if you are in the EU or UK and running Shopping, you are losing 20% by default.

How to run this audit yourself

Pull your search terms report for the last 90 days. Sort by cost descending. Eyeball the top 100 for low-intent queries and add them as negatives.

Pull your Performance Max insights report. Flag placements with more than 1,000 impressions and zero conversions. Exclude them.

Export your product-level performance. Tag every SKU by margin and 30-day conversion count. Cap or exclude the bottom 10%.

Audit your bidding: is Target ROAS one number or tiered? If one, that is your highest-leverage fix.

If you are in the EU or UK, check if you are on a CSS. If not, that is a 20% Shopping refund waiting.

If that sounds like a lot of work: this is the first thing Scaley does when you plug in an account. One hour, then a diff.