8 Google Ads Red Flags That Could Be Draining Your Budget

Key takeaways:

• We’ve audited 75+ Google Ads accounts for UK businesses over the past year, and the same eight red flags kept appearing.
• Missing conversion tracking undermines everything else, because without it there’s no way of knowing what your budget is achieving.
• Most of the eight come back to measurement and ownership, and every one of them can be fixed.
• Each red flag comes with a short checklist, so you can check your own account as you read.

Do you know what your Google Ads budget bought you last month? Most owners we ask can name the figure they spent and surprisingly little about where it went. That’s absolutely no reflection on them. Google Ads has become complicated enough that an account can look busy and healthy from the outside while hundreds of pounds a month go to keywords that have produced diddly squat.

We’ve audited 75+ Google Ads accounts for UK businesses over the past year, and the same eight problems came up again and again and again. One account had more than 10,000 active keywords with fewer than 1% producing any useful data. Another was generating leads that a broken automation never delivered to anyone.

This article runs through all eight, so you can check your own Google Ads account against them today.

8 common Google Ads mistakes:

Here are the most common red flags we see when auditing Google Ads accounts:

1. Zero conversion tracking

Conversion tracking is the part of Google Ads that records what happens after someone clicks your ad, like a phone call or an enquiry landing in your inbox. Without it, the account can tell you what you spent and nothing about what came back, so every decision about budgets and keywords ends up being a guess. You can’t optimise what you can’t measure.

One account we reviewed had no meaningful conversion tracking in place at all, so there was no way of telling which campaigns and keywords were bringing in leads or sales. The business had been paying for clicks every day without any way of seeing which ones led to work.

Check your account:

• Open your campaigns view in Google Ads and look at the Conversions column. Zeros across the board, or no column at all, means tracking isn’t set up or isn’t working
• Send a test enquiry through your website’s contact form and check it appears in Google Ads within a day
• If your ads show a phone number, ring it from your mobile and check the call gets recorded

2. Low Quality Score

Google rates every search keyword from 1 to 10 based on how relevant your ad and landing page are to the person searching. A low score means you pay more for each click and your ads appear less often, so a poorly scored account ends up paying extra for less visibility.

In one account we audited, more than half of the active keywords were being held back by low Quality Scores. Some were rated 1 out of 10 and were costing substantially more per click as a result.

Check your account:

• Add the Quality Score column to your Keywords view. It’s hidden by default, and you’ll find it under Columns
• Look at your highest-spending keywords first. A score of 4 or under on a keyword taking a real share of your budget is where money leaks out
• Google shows how each score breaks down, so you can tell if the problem sits with the ad or the page it leads to. Our guide to improving your Quality Score covers the fixes

3. Wasted spend on zero-conversion keywords

Some keywords collect clicks for months without producing a single enquiry, and Google will keep charging for them for as long as they’re switched on. It adds up faster than most owners expect, too. Our own benchmark data found the average UK cost per click rose 17% in a year, from £1.72 to £2.01, so every wasted click now costs more than it did.

Over one 30-day period, an account we audited had spent hundreds of pounds on keywords that hadn’t produced a single conversion. One high-spend keyword alone had nothing measurable to show for its share of the budget.

Check your account:

• In Keywords, set the date range to the last 30 days and sort by cost, highest first
• Compare each keyword’s cost with its conversions. Real spend sitting next to a zero is the red flag
• Open the Search terms report to see the exact searches people typed before clicking. Anything irrelevant can be blocked with a negative keyword
• Check your conversion tracking works before pausing anything, because broken tracking makes good keywords look like bad ones

4. Account access and ownership fragmentation

Your Google Ads account, and the years of performance history inside it, should belong to your business. Plenty of accounts were set up in a hurry under whichever email address was handy at the time, often a former employee’s or a previous provider’s. When that happens, the business can lose access to its own data, and changing provider becomes far more awkward than it needs to be.

We’ve found multiple accounts where the key people in the business had no administrative access to their own advertising, and in some cases didn’t own the account at all. It usually comes to light at the worst possible moment, when someone tries to make a change.

Check your account:

• In Google Ads, go to Admin, then Access and security, and read through the list of people who can get in
• Make sure at least one senior person in the business has Admin access on an email address the business controls
• Keep a note of your ten-digit customer ID, shown at the top of the screen. You’ll need it if you ever have to recover the account or move providers

If you’re setting up from scratch, our guide to creating a Google Ads account walks through it step by step.

Recognise any of these so far?

As a Google Premier Partner, our PPC team reviews Google Ads accounts for UK businesses all the time, and we’ll tell you straight what we find in yours. Get in touch with our team.

5. GA4 attribution gaps

GA4, short for Google Analytics 4, is the free tool that records what visitors do once they land on your website, and Google Ads relies on it to understand which campaigns are working. When the connection between the two is broken or patchy, a share of your results never gets counted, and you end up making decisions from figures that are wrong.

One business we worked with was only capturing a fraction of its sales in GA4, with more than 30% of its data going missing through attribution and processing issues. Every report it ran gave a misleading picture of what its advertising was achieving.

Check your account:

• Take a recent week and compare the sales or enquiries you know you had with the number GA4 reports for the same days
• A small difference is normal. A gap of a quarter or more means something needs fixing
• In GA4, go to Admin and then Product links to check your Google Ads account is connected

6. Keyword bloat

A long keyword list can look thorough. In practice it spreads your budget across thousands of terms that hardly anyone searches for, and the handful that bring in business get buried somewhere in the middle.

One account we reviewed had more than 10,000 active keywords, and fewer than 1% of them were producing meaningful performance data. The budget was being shared across all of them all the same.

Check your account:

• Check how many keywords are active. If the number runs into the thousands for a small business, that’s a warning sign
• Set the date range to the last 30 days and filter for keywords with no clicks. If most of the list is sitting idle, the account is due a tidy-up

7. Campaigns on autopilot

Google Ads rarely improves on its own. Search habits shift and competitors adjust their bids from week to week, so a campaign that’s left alone slowly falls out of step with the market around it.

Several of the accounts we reviewed showed very little optimisation over an entire month, even though there were clear opportunities to improve performance.

Check your account:

• Open Change history in Google Ads (typing it into the search bar at the top is the quickest way) and set the date range to the last 30 days
• This lists every change made to the account. A month with hardly any is a sign nobody’s been steering
• In a well-managed account you’d expect to see bids being adjusted and new ads being tested on a regular basis

8. Broken lead automation and tech stack

Between an ad click and a real person picking up the enquiry, most businesses have a few pieces of software passing it along, such as website forms, email inboxes, a CRM and automated alerts. If one link in that chain breaks, the ads keep producing leads and nobody at the business ever sees them.

This is the hardest flag to raise on a review call. In one case, a technical fault in the lead management process meant enquiries weren’t reaching the business at all, while the campaigns carried on generating them.

Check your account:

• Fill in your own contact form today and time how long it takes for the enquiry to reach a real person
• Test every route a customer might use, including any phone numbers that appear in your ads
• Run the test again whenever something changes, like a new website or a new CRM

What all eight red flags have in common

Most of these red flags come back to measurement or ownership. Once a business knows what its spend is achieving and controls the accounts that report it, the other problems become much easier to spot and fix.

Your website deserves a look too, because the ads only get people as far as your landing page, and a slow or confusing page loses enquiries, however good the campaign is. Our free Website Grader scores your site in minutes, and our guide to what makes a good website covers the standards we grade against. For questions about budgets and timelines, our PPC FAQs cover the ones UK businesses ask us most.

Get more leads from the budget you already spend

Our PPC team takes the whole account off your hands, fixing what’s draining your budget and managing your campaigns week in, week out. Every call and enquiry your ads bring in shows up in Client Centre, our reporting platform, so you’ll always know what your spend is achieving. We’re a Google Premier Partner, and our work has won more than 50 industry awards.

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Meet the Author

Hamish Lister

Hamish Lister is a digital marketing content writer with eight years of experience across SEO, paid media, brand and content strategy. Having worked with clients from Google Cloud and Unilever down to early-stage startups and local businesses, he has a broad understanding of what makes digital marketing work for businesses of different sizes and budgets.

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