Google Ads has an elegant design: it is extremely easy to spend money and extremely easy to spend it inefficiently. The platform defaults — broad match keywords, smart campaigns, automated extensions, and geographic targeting — are optimised for Google's revenue, not your ROI. Most accounts running on default settings are wasting 30–60% of their budget. Here are the 10 mistakes we find in virtually every account we audit.
1. Using broad match keywords without sufficient negative keywords
Broad match tells Google to show your ad for any query it considers semantically related to your keyword. Without a robust negative keyword list, this produces expensive, irrelevant clicks. The fix: switch to phrase or exact match for your highest-value keywords, and build a negative keyword list from your Search Terms report — any query that triggered your ad but wasn't relevant should become a negative keyword immediately.
2. Sending all traffic to the homepage
A homepage is designed for many audiences and many goals. A searcher who clicked 'emergency boiler repair London' lands on your homepage and has to figure out whether you offer emergency services, your prices, and how to contact you — while your competitor's ad sends them to a page that says 'Emergency Boiler Repair London — Available Now. Call us'. That competitor gets the lead.
3. 'Presence or interest' geographic targeting
Google's default geographic targeting is 'presence or interest' — showing your ads to people in or interested in your target location. A London-based plumber's ads can show to someone in Manchester researching 'plumbers in London' on a news article. Switch to 'presence only' for any local service business.
4. Running automated bidding without conversion data
Smart bidding strategies (Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximise Conversions) require conversion history to optimise. With fewer than 30–50 conversions per month, automated bidding has insufficient data and actively underperforms manual CPC. The fix: start with manual CPC, generate conversion history, then switch to smart bidding once the data threshold is met.
5. No conversion tracking (or tracking the wrong things)
Google Ads optimises toward whatever you tell it to measure. If you're tracking 'page views' or 'time on site' as conversions, you're optimising for visitors, not customers. Proper conversion tracking should capture: form submissions, phone calls (using Google call tracking), purchase completions (for e-commerce), and chat initiations. Every conversion action should be verified in the account before using it for smart bidding.
6. Ad groups with too many diverse keywords
An ad group called 'plumbing' with 50 keywords including 'emergency plumber', 'boiler service', 'bathroom installation', and 'drain unblocking' cannot write an ad relevant to all of them. Irrelevant ads have low quality scores, which increases your CPCs. The fix: tightly themed ad groups of 5–15 closely related keywords, each with ads specifically written for that theme.
7. Ignoring the Search Terms report
The Search Terms report shows the actual queries that triggered your ads — not just the keywords you bid on. This is your best source of negative keywords and your best source of new keyword ideas. Reviewing this report weekly in the first 60 days of a campaign and adding negatives and new keywords from it is the most impactful ongoing optimisation activity.
8. Pausing ads too early based on insufficient data
A common mistake is pausing an ad or keyword after it spends £50 without converting. Statistical significance requires sufficient data — especially for lower-volume campaigns. An ad that has received 20 clicks and 0 conversions hasn't failed; it hasn't been tested. Decisions about what to pause or pause should wait until each element has had sufficient exposure to produce meaningful data — typically 50–100 clicks minimum.
9. Not running ad extensions
Ad extensions (now called 'assets' in Google Ads) are free additions to your ads — sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, image extensions, call extensions, location extensions. They increase your ad's visual footprint in the search results, improve click-through rate, and raise your Ad Rank without increasing bids. Running campaigns without extensions is leaving free performance on the table.
10. No remarketing
Most Google Ads campaigns only target cold traffic — people who have never heard of you. The 95–98% of visitors who click your ad, visit your site, and leave without converting are your warmest prospects. Running a remarketing campaign to recapture these visitors is almost always among the highest-ROI campaign types available, yet many small business accounts have no remarketing lists configured at all.
If you recognise more than three of these mistakes in your current account, a professional audit will almost certainly identify a path to getting significantly more from your existing budget. Our Google Ads audit covers all 10 of these issues plus account-specific diagnosis and a prioritised remediation plan.
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