I went through your Google Ads account. Here is where the $2,738 went.

The shape of it

Your campaigns on a timeline.

Here is every campaign you have run, drawn against time. Hover or tap any bar for its cost, conversions, keywords, and dates. The pattern matters: a small automated campaign trickled along from October to April, then the account went dark for two months, and then in July 2026 almost everything happened at once — two search campaigns spent about $2,400 in roughly three weeks and were shut off.

The single biggest line, Shamim_Rooter at $1,650, ran for 13 days in July and spent more than everything else combined. That is the campaign most of this report is about.

First: the tracking

Your "18 conversions" are not 18 leads.

A conversion is supposed to mean a real result — someone called you or filled out your form. Your account records 18 conversions, which sounds like 18 leads. It is not. Here is what those 18 actually are, pulled straight from the account.

So the honest summary is not "you have no tracking." You have tracking, you have been paying for the traffic it measures, and it has been reporting a padded number that mixes map taps and out-of-state clicks in with your real calls.

The blind spot

You could not tell which ads produced phone calls to your website.

This one is worth separating out, because it is the difference between guessing and knowing.

Now the ads

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

Almost everything below comes down to two settings whoever built the account chose, and then never corrected. On their own they sound harmless. Together they are the most common way a small ad budget gets burned.

This is the answer to "how am I paying for my competitors?" You never added "Roto-Rooter" or "Bob Oates" as keywords. You did not have to. Broad match volunteers your ad for those searches on its own, because it sees "plumbing" and matches. The only thing that stops it is a negative keyword, and you had none. So Google was free to spend your money on every plumber's name in the region.

Where the money went

Every search you paid for. All 47 of them.

Out of the 1,328 searches your ad appeared on, only 47 ever cost you money — those are the ones someone actually clicked, and together they are your entire $1,399 of traceable spend. Here they all are, grouped by what the search actually was. Most of it went to other companies.

Pulled straight from your account's search-terms report. "Calls" is the conversions Google recorded for that search.

Look at the "Calls" column. Every one of the 5 recorded conversions in this whole list came from a search for someone else — a competitor, a supply house, or a septic company. Not one came from a person looking for you. The competitors and supply stores alone account for $1,100 of the $1,399. Every one of those searches could have been shut off with a negative keyword.

How big the problem is

81 cents of every dollar I can trace produced nothing.

What "traceable" means. Google does not show you the exact wording of every search you pay for — a lot of it, especially from the Smart campaigns, gets lumped into buckets you cannot see into. Of your spend, $1,399 is the slice where Google does tell you the exact phrase someone typed. That is the part I can inspect, and it is the table above. Within it, $1,133 — 81% — came from searches that led to no call at all.

Where the 1,328 comes from. You had about 120 keywords, all on broad match. Broad match takes each one and fans it out across every phrasing Google thinks is related, so a handful of keywords turned into 1,328 different real-world searches your ad showed up on. That number is not a sign of reach. It is a sign of no aim.

Where your ads were pointed

The geography, campaign by campaign.

Your location targeting is one of the few things set up correctly in principle — every campaign shows only to people physically in the areas below, not to random far-away searchers. But no two campaigns target the same thing, they use different units, and the two that spent almost all the money reached far past the Eastside, where you are the #1 drain specialist.

Three campaigns use city lists, one uses ZIP codes, one uses a radius — five campaigns, four different ways of drawing the same map. And the big one, Shamim_Rooter, was pointed at two entire counties. Together with "call only," that is the 92% of your search budget that was aimed well beyond the Kirkland and Eastside area you actually dominate. To be clear, this is not what produced the Oklahoma and Sequim clicks — those searchers were local; broad match did that. But the wide geography meant your best-funded campaign was competing across all of Seattle instead of concentrating where you win.

Two more that cost you

Duplicate keywords and off-target keywords.

The Local Services Ads

Why the LSA spent $138 against an $8,000 ceiling.

This looks alarming — a budget cap around $8,000 a month, and only $138 spent — so let me explain exactly why, because it is not what it looks like.

The two leads, examined.

Two leads is a small sample, so here is everything the account knows about each one. Both have call recordings that can still be pulled and listened to.

Here is the part worth sitting with: the lead you paid for was the 23-second throwaway, and the lead you got for free was the real one — two genuine conversations from someone who came looking for you by name. That is not bad luck, it is how the pricing works: Google charges for category leads and generally waves through direct, by-name leads, so your reputation was earning you the better lead at no cost. Two weeks is far too small a sample to judge the channel — but it is a clean preview of what LSA does when your reviews do the selling.