5 Google Ads Mistakes That Waste Your Budget

Every time we look at a new Google Ads account, we find the same problems. These are not obscure technical issues. They are basic mistakes that drain advertising budgets every single day.

The frustrating part is that most of these mistakes are easy to fix once you know what to look for. Here are the five we see most often and what to do about them.

1. No Conversion Tracking or Broken Tracking

This is by far the most common problem we see. Either there is no conversion tracking set up at all, or it was set up incorrectly and is not actually recording conversions.

Without conversion tracking, you have no idea which keywords and ads are actually driving business results. You might be spending 80% of your budget on keywords that generate zero conversions while the keywords that work only get 20% of your spend.

We have seen accounts where the owner thought Google Ads was not working for them. After fixing their conversion tracking, they discovered certain campaigns were actually generating excellent returns. They had been making optimization decisions based on incomplete data.

2. Using Broad Match Keywords Without Smart Bidding

Broad match keywords tell Google to show your ads for searches that are related to your keyword, even if the searcher did not type those exact words. This can work well in the right situations, but it can also lead to your ads showing for completely irrelevant searches.

For example, if you sell running shoes and bid on the broad match keyword "shoes," your ads might show for searches like "horseshoes" or "shoe repair" or "brake shoes." Those people are not looking for running shoes.

Google recommends using broad match with smart bidding strategies because the algorithm can learn which broad match queries actually convert. But if you are using manual bidding or maximize clicks, broad match can quickly burn through your budget on irrelevant traffic.

3. Sending Traffic to the Wrong Landing Page

Many advertisers send all their ad traffic to their homepage. This is almost always a mistake.

Think about it from the searcher's perspective. They searched for something specific, clicked on an ad that promised something specific, and then landed on a generic homepage where they have to figure out where to go next. Many of them will just leave.

If your ad is about a specific product, send people to that product page. If your ad is about a specific service, send people to a page about that service. The more relevant the landing page is to what the person searched for, the more likely they are to convert.

This also affects your Quality Score. Google looks at how relevant your landing page is to your keywords and ads. A mismatch hurts your Quality Score, which means you pay more per click.

4. Not Using Negative Keywords

Negative keywords tell Google which searches you do NOT want your ads to show for. Without them, you are almost certainly wasting money.

Every industry has searches that look relevant but are not. Someone searching for "free accounting software" is probably not a good lead for an accounting firm. Someone searching for "how to become a plumber" is looking for a career, not a plumber to fix their sink.

We typically find that new accounts are wasting 20 to 40 percent of their budget on irrelevant searches that could be filtered out with negative keywords. That is money that could be going toward searches that actually convert.

Building a solid negative keyword list takes time, but it is one of the highest impact things you can do to improve campaign performance.

5. Ignoring Geographic Targeting

By default, Google shows your ads to people "in, regularly in, or who've shown interest in your targeted locations." That last part is important. Someone in California might be searching for "restaurants in Miami" because they are planning a trip. If you own a restaurant in Miami and are targeting Miami, your ad could show to that person in California.

That might be fine for some businesses. But for local service businesses where you need the customer to physically be nearby, it is a problem. You do not want to pay for clicks from people who are 3,000 miles away.

You can change this setting to only show ads to people who are physically located in your target area. Go to your campaign settings, click on Locations, then click Location Options and select "Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations."

The Real Cost of These Mistakes

What makes these mistakes so damaging is that they compound. An account with no conversion tracking cannot identify which keywords waste money. Without that knowledge, they cannot build a useful negative keyword list. They keep spending on irrelevant traffic while thinking Google Ads "does not work."

The good news is that fixing these issues often leads to dramatic improvements. We have seen accounts cut their cost per conversion in half just by addressing these five things. It is not magic. It is just getting the fundamentals right.