Google Ads rarely fails all at once. It doesn’t switch off, it doesn’t break, it doesn’t report an error. It simply spends its budget every month, shows a respectable number of clicks and brings in less than it should. The invoice is correct, the report is green, and the money goes sideways.
Below is a list of the places where most of it leaks in practice. None of them is exotic, and that is exactly the problem — every one is either a default setting or the most convenient decision.
1. Broad match, which sounds generous
If you enter a keyword without quotation marks or brackets, Google treats it as a hint rather than an instruction. Your ad will also show on searches that are “related”. What counts as related is decided by an algorithm that is paid per click.
So for “flooring” you get searches for sanding, for second-hand flooring, for laying courses, and for someone looking up how to lay a floor themselves. Every one of those clicks costs the same as a real one.
What to do: start narrow, with exact and phrase match, and only widen carefully once you know what works. The reverse order is a more expensive way to reach the same conclusion.
2. An empty negative keyword list
This is the cheapest improvement in the entire system and the one most often left undone. A few terms almost every trade and service business wants excluded immediately: free, cheap, cheapest, job, jobs, career, salary, forum, reviews, used, second hand, how to, DIY, tutorial, course, wikipedia.
Look at the search terms report — not the keyword report, but what people actually typed. The first time it is usually uncomfortable reading. It is also the to-do list for your next twenty minutes.
3. Every ad leads to the home page
A classic worth repeating on this list too. Someone searches for a specific service, lands on a general page and has to go looking. Every extra click you demand from someone who arrived from an ad is paid for twice: once to Google and once in the lost customer.
If you have five services, you need five landing pages. If that feels like too much work, that is a sign it isn’t time for advertising yet but for a website that can carry it.
4. Tracking that measures the wrong thing
Surprisingly often, “visit to the contact page” is set up as a conversion. That isn’t a conversion. That is a person who reached the form and didn’t fill it in. The report will look excellent and the phone will stay quiet.
Measure the thing that brings money: form submitted, call from the phone, order completed. And measure value, not just count — ten enquiries for a free survey is not the same as two orders.
5. Recommendations you approve with one click
Google is good at politely suggesting in the interface that you could “improve performance”. Some recommendations make sense. Some mean broader matching, higher bids and automatically added keywords. Google earns from that; you don’t necessarily.
The same goes for automatic upgrades of a campaign into broader ad formats that spread across several networks at once. For a store with a large catalogue that can be good. For a tradesman who wants five calls a week from his own area it is often the fastest way for the budget to evaporate into impressions on unrelated websites and inside mobile games.
6. Bidding on your own name without thinking about it
Advertising on your own company name has its time and its reason — for instance, if a competitor is buying your name and taking it from you. But if nobody is attacking you and you are already first in the organic results for your own name, you are paying for a click you would have had free half a second later.
Check it simply: what share of your spend goes to searches containing your company name? If it is large, the numbers in the report look brilliant, because those are people who already knew you.
7. Showing at impossible hours and in impossible places
If the ads run overnight and on Sundays when nobody answers, you are buying calls for the competition. The same applies if the geographic targeting is set to the whole country while you work in two districts.
Location has another trap: by default, ads can also be seen by people who have shown interest in your area, not only those in it. That means ads to people at the other end of the country who once searched for something about your town.
8. A campaign nobody ever looks at
Advertising isn’t a washing machine you switch on and come back to for the laundry. Click prices change, competitors come and go, search habits shift. A campaign that was good last year can today be quietly paying for the wrong searches.
The minimum is once a month: a look at the search terms, adding negative keywords, checking what has got more expensive, and switching off whatever brings nothing.
How to tell in fifteen minutes whether yours is leaking
Open the account and look at four things, in this order:
- The search terms report for the last 30 days. How much of that would you genuinely want to pay for?
- The negative keyword list. If it is empty, you have your answer.
- Conversions. Is an order and a call being measured, or a page visit?
- Share of spend on your own name. If it is high, the results are prettier than they really are.
If at this point you realise you don’t know where to look for any of that, this is entirely normal and is also useful information.
If you would like us to look over the account, the simplest route is a website audit — a written review stating what specifically is leaking and how much work the repair is. What campaign management with us looks like is on the advertising pricing page, from 299 €/month for Google Ads; if what interests you most is the link to long-term visibility, Google Ads management is also included in the VISIBILITY+ subscription (299 €/month, ad budget separate). You can also send questions to cont@limonet.com.