Scaley1. Low-intent search terms
Google stuffs your PMax 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 ~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
PMax 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 >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're 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. CSS fee you're 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're in the EU/UK and running Shopping, you're 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 PMax insights report. Flag placements with >1K 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's your highest-leverage fix.
If you're in the EU/UK, check if you're on a CSS. If not, that's 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.