Doctor Ads: Google Ads Profit Forensics by Igor Ivitskiy, PhD

44.0% of the Median Account’s Search Clicks Land in Google’s Leftover Category

Google Says Count a Lead Once. In 79 of 98 Accounts the Bidding Column Counts It Every Time

August 24, 2026

An audit of 1,611 conversion actions inside the column Smart Bidding optimizes toward: 51.1% of lead-type actions count every conversion against Google's own advice, while 86.7% of sales follow it.

Bidding and Budget

Where Your Google Ads Impressions Actually Go: 43.18% Lost to Rank, 1.24% to Budget

August 24, 2026

Across 7,977 Search campaign-months in 89 accounts, the median campaign loses 43.18% of its impressions to Ad Rank and only 1.24% to budget, and rank carries 83.7% of everything lost.

Metrics and Scores

A Google Ads Audit Checklist Ordered by the Strongest Evidence

August 16, 2026

Eight account checks ordered by the strength of the measurement behind each one, starting with the worst tenth of zero-conversion search terms, which holds a median 48.8% of the wasted spend in 32 accounts.

Metrics and Scores

Which Google Ads Score Actually Tracks Results? Three Tests and One Data Gap

August 16, 2026

Across 10,424 landing pages in 22 accounts, pages scoring 9 or 10 on Google's mobile speed scale convert pooled clicks at 7.41% against 1.45% for the slowest, yet inside the median account the same relationship is only 0.11.

Metrics and Scores

The Last-Step Gap: Ad Strength Sorts Every Step of Its Scale Except One

August 10, 2026

Compared inside the same ad group across 72,970 ads, Good beats Average on click-through rate in 71.1% of cases, while Excellent beats Good in only 48.3%.

Metrics and Scores

The Score-Rank Gap: What Optimization Score Actually Ranks Inside Your Account

August 10, 2026

Across 29 Google Ads accounts and 6,071 scored campaigns, the median rank correlation between a campaign's optimization score and its click-through rate is 0.05, and for conversion rate it is -0.05.

Wasted Spend