What reports should I check to see if my paid ads are losing money?

Google Ads search terms report

This is the first report I open on any account that looks like it is losing money. Set the date range to the last ninety days, sort by cost descending, and read the top hundred queries against a single question: would a stranger pay to be on this list. If a quarter of the spend is sitting on terms that describe products you do not sell, jobs you do not staff, or geographies you do not service, broad match has taught the algorithm the wrong business and the fix is negative keywords plus a match-type audit.

Concern threshold: more than fifteen percent of spend on queries you would not have bid on by hand. Typical fix: a negative keyword sweep, then a phrase or exact rebuild on the worst-offending ad groups. The free 25-page setup audit walks through the match-type discipline section.

Auction insights

Open this report at the campaign level and the ad group level for your top three spenders. Look for two things. First, impression share lost to budget climbing above twenty percent on campaigns that used to clear inventory. Second, a new competitor appearing in the top three with a high overlap rate. Either pattern explains a CPC spike that the recommendations tab will never name.

Concern threshold: outranking share dropping more than fifteen points month-over-month against a top-three competitor. Typical fix: bid cap review, ad rank diagnosis through ad strength and landing page experience, and a check on whether a competitor launched a price promotion you have not matched.

Change history

The most under-used report in Google Ads. Open it, set the date range to the period when performance broke, and filter by change type. Look for budget changes, bid strategy switches, asset changes inside Performance Max, and conversion goal edits. Half the accounts I audit have a single change in the change history that explains the entire performance drop, usually a bid strategy switched to maximize conversions on an account with thin conversion data, or a target ROAS set too aggressively for the auction.

Concern threshold: any bid strategy change inside the underperformance window. Typical fix: revert the change, document why it was made, and run the original strategy for a full conversion cycle before testing again.

Performance Max placement and asset reports

Performance Max accounts for most of the wasted-spend complaints I see in 2026. The placement report (Insights tab, then Placements) shows where your spend went across Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Search. The asset report shows which combinations of headlines, descriptions, and images Google is serving. Read both. The placement report often shows seventy percent of budget going to placements that have nothing to do with your buyer. The asset report often shows that the algorithm has fixated on one image asset that drives clicks but no orders.

Concern threshold: more than thirty percent of Performance Max spend on Display network placements with sub-one-percent conversion rates. Typical fix: account-level placement exclusions, asset group splits by intent (brand vs prospecting), and the audience signal rework covered in the Wasted Spend Calculator framework.

GA4 landing pages filtered to paid traffic

Switch to GA4. Open the Pages and Screens report, add Session source / medium as a secondary dimension, and filter to google / cpc. Sort by sessions. Read the landing pages where paid traffic is arriving against the engagement rate column. A landing page receiving fifteen percent of paid traffic with a forty-percent engagement rate and a two-percent conversion rate is the leak, not the keyword that sent the click.

Concern threshold: a top-five paid landing page with engagement under fifty percent or session conversion rate under one percent of site average. Typical fix: rebuild the landing page or reroute the traffic. Bid changes will not fix a page that loads slowly or asks for a phone number above the fold.

Shopify Sales by Traffic Source

The truth report. Open Shopify Analytics, go to Reports, and run Sales by traffic source on the same date range. Compare the revenue Google Ads attributes to the revenue Shopify attributes to paid search. The two numbers will not match exactly. The gap is the diagnosis.

A gap inside ten percent is a healthy attribution setup. A gap above twenty-five percent is a tracking problem and no bid change fixes it. The Sales by referrer report adds the second layer: it shows you the actual referring URLs and catches scenarios like a click parameter being stripped at checkout. The Tracking Stack reference covers the conversion deduplication contract that closes most of these gaps.

Concern threshold: Shopify reports thirty percent less paid-search revenue than Google Ads does. Typical fix: server-side conversion implementation, GA4 enhanced measurement audit, and a recheck of the consent banner blocking the pixel on a quarter of EU sessions.

Reading the reports in order

The order matters. Search terms and auction insights catch the obvious leaks. Change history catches the self-inflicted ones. The Performance Max reports catch the algorithmic ones. GA4 catches the landing-page ones. Shopify catches the attribution ones. A founder who pulls these six reports on a Friday afternoon every other week will catch most issues before they cost a full month of budget.

Founders who want me to run the six-report sweep against the live account instead of running it solo can book a thirty-minute call.

If the numbers across the six reports look ugly enough that the question is no longer where the leak is but how to staunch it, the full diagnostic library lives at /wasted-ad-spend/.