01Broad match with no negatives
Broad match gives Google one instruction: show this ad for anything you judge to be related. That is a very wide brief. Left unsupervised, it will spend your money on job hunters, DIY researchers, people in towns you do not serve, and people searching for a different service that happens to share a word with yours.
Broad match is not the villain here. Paired with a smart bid strategy and clean conversion data, it can find valuable searches that exact match never will. The villain is broad match with no supervision: no negative keywords at launch, and no review of the search terms report afterwards.
- Read the search terms report every week. It is the literal record of what your money bought.
- Build negative keyword lists before launch: free, jobs, courses, DIY, locations you do not cover.
- Hunt for recurring one and two word patterns in wasted spend, not just individual odd queries. Patterns are what you exclude. One-off queries are noise.
- Give broad match room only once a campaign has conversion history for the bid strategy to learn from.
02No conversion tracking, or the wrong tracking
Some accounts have no conversion tracking at all. More have something worse: tracking that confidently counts the wrong things. Page views recorded as conversions. A thank-you page that fires twice. Button clicks that measure curiosity, not enquiries. The dashboard says forty conversions. The inbox says nine.
This hurts twice. First, you cannot judge anything: every optimisation decision becomes a guess dressed up as a strategy. Second, automated bidding learns from whatever you feed it. Feed it clicks on a phone icon and it will buy you more clicks on a phone icon. That is not the same as buying customers.
The fix is unglamorous and non-negotiable. Track the actions that put money in the bank or a genuine enquiry in the pipeline. Test them yourself: submit the form, make the call, and check that exactly one conversion is recorded. Until the gap between reported conversions and reality is closed, nothing else in the account is worth optimising, because you would be optimising toward fiction.
03Sending every click to the homepage
Your homepage is built to serve everyone: new visitors, returning customers, job applicants, the mildly curious. A page that serves everyone sells to no one in particular.
Someone who searches for emergency boiler repair in Manchester and clicks an ad promising exactly that should land on a page about emergency boiler repair in Manchester. Land them on the homepage instead and they have to go and find the thing they were promised. Some will. Many will not. You paid the same for both.
It also affects what you pay. Google scores every keyword with a Quality Score from 1 to 10, and expected landing page experience is one of its components. Relevant, fast, focused pages tend to cost less per click than generic ones, because the auction rewards ads that lead somewhere useful. A dedicated page per service, a headline that matches the search, and one clear action: that is the standard we build to in our web and landing page work.
04Set-and-forget budgets
Most budgets are set once, on launch day, and encode launch-day guesses. Then the account learns, the market moves, and the budget stays exactly where it was.
Six months later the pattern is nearly always the same: the best campaign is capped, losing impression share to budget while it produces profitable enquiries, and a weaker campaign spends its full allowance every day simply because nobody took it away. Money flows by inertia instead of by merit.
The fix is a standing appointment, not a heroic one-off. Once a month, move budget toward the campaigns that earn it: protect what is proven, feed what is promising, and cut what has had a fair test and failed. The rule is short: budgets follow evidence.
05Judging on clicks, not cost per customer
Clicks, impressions and click-through rate are inputs. They tell you the machine is turning, not that it is producing anything. The number a campaign should be judged on is what it costs to acquire a customer, set against what that customer is worth.
The campaign with the best click-through rate can easily be the worst performer in the account. Cheap clicks that never become customers are the most expensive traffic you can buy.
Work out, from your own margins and close rates, the most you can afford to pay for a customer. Then hold every campaign to it. Two questions settle almost every optimisation debate: what does a customer cost from this campaign, and what is that customer worth? This is the discipline our Google Ads management is built around.
06Fighting the auction with a weak page
Google Ads is an amplifier, not a creator. It multiplies whatever your website already does. If the site converts visitors into enquiries, ads scale that. If the site leaks, ads scale the leak, at your expense.
The symptoms are familiar: bids creep up to hold position, traffic looks healthy while enquiries stay flat, and a competitor seems able to outbid you indefinitely. Usually they are not richer. Their page converts more of its visitors, so every click is worth more to them, so they can pay more for it and still profit. That is the whole game.
Conversion rate is the multiplier you control. Before blaming the auction, the keywords or the platform, put your landing page next to the ad that feeds it and ask whether it keeps the promise. Most accounts that tried Google Ads and concluded it does not work sent decent traffic to a page that could not close.
07Fix them in the right order
These mistakes are not equally urgent, and fixing them out of order wastes effort. The sequence that works:
- Tracking first. Until conversions are counted correctly, every other judgement is guesswork.
- Economics second. Decide what you can afford to pay for a customer before optimising toward anything.
- Stop the obvious waste. Search terms review and negative keywords. This is usually the fastest saving available in the account.
- Fix the destination. A page per intent, message matched to the ad, one clear action.
- Then, and only then, budgets and scale. More spend multiplies whatever is already there, good or bad.
You are always at the lowest broken step. A large account with broken tracking is not a sophisticated account. It is a measurement problem that happens to spend a lot of money.
None of this is clever, and that is the point. Most underperforming accounts do not need a secret tactic. They need the basics done properly, in order, and kept that way. If you would rather have a second pair of eyes on yours, book a call and we will tell you which step you are on.