Years ago we wrote a post on the most common mistakes we found when auditing Google Ads accounts that weren’t paying their way. Too many keywords, three match types on everything, generic ads, and every click sent to the home page.
Some of that has aged well. Some of it Google has made irrelevant. And there’s a whole new set of mistakes that didn’t exist then, because Google now makes far more of the decisions for you, and it will happily make them in its own favour.
Here’s the 2026 version. The first half is inside the account. The second half is the part most audits never look at: what happens after the click.
Inside the account
1. Showing ads to people who aren’t anywhere near you
This is the one we find most often with local businesses, and it’s hidden behind a default. When you target “Dundee”, Google’s standard location setting includes people in Dundee and people who have shown interest in Dundee. That can mean someone in Manchester reading about the V&A.
If you’re a plumber, a garage or a solicitor who only serves Tayside, change the location option to presence: people in, or regularly in, your area. It’s under the campaign’s location options, and it’s one of the fastest savings there is.
2. Leaving the extra networks switched on
New Search campaigns usually start with Google’s search partners and the Display Network ticked. Your carefully written search ad then turns up as a banner on a word game app. Sometimes that works. Usually it just spends. Start with them off, and switch them on deliberately if you want to test them.
3. Letting Google auto-apply its own recommendations
Google Ads can apply its recommendations automatically: new keywords, broader match types, bigger budgets. Some are useful. Plenty of them mainly help Google spend more of your money. Turn auto-apply off and review recommendations like you would a salesperson’s advice: politely, one at a time.
4. Broad match without the data to steer it
Our old post said to be careful with broad match. That’s still true, but for a different reason. Broad match now works well when it’s paired with smart bidding and good conversion data, because Google can see which searches actually turn into customers. Without reliable conversion tracking, broad match is a blindfold. That’s why the second half of this post matters more than the first.
5. Paying for your own name without meaning to
Performance Max and broad-match campaigns will happily bid on searches for your own business name, then take the credit for customers who were looking for you anyway. Check the search terms, set up brand exclusions where you need them, and run brand as its own small campaign so you can see what it really costs.
6. Negative keywords set once and forgotten
“Free”, “jobs”, “course”, “DIY”, and whatever odd searches your business attracts. The search terms report is where the waste lives. Look at it every week for a new campaign and every month after that.
7. Ads that don’t say anything
This one hasn’t changed at all since the old post. Say what you do, where, and why someone should pick you, then tell them what to do next. Use every headline Google gives you, and make sure the ad matches the page it points to.
After the click: where most of the money goes missing
Most account audits stop at the edge of Google Ads. That’s a shame, because some of the most expensive mistakes we’ve found were on the website, and nothing in the Ads dashboard would ever show them.
8. A redirect that eats your tracking
Every Google Ads click arrives with a tag on the end of the URL (gclid, plus any UTM tags you’ve added). If the site redirects that visitor, say from www to the plain domain, and the redirect doesn’t carry the query string across, the tag is gone. The visitor lands fine. The conversion is never connected to the ad.
We found exactly this on our own CDN in September 2026: a set of our www-to-domain redirects was quietly dropping query strings. Nobody saw it, because every page still loaded perfectly. We’ve switched ours to a form that keeps the query string, changed the tool we use to set up new sites so it can’t happen again, and are working through the older ones. Click one of your own ads and check the address bar where you land. If the gclid has vanished, so has your data.
9. A form that looks fine and doesn’t send
A landing page can load quickly, look great and return “200 OK” to every monitoring tool while the enquiry form behind it is broken. We’ve had it happen after a routine file update on a site we look after: every page worked and only the form had died. We found it by sending a test enquiry, not by looking at the page.
If you’re paying for clicks, send a real test enquiry every month, all the way to the inbox, and every time anything on the site changes.
10. Enquiries going to an inbox that doesn’t exist
Changing email provider, adding a new address, or moving your domain’s DNS can leave a window where messages to your new address bounce. We caught it on our own site at launch: the brand-new address for enquiries was still being rejected by the mail server, so we pointed the form at an address we knew worked until it wasn’t. Without that check, the form would have looked fine and the emails would never have arrived. Test the address itself, not just the form.
11. Counting the wrong thing as a conversion
Page views of the contact page. Clicks on a phone number that went nowhere. The same form submission counted twice. If Google’s smart bidding is optimising towards a conversion that isn’t really a customer, it gets very good at finding more of the wrong thing.
Count what matters (a submitted enquiry, a completed booking, a sale) and, where you can, feed the real outcome back into Google Ads, so it learns which clicks became paying customers.
12. No consent set-up
For advertisers reaching people in the UK and Europe, Google expects consent signals to be passed through (Consent Mode) for its measurement and audience features. Get it wrong and you under-report conversions, which starves smart bidding of the data it runs on. It’s dull, technical and worth doing properly.
13. Still sending everyone to the home page
We said this last time. We’re saying it again, because we still find it. Someone who searched “MOT Dundee” should land on the MOT page, with the price, the booking button and the phone number, not on a home page that makes them hunt.
A ten-minute check you can do today
- Check each campaign’s location option. Is it set to presence?
- Check the networks. Are search partners and Display on because you chose them?
- Turn off auto-applied recommendations.
- Open the search terms report for the last 30 days and add negatives.
- Click your own ad on your phone. Did the
gclidsurvive to the page? - Submit your own form. Did the email arrive?
- Look at what’s counted as a conversion. Is each one a real enquiry or sale?
If any of those turn up something you’d rather not fix yourself, that’s what our paid media work is for. We start with an audit of the account and the website behind it, because that’s where the money usually goes. Tell us what you’re spending and what it’s getting you.
Got a problem like this? Good. We like those.
Tell us what you’re dealing with and we’ll tell you honestly what we’d do.
