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Google Ads wasted spend calculator
Put in your monthly spend and how much of it goes to search terms that never convert. Get the monthly and yearly leak, what that money would buy at your target CPA, and a grade from A to F.
Google Ads wasted spend calculator
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Your numbers (last 30 days)
Results
30 to 40% wasted. The reference audit sat here: 292 terms, $1,427, zero conversions.
How the calculation works
The method is the one an account audit uses. Open the search terms report, set the range to the last 30 days, sort by cost, and add up every term with zero conversions. That sum is the wasted spend. Divide it by total spend to get the share of budget the calculator grades.
The defaults come from a real audit of a small B2B account. In 30 days it spent $3,978 and recorded 3 conversions. Of the search terms that got clicks, 292 had zero conversions and cost $1,427 between them, which is 36% of the budget. The account’s CPA was $1,326. Moving that $1,427 to a $250 target CPA buys roughly 5.7 more conversions a month, so the same budget would have almost tripled results.
If you have the term count but not the dollar figure, switch to term-count mode. The calculator multiplies terms by average CPC and the average clicks per zero-conversion term. Three clicks per term is a fair default; in the audit the 292 terms averaged $4.89 each.
Grade scale (share of spend on zero-conversion terms)
- A under 10%
- B 10 to 20%
- C 20 to 30%
- D 30 to 40%
- F 40% and up
What to do with the number
- Add the top 50 zero-conversion terms as negatives at the campaign level, phrase match, to stop the largest leaks first.
- Check which match type produced them. In most audits broad match ad groups own 70% or more of the wasted cost.
- Confirm conversion tracking fires before trusting the list. A broken tag makes every term look like waste.
- Repeat weekly. Query growth refills the list in about two weeks in an active account.
Embed this calculator
Paste this into any page. It loads the calculator without the site navigation and shows a one-line credit under it. Free to use on agency sites, client reports and course pages.
Want the real numbers from your account?
The free Ryze audit pulls your last 30 days of search terms, flags the zero-conversion ones with their exact cost, and lists the negatives to add. If you work in Claude or ChatGPT, the Google Ads MCP server runs the same query on demand.
Questions
How do you calculate wasted spend in Google Ads?+
Pull the search terms report for the last 30 days, sort by cost, and add up the cost of every search term with zero conversions. That total is the wasted spend. Divide it by total spend for the share. In the audit this tool is built on, 292 zero-conversion terms cost $1,427 out of $3,978, which is 36%. The calculator lets you enter either the share or the term count with an average CPC.
What counts as a zero-conversion search term?+
A query that received clicks and cost money in the period but produced no tracked conversion. Use a 30-day window so the number reflects the current account rather than one bad week. Terms with one or two clicks are still counted; they add up. Before adding negatives, check that conversion tracking actually works, otherwise every term looks like waste.
Is 36% wasted spend normal?+
It is common in accounts that rely on broad match and review search terms less than monthly, but it is not acceptable. Accounts with a weekly negative keyword routine and mostly phrase and exact match usually sit under 15%. The grade in this tool maps under 10% to A, 10 to 20% to B, 20 to 30% to C, 30 to 40% to D and anything above 40% to F.
Not sure how your account setup compares? Take the 10-question Google Ads account score to see which habits produce the leak in the first place.
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