This is the whole audit. Nothing held back for the paid version.
Below is a complete AdHelm audit for a demo dental practice — the same report your own account produces, with the same reasoning attached to every number. The figures are illustrative; the format, the logic, and the level of detail are not.
Account audited
Northside Family Dental
Single location · General & cosmetic dentistry · Suburban metro
Lookback 90 days
Total spend $12,600
Health score
64/100
Structure, targeting, and spend efficiency combined.
Likely waste
$1,631
12.9% of spend over the lookback.
First fixes
3
About $544/month if all are applied.
Roughly one dollar in eight is going to searches this practice cannot convert — job seekers, free-care inquiries, and out-of-area traffic. The demand itself is healthy; the targeting around it is not. The fixes below are ordered by how much they return for how little risk.
First finding
Who actually clicked your ads
Every search Google named is sorted into patient, job seeker, student, price shopper, or reader. This is the split.
The other 77 were job seekers, students, and price shoppers — about $398 of spend.
- Looking for treatment
- 412 clicks$2,312
- Looking for a job
- 31 clicks$168
- Price or free-care led
- 26 clicks$121
- Reading, not booking
- 12 clicks$61
- Studying the field
- 8 clicks$48
Based on the 489 of this account’s 604 paid clicks that Google named a search for. It withholds the rest as too rare to report, so they cannot be judged either way.
Where the money went
Searches that could never have become patients
Every term below drew real clicks. None of them named something this practice sells, or they landed somewhere that could not answer them. Spend is the 90-day total. Where a paid plan can make the change for you, the finding says so.
“invisalign near me”
Strong treatment intent, but every click lands on the general homepage instead of a consult page. The traffic is worth having — the destination is losing it.
“emergency dental jobs”
Career intent matched inside an emergency treatment campaign. These are people looking for work, not treatment.
AdHelm can block this search for you. One tap, undoable for 30 days.
“free dental clinic”
Free-care intent. This practice does not offer free treatment, so the search names something it cannot sell.
AdHelm can block this search for you. One tap, undoable for 30 days.
Elsewhere in the account
Five things nobody told this practice
Each one is visible in Google Ads today. None of them generate an alert unless someone is looking.
An ad has been switched off for 11 days
Your best-performing Invisalign ad was disapproved on 14 May for a policy issue in the headline. Google emailed the account owner once. Nobody saw it.
That ad group has run on one weaker ad ever since. Impressions are down 34% against the 11 days before.
Fix the headline and resubmit. It usually clears in a few hours.
A conversion action is counting page views
“Contact page view” is set as a primary conversion. It fires when someone loads the contact page, whether or not they call, write, or do anything else.
61% of your reported conversions are this one action. Your bidding is optimizing toward people who read a page and left.
Demote it to secondary. Keep phone taps and form submits as primary.
Google changed your account without asking
On 2 June, Google auto-applied a recommendation that added 23 broad-match keywords to your General Dentistry campaign, including “dental hygienist salary”.
$104 of the waste below traces to those keywords.
Turn off auto-apply. Google only keeps 30 days of this history, so anything older than that is already gone.
AdHelm can pause those keywords for you, one approval, undoable for 30 days. Turning auto-apply off is a Google setting only you can change.
A Google recommendation we would decline
Google is pressing you to switch your General Dentistry keywords to broad match, and quoting a 62% optimization score to make the case.
Broad match hands Google the decision about which searches you pay for. On a $4,200 budget that is where the money goes missing.
Decline it. The optimization score measures how many of Google’s suggestions you have accepted, not how well your account is doing.
Demand you are not bidding on
People near this practice search for dental implants about 680 times a month. You have no keyword, ad group, or ad for implants.
Not spend you lost — spend you never placed. Implants are the highest-value treatment on your profile.
Add an implants ad group before raising budget anywhere else.
What to do about it
Ranked fixes, with the reasoning attached
Ordered by return against risk. Each one states what it is based on, so you can disagree with it.
Add 14 negative keywords for hiring and free-care terms
Account-level negative list
“jobs”, “careers”, “hiring”, “free”, and “low income” variants accounted for $739 across the lookback. Every one of them was classified as a job seeker or a free-care search. Excluding them cannot affect genuine patient demand.
high confidenceAdHelm can make this change. One approval blocks all 14, and you can undo it for 30 days.
Point Invisalign traffic at a dedicated consult page
Cosmetic — Invisalign ad group
118 clicks at a $7.56 average cost reached the homepage rather than a treatment page. The searcher asked about one treatment and landed on a page about everything.
high confidenceSplit emergency searches out of the general campaign
General Dentistry — Search
Emergency and routine intent share one budget and one bid strategy, so urgent high-value searches compete against routine cleanings. Separating them lets each bid to its own value.
medium confidenceAlso flagged
Budget and coverage notes
Smaller than the fixes above, but worth knowing before spend scales.
Weekend spend outruns coverage
22% of spend lands Saturday and Sunday, when the practice cannot answer the phone and nobody reads the website form until Monday.
Geographic spill
$196 reached searchers outside the 12-mile service radius, mostly from a broad-match location setting rather than deliberate targeting.
What this audit cannot tell you
- AdHelm cannot see your bookings. It reads Google Ads and nothing else — not your practice management system, not your phone, not your inbox. Everything up to and including the click is visible. What happened afterwards is not.
- So no number on this page is a booking, a patient, or revenue. They are searches, clicks, and dollars, plus a judgment about who was doing the searching.
- Performance Max campaigns report limited search-term data, so waste inside them is estimated rather than itemized.
- Google withholds the search behind rarer clicks, so a share of your clicks cannot be classified either way. The page says how many.
- Google keeps only 30 days of account change history, so changes older than that cannot be recovered by anyone.
- A 90-day lookback needs roughly 30 days of spend before the ranking is stable.
Run this on your own account. Then have it fixed.
Connect Google Ads read-only and AdHelm produces this report for your practice. That half is free. On a paid plan it makes the fix as well — it blocks the search wasting your money, pauses the keyword that is not working, moves budget between your campaigns. You approve each change. You can undo any of it for 30 days.
The audit is free and needs no card. Read-only connection — nothing in your account changes unless you approve it.