Most business owners find out their Google Ads are getting expensive the same way: the card statement arrives and the number is bigger than last month, while the phone is ringing about the same amount as before. This is a walkthrough of why that happens and what to look at, written for someone who owns the business rather than someone who runs ad accounts for a living.
The short answer
If your costs have crept up, it is almost never because Google has put its prices up. It is usually because the account is buying more than you think it is buying. Your ads get shown for searches you would never choose. Several services compete for the same daily budget. Nobody has told the account which enquiries are actually worth having. Every one of those is checkable, and most of them you can check yourself.
First, decide what "too expensive" means
Cost per click on its own tells you very little. A twelve pound click that leads to a four thousand pound job is cheap. A sixty pence click that leads to nothing at all is expensive. So before you judge the account, write down two numbers: roughly what one new customer is worth to you, and how many enquiries you need in a month to be happy.
Those two numbers turn a vague feeling into a test. If you need ten enquiries a month and a customer is worth a few hundred pounds to you, you can work out what you can afford to pay for an enquiry and still be comfortably ahead. Everything below gets judged against that, not against a benchmark you read in an article.
Where the money usually goes
Searches you would never have chosen
This is the big one, and it is the easiest to see. Google will show your ads for searches it considers related to your keywords, and its idea of related is broader than yours. A plumber bidding on "boiler repair" can end up paying for "boiler repair apprenticeship", "how to repair a boiler yourself" and "boiler repair jobs near me". None of those people are going to book you. All of them cost you the same as a real customer.
Match types doing exactly what they were designed to do
Keywords can be set to broad, phrase or exact match. Broad match gives Google the most freedom, and if your account was set up quickly, or by an automated wizard, there is a good chance most of it is broad. That is not a scandal. Broad match has its uses once tracking is solid and there is a strong negative keyword list behind it. Without those two things, it is just a wide net.
One campaign carrying everything
If every service you offer sits in a single campaign with one budget, the service with the cheapest clicks and the most search volume will quietly eat the budget. That is often your least profitable service. Splitting things out so each one has its own budget is unglamorous work that usually pays for itself quickly.
Ads pointing at the wrong page
If someone searches for a specific service and lands on your homepage, they have to find their way to the thing they asked about. Plenty of them will not bother. You paid for that click either way. Sending each ad group to the page that matches it is the single cheapest improvement most accounts have available.
Bidding to be first when second is fine
Being at the very top of the page costs a premium. Sometimes that premium is worth it, for example when you are the only local option and the job is high value. Often it is not. If your ads are set to chase the top position by default, you are paying extra for something you never explicitly decided to buy.
The checks I would run, in this order
1. Read the search terms report
In Google Ads, this sits under the keywords section and shows the real things people typed before your ad appeared, as opposed to the keywords you chose. Set the date range to the last three months and sort by cost. Read the top fifty. You will usually find something you would never want to pay for in the first ten rows, and that alone justifies the twenty minutes.
2. Check what the account counts as a conversion
Open the conversions section and look at what is actually being recorded. If the list includes things like page views, scrolls, or every click on any button, then the account is optimising towards activity rather than enquiries. Google will faithfully buy you more of whatever you told it to count. Make sure what it counts is a phone call, a form, or a booking.
3. Look at spend by campaign, then by ad group
Sort by cost and ask a simple question of every line: did this bring me work? If you cannot answer that, the problem is measurement rather than money, and check three becomes check two again.
4. Follow the clicks to the page
Click your own ads, or check the final URLs, and ask whether the page delivers what the ad promised within one screen. Is the phone number visible without scrolling? Is the area you cover obvious? Is there one clear next step?
5. Check devices, locations and hours
Look at performance split by device. If mobile is where the enquiries come from, is your site fast and easy to use on a phone? Then check locations: it is common to find spend going to areas you do not serve, particularly with the default "presence or interest" location setting. Finally, if you only answer the phone during working hours, consider whether you want to be paying for clicks at midnight.
6. Check the search partners and display settings
Search campaigns often have the display network switched on by default. That means your search budget is also buying banner space across other websites. It is very cheap traffic and often very poor traffic. If it is on and nobody chose to turn it on, turn it off and watch what happens to your cost per enquiry.
What to change first
Do the cheap, reversible things before the structural ones. Add negative keywords for the obvious waste you found. Fix the conversion actions so the account is measuring enquiries. Point ads at the right pages. Turn off networks and locations you never meant to buy. Only then start restructuring campaigns or changing bidding strategies, and change one thing at a time so you can tell what did what.
Give changes a fair run before judging them. Accounts move slowly, and if you change five things on Monday and something improves on Friday, you have learned nothing you can repeat.
When it is worth asking someone else to look
If you have gone through those checks and the account still costs more than it returns, the problem is usually structural: the wrong campaign types, tracking that has never worked properly, or a mismatch between what the ads promise and what the website delivers. That is worth a second pair of eyes, but ask for the findings in plain English, with the numbers to back them up.
You should be able to finish any conversation about your ad account knowing three things: what you paid, what you got, and what is being changed next.