Brandie Neagles
“Google Ads doesn’t work for my business” is almost never the right conclusion. In the vast majority of underperforming accounts, the platform is fine. A handful of fixable setup mistakes are quietly draining the budget instead. Here are the five that show up most often.
Mistake #1: Broad match with no negative keyword list
This is consistently the most expensive mistake small accounts make. Broad match tells Google to show your ad for anything it considers related to your keyword. That sounds efficient, but in practice means a plumber bidding on “pipe repair” can end up paying for clicks from people searching DIY tutorials, apprenticeship listings, or unrelated products, none of whom were ever going to become customers.
The fix isn’t necessarily abandoning broad match. It’s pairing it with a real, actively maintained negative keyword list. Pull your search terms report periodically and add anything clearly irrelevant. This single habit is usually the fastest way to stop budget leaking to searches that were never going to convert.
Mistake #2: No real conversion tracking
This is the mistake that makes every other mistake invisible. Without accurate conversion tracking, you have no way of knowing which keywords, ads, or campaigns are actually producing customers versus just clicks. That means every other optimization decision is a guess dressed up as a strategy.
Set up tracking for the actual outcomes that matter: a genuine form submission, not just a page view; a phone call that lasts long enough to be a real conversation, not a one-second accidental dial. Vague or sloppy tracking doesn’t just fail to help. It actively misleads any automated bidding system into optimizing for the wrong thing.
Mistake #3: Sending traffic to the homepage
We covered this in detail in Landing Pages That Convert Ad Traffic (and Why Your Homepage Isn’t One), and it remains one of the most common, most expensive mistakes on this list. A homepage is built to serve everyone browsing your whole business. A visitor who clicked a specific ad already knows exactly what they’re interested in. Sending them to a broad, general page instead of a focused one that repeats the ad’s exact promise is asking your most expensive traffic to do extra work to find what you already told them you’d show them.
Mistake #4: Targeting a geography that’s too broad
Google’s default location targeting shows your ads not just to people physically in your target area, but to anyone “in or interested in” it. That can mean someone researching your city from a different state entirely. For a service business tied to a real, defined service area, that default setting quietly pays for clicks from people who could never actually become customers. Tightening this to your genuine service area, rather than accepting the platform default, is a five-minute fix with a real, ongoing budget impact.
Mistake #5: Blind trust in automated defaults
Google’s automated campaign types and bidding strategies can perform genuinely well, but only when they’re given good inputs to work with: real conversion data, meaningful volume, and clear signals about who your best customers actually are. Turning on an automated campaign type with minimal setup and vague goals, then blaming the results on “the algorithm,” skips the part where the business owner still has to define what success actually looks like. Automation amplifies whatever inputs it’s given, good or bad.
When someone tells me Google Ads didn’t work for them, my first question is never about the platform. It’s about which of these five things was actually set up right. In almost every case I’ve seen, that’s where the real story is.
Brandie Neagles, Coyote Creative
A quick way to check your own account
Pull your search terms report from the last 30 days and look for anything clearly irrelevant. That’s your negative keyword gap. Submit a test lead through your own site and confirm it actually shows up as a conversion in your account within a reasonable time. That’s your tracking gap. Click through your own ad and see where it lands. That’s your landing page gap. All three take under thirty minutes combined and usually surface the most expensive issue in the account immediately.
Getting the fundamentals right first
None of these fixes require a bigger budget. Most of them cost nothing but attention. As we covered in Google Ads for Service Businesses: A No-Nonsense Guide and How Much Should You Budget for Google Ads?, the channel and the budget matter, but neither one can compensate for a setup mistake quietly draining the account underneath them.
Not sure if your account has one of these mistakes? Book a free strategy session and we’ll take a look together.
