Common Google Ads mistakes, and what each one costs

One: broad match with no exclusions

The default settings will show your ad for searches that merely resemble yours. In a trade at thirteen dollars a click, a hundred irrelevant clicks a month is about thirteen hundred dollars spent on people who were never going to buy. At thirty cents it is thirty dollars, which is why this mistake is survivable for a barber and ruinous for a roofer.

Fix: read the search terms report weekly and add negatives. It costs nothing but attention.

Two: sending every ad to the homepage

The most common mistake there is. Someone searching for emergency boiler repair lands on a page listing eight services and has to find theirs. Most do not.

Fix: one landing page per campaign, answering the search it was bought for.

Three: no conversion tracking

Without it, the account optimises toward clicks. You will get more clicks, cheaper, and fewer customers, and the reports will look like progress.

Fix: conversion tracking working before the first click is bought, including calls.

Four: bidding on your own brand name without checking

Sometimes necessary, when competitors bid on your name. Often it is paying for people who would have found you anyway. It is defensible either way and it should be a decision rather than a default.

Fix: check whether anyone else actually appears for your name before paying for it.

Five: a service area far wider than you serve

Widening the radius always increases traffic and usually decreases quality, because the people furthest away are the least likely to choose you. This is the paid-search version of the distance problem that limits local search, and it costs money instead of just position.

Fix: set the radius to where you will actually travel profitably.

Six: leaving campaigns running through the quiet season

A trade with a real off-season pays full price for out-of-season clicks. This is the mistake an agency on a percentage-of-spend fee has the least incentive to point out.

Fix: agree in advance what happens in the quiet months.

Seven: judging the account in week two

Early data is noisy and early cost per conversion is usually terrible. Businesses that panic and change everything in week two never accumulate enough data to know what works.

Fix: decide in advance how long the test runs and what would count as failure, before it is running.

The pattern

Six of the seven are free to fix and cost real money to leave in place. That is the honest case for paying someone to manage an account: not access to a secret, but somebody whose job is to look every week.