Five signs your Google Ads account is wasting budget

Most Google Ads accounts are not badly run on purpose. They drift. Settings are left on their defaults, keywords are added and never reviewed, and tracking breaks without anyone noticing. Here are the five problems we see most often, and how to check for each one yourself.

1. Conversion tracking you cannot trust

If your account counts page views, scrolls, or button clicks as conversions, the bidding system is optimizing for the wrong thing. It will happily find you more people who click a button and never become customers.

How to check: go to Goals, then Conversions, and look at each action marked as primary. Each one should be a real enquiry, call, booking, or sale. Anything else should be secondary or removed.

2. No negative keywords

Broad and phrase match keywords can trigger your ads for searches you would never want to pay for, such as jobs, free versions, DIY guides, or competitors' support lines.

How to check: open the search terms report for the last 90 days and sort by cost. If you see searches that could never become customers, add them as negative keywords. Repeat this regularly, not once.

3. The Display Network switched on in search campaigns

New search campaigns often include the Display Network by default. That sends part of your budget to websites and apps instead of search results, where intent is usually far lower.

How to check: in each search campaign's settings, look under Networks. Unless you have a specific reason, untick the Display Network.

4. One ad group for everything

When dozens of unrelated keywords share one ad group, the ad cannot match what each person searched for. Relevance falls, click-through rates drop, and you pay more for each click.

How to check: each ad group should cover one tight theme, with ads and a landing page that speak directly to it.

5. Nobody is looking at locations and schedules

If you only serve certain areas, or only answer the phone at certain hours, your campaigns should reflect that. Otherwise you are paying for clicks from people you cannot serve, or calls nobody picks up.

How to check: review location settings, making sure targeting is set to people in, not just interested in, your area. Then check the ad schedule report to see which hours and days produce real enquiries.

The common thread

Each of these problems is easy to fix once you know it is there. The difficulty is that none of them is obvious from the main dashboard. A quarterly review of settings, search terms, and tracking prevents most of the waste.

If you would like a second pair of eyes on your account, ask us for a free audit.