You spent $2,738 on Google Ads. We pulled the account and traced every dollar.

First: the tracking

The numbers you have been trusting are not real.

You do have tracking installed — this is not a case of nothing being there. A Google Analytics tag runs on 13 pages of your site, and call tracking is on. The problem is what it was set up to count. Whoever built it pasted in the defaults and never tuned a single one, so the report you would open counts the wrong things and is polluted with actions that were never customers.

So the honest version is worse than "you have no tracking." You have tracking, you have been paying for the traffic it measures, and it has been quietly reporting numbers that do not mean what they say.

Now the ads

Two settings sent most of your budget to the wrong searches.

The whole account comes down to two choices whoever set it up made — and then never corrected. Together they are the single most common way a small ad budget gets burned.

Here is what those two settings did with your money.

Where the money went

You paid to send people to your competitors.

These are real searches from your account that spent your money — the highest-cost ones. Most are people typing a competitor's name into Google. Your ad showed up, they clicked, you paid, and they were looking for someone else the whole time.

Straight from the account's search-terms report. "Calls" is the conversions Google recorded for that term.

Every one of those competitor names is a search you could have blocked with a single negative keyword. None were blocked, because there were no negative keywords. And the two that did record a "call" are exactly the kind of junk the tracking section is about — a click on the Roto-Rooter brand and a search from Oklahoma are not customers.

The scale of it

81 cents of every traceable dollar produced nothing.

Of the spend that can be traced to an actual search, 81% produced no call at all. Your ads were matched to 1,328 different searches — an enormous, unfocused spread for a Kirkland drain specialist, and the direct result of broad match with no negatives. Beyond the competitor names, your money also went to searches for services you do not lead with and towns you do not serve: septic systems, water heaters, drain fields, and cities from Everett to Snoqualmie to Sequim.

The rest of what we found

Smaller problems, same story.

None of these alone explains the waste, but each one is a sign the account was set up on autopilot and left there.

• ×Duplicate keywords competing with each other. The same term appears more than once across your campaigns — "drain cleaning," "clogged drain," "commercial plumber," "24 hour plumber" — so your own ads bid against each other and push your cost up.
• ×Bidding on generic and neighboring-city terms. Broad terms like "commercial plumber," "bellevue plumber," and "bothell plumber" pulled budget away from the Kirkland drain and sewer work you actually rank #1 for.
• ×Geographic targeting is inconsistent. Your campaigns do not target the same area — one runs on a 14-mile radius, others on different city lists. That is how a click from Sequim ends up on your bill.
• ×Your Local Services Ads barely ran. The LSA spent $138 lifetime against a $2,100-a-week budget ceiling, and delivered 2 leads. It was on, but it was never really working.