Seven Google Ads mistakes quietly eating your budget

This is the single most common leak we find. An account running broad match with no negatives will happily spend on 'free', 'jobs', 'salary' and the name of every competitor's cheaper product.

Open the search terms report, sort by cost, and read the first hundred rows. You will usually find twenty percent of the budget going somewhere it should not.

If a page view is counted as a conversion, Google will cheerfully optimise for people who browse and leave. Count booked calls, qualified form fills and purchases. Nothing else.

Import offline conversions if your sales cycle runs on phone calls. It changes what the platform chases, and it is the highest-leverage change most accounts can make.

Someone searching for a specific service should not land on a page that lists nine services and a company history. Match the landing page to the search, or expect a high cost per conversion.

One page per service is the minimum. One page per service per city if you operate locally.

PMax works, but it needs boundaries — brand exclusions, good asset groups and clean audience signals. Handing it a budget with no guardrails usually means you pay Google to sell you your own brand traffic.

Check the placement and search category reports monthly. Exclude anything that is not producing.