If you are spending on Google Ads and not auditing the account regularly, you are almost certainly wasting money. The good news: you do not need to be an expert to find the biggest leaks. This 30-minute audit walks you through the five checks that uncover most wasted spend — and the fixes that put that budget back to work acquiring patients.
Google Ads accounts drift. Keywords you never intended to target start matching, budgets get misallocated, and conversion tracking quietly breaks after a site update. Left unchecked, a typical healthcare account wastes 20–40% of its spend on clicks that never become patients. A regular, focused audit catches that drift before it costs you a quarter’s worth of budget.
Check 1: Are you tracking appointments properly?
Before you evaluate anything else, confirm your conversion tracking works. If you cannot see which keywords and campaigns produce appointments, every other decision is a guess. This is the single most common — and most expensive — problem we find.
- Open Conversions in Google Ads and check for recent, consistent recorded conversions.
- Complete a test appointment request yourself and confirm it registers.
- Make sure you are tracking the actions that matter — calls, forms, bookings — not just page views.
- If conversions look broken, fix tracking before optimising anything else.
Check 2: Where is your spend actually going?
Pull a campaign and keyword report sorted by spend, then compare spend to conversions. You will usually find a small number of keywords eating most of your budget with little to show for it. Those are your first cuts.
Look for: broad-match keywords spending heavily with no conversions, campaigns with budgets capped while better campaigns sit idle, and one "brand" or "display" campaign quietly absorbing spend you did not intend.
Check 3: What is your search terms report telling you?
The search terms report shows the actual queries people typed that triggered your ads. This is where you find the waste: irrelevant searches burning your budget on broad matches. Add those as negative keywords and watch your cost per patient drop.
- 1Set the date range to the last 30 days.
- 2Sort by cost, descending, and scan for irrelevant queries.
- 3Add every irrelevant query as a negative keyword.
- 4Repeat sorted by clicks with zero conversions.
Check 4: Are your landing pages matching your ads?
When someone clicks an ad for "teeth whitening" and lands on a generic homepage, they leave. Each ad group should send traffic to a page that matches the ad’s promise and makes booking obvious. Mismatched landing pages are a leading cause of wasted ad spend.
Fix it: pair every ad group with a dedicated, conversion-focused landing page. Match the headline to the keyword, keep the form short, and put the booking button above the fold.
Check 5: What is your real cost per acquisition?
Divide total spend by the number of conversions. That number is the truth about what each patient costs you. Compare it to what a patient is worth to your practice. If your cost per acquisition is higher than you can afford, you have a profitability problem — not a traffic problem.
The 30-minute payoff
Run these five checks once a month and you will catch most wasted spend before it compounds. Most accounts we audit recover 15–30% of their budget in the first round of fixes alone.
Want a professional audit of your practice’s Google Ads? We will review your setup, find the waste, and show you exactly what to fix — no obligation.
Get your free ads auditMake the audit a habit
A one-time audit helps, but accounts drift back. The practices that get the most from Google Ads audit regularly — or work with a partner who does it for them every week. Treat your ad spend like any other investment: measure it, review it, and cut what is not paying.
