Why Your Google Ads Agency Might Be Wasting Your Budget Without You Knowing

There's no alert that pops up when your Google Ads budget is quietly wasted. No notification saying half your spend went to traffic that never had a shot at converting. It just happens, click by click, month after month, until the numbers don't add up anymore and nobody can say exactly when it started.

That's the core argument Lior Krolewicz, founder and CEO of Yael Consulting, made on a recent episode of the Goodfirms Podcast. With more than 20,000 hours spent managing Google Ads accounts, Lior has seen firsthand how quickly inefficient campaigns can drain a budget. His background is unusual for a PPC expert: before building his agency, he served as an Israeli special ops commander. Today, he runs an agency built around one client per market and no long-term contracts—and he's blunt about why so many businesses bleed money without noticing. 

Here's Lior breaking it down in his own words.

The "Set It and Forget It" Trap

Google Ads has gotten complicated enough that most business owners can't manage their own accounts anymore, so they bring in an agency and trust the experts to handle it.

Here's where it usually goes wrong. Some agencies set up automated rules, make a few early improvements, and then leave the account alone. When the client asks to grow, the answer is often just to raise the budget.

But a bigger budget doesn't fix a messy account. It just gives the same inefficiencies more room to run if an account is already pulling in irrelevant traffic; scaling it up multiplies that waste instead of solving it.

Lior calls this a slow bleed, and it's the right word for it. Nothing looks broken day to day. The damage only shows up once you zoom out.

Search Terms Tell the Real Story

Here's a distinction that gets lost more often than it should: keywords are what you're targeting. Search terms are what people actually typed into Google before your ad showed up.

An account can look perfectly reasonable at the keyword level and still be burning money on searches that have nothing to do with your business. Every irrelevant click is a click you paid for and got nothing back.

Lior's approach is to go through search queries regularly, filter out what doesn't belong, and use what's left to find new opportunities. He's upfront that there's no secret formula here. The differentiator is doing this work consistently, not occasionally.

Scaling Should Be Selective, Not Automatic

When a business wants to grow, the instinct is usually to double the budget and let Google find more conversions. Lior pushes back on that.

More aggressive spending means more exposure to irrelevant traffic, especially if the search terms weren't clean to begin with. Instead of blindly increasing spend across the board, he recommends identifying what's already outperforming and pushing that harder, while pulling back on what isn't working.

The question isn't just how much more you can spend. It's where the next dollar should actually go, and that only becomes clear once you're watching the data closely enough to tell winners from losers.

Automation Isn't the Problem. Bad Setup Is.

Performance Max and other automated campaign types can genuinely work well. Lior isn't against the technology. He's against how casually it gets turned on.

Google used to require a minimum number of conversions before automation could even be enabled. That gate doesn't exist anymore, and plenty of accounts flip on automated bidding without proper conversion tracking in place first.

When that happens, Google optimizes toward signals that don't actually reflect real business outcomes. The tool isn't broken. The inputs feeding it are. As Lior puts it, a powerful tool works great when it's used correctly and can do real damage when it isn't.

It's the kind of setup mistake that separates the PPC and Google Ads agencies actually doing the daily work from the ones just flipping switches and hoping for the best.

Four Questions Worth Asking Your Agency

This is the most useful part of the conversation, and it doesn't require a Google Ads background to act on.

• What search terms consumed the budget over the last 90 days, sorted by cost? Not keywords. The actual terms Google matched you to. If they don't make sense for your business, that's your answer.
• What counts as a conversion in this account? A page visit or a five-second phone call sometimes gets logged as a win when it isn't one. Know what Google is actually being told to optimize for.
• Why is the account structured this way? A good account mirrors how you think about your own business. If you want to push one product, it should be simple to find the campaign behind it and adjust the budget.
• Can they explain any of this in plain language? If the answer to every question is a shrug or a wall of jargon, that's the real warning sign, more than any single bad month ever could be.

Why No Contracts, Why One Client Per Market

Lior has run Yael Consulting month-to-month for fifteen years. His reasoning is simple: if the work is genuinely good, a contract shouldn't be the thing keeping a client around. If a client wants to move the work in-house, he'll train their team and stay available afterward.

That kind of focused approach matters whether you're working with SEO Companies for organic growth or paid-search specialists managing your advertising budget.

"I couldn't imagine it not working, not being able to help them, but then having to stick together. Why? There's no winner there."

The same thinking drives his refusal to take on competing clients in the same market. Splitting focus across rivals makes it hard to say either one is truly winning. Keeping it to one client per market means every resource goes toward that business, becoming the strongest player in its space.

It's not a common stance among digital marketing companies, most of which are built to add clients, not turn them away.

Rapid Fire With Lior Krolewicz

• Buzzword that instantly signals someone's never managed a complex account? Accepting all of Google's recommendations and handing over full control.
• Is a $3,000-a-month ad budget a real strategy or just an expensive hobby? A hundred percent legitimate. He's started accounts on $500 a month and scaled them all the way to an IPO.
• Unmonitored Google AI running the account, or a college intern who's never seen a dashboard? The intern. Someone who cares about the client will figure the rest out.

The Real Warning Sign

The worst sign isn't one bad month of performance. It's an agency that can't explain what's actually happening inside your account, or one whose answer to every growth question is simply "increase the budget."

Google Ads is too expensive to run on autopilot, and the more you spend, the more that lack of attention costs you. Ask what you're paying for. Ask what counts as a conversion. Ask what's being done in your account today that wasn't happening yesterday.

Because most of the time, wasted ad spend doesn't look like a disaster. It just looks like another normal month.                                                                                                 

Conclusion

Google Ads waste rarely shows up as one bad month. It builds quietly, through search terms nobody checked and automation nobody set up right. Lior's point isn't complicated: most of this comes down to agencies doing daily work instead of setting it and walking away.

You don't need to become a PPC expert to catch it. Ask what your budget is actually buying, what counts as a conversion, and whether your agency can explain any of it in plain language. The answers usually tell you everything.

Where to Find Lior Krolewicz and Yael Consulting

Website: Yael Consulting

LinkedIn:  Lior Krolewicz

Conversations That Matter is the Goodfirms podcast featuring the practitioners, founders, and operators behind some of the most interesting companies in the world. Subscribe wherever you listen.