Most Google Ads accounts fail for a pretty small set of reasons.
No conversion tracking.
Traffic sent to the wrong page.
Treating the whole thing like a tap you can just switch on.
Match type settings nobody's touched in years, along with a fair amount of blind trust in Google's own recommendations, and increasingly, in whatever a chatbot tells you to do.
We talked to Patrick, our Google Ads specialist at Websites that Sell, who spends a good chunk of his working life fixing accounts that business owners set up themselves.
In This Article
Mistake 1: No Conversion Tracking
Patrick compares running ads without conversion tracking to driving with a blindfold on: if you don't know which keywords are converting and which ones are just burning money, there's nothing to actually optimise. You're guessing.
It goes wrong two ways. Some businesses just never set tracking up at all. The phone rings, a few sales trickle in, and there's no real way to know whether that's coming from the ads or happening despite them.
A lead generation business sets up tracking, feels good about it, but it's actually tracking landing page views rather than form submissions. So Google sees people arriving on the contact page, decides that's a win, and keeps sending more of that same traffic. It looks fine in the dashboard, but doesn't turn into leads.
Mistake 2: Sending Every Click to the Homepage
Someone clicks your ad, and you send them straight to the homepage. This feels like the obvious move: get them onto the site, let them look around. Patrick's example was an electrician in Maroubra, a Sydney suburb. Someone searching for that doesn't want a generic "electrician Sydney" page. They want something built for Maroubra specifically. And if you also cover Bondi, that deserves its own page; it shouldn't be lumped in.
The same idea applies to online stores. Someone searches for a Nike gym t-shirt, you send them to that exact product page, not the Nike homepage where they now have to go hunting for the thing they already told Google they wanted. Every extra click in between is a chance to lose them.
Local Service Business
An electrician covering Maroubra and Bondi needs a page built for Maroubra specifically, not a generic "electrician Sydney" page. Bondi deserves its own page too, not one lumped in with the other.
Online Store
Someone searches for a Nike gym t-shirt. Send them to that exact product page, not the Nike homepage where they have to go hunting for the thing they already told Google they wanted.
Mistake 3: Treating Google Ads Like a Tap
A lot of business owners expect Google Ads to behave like a tap. Flip it on, leads start flowing, flip it up, more leads flow.
"Google Ads is not a business model. It's a marketing channel."
Market conditions and your offer matter. Are your competitors doing free shipping and you're not? Do you have reviews on the page, anything that builds a bit of trust before someone hands over their card details? None of that is something the ads account controls, but it all affects whether people convert once they land. Patrick's estimate was that actually running the account (bids, keywords, budgets) is maybe 10% of what makes ads work. The rest is your offer and how it's positioned.
(Bids, Keywords, Budgets)
Mistake 4: Assuming Your Ad Should Show Every Time You Search For It
Business owners Google their own business, don't see their ad pop up, and assume something's broken. It's understandable, but it's not really the right way to check.
The number to actually look at is search impression share: how often your ad was shown versus how often it could have been shown, given your budget.
If that number's low, it usually comes down to one of two things: you're losing impressions to budget, or you're losing them to rank, which is your bid combined with your Quality Score (relevance of the ad, relevance of the landing page, that sort of thing). For most small businesses, it's just budget. Though Patrick did mention seeing accounts penalised because the business's actual website "looks like it's coming out of 2005," not built for mobile at all. So it's not always just a budget problem.
Mistake 5: Using Outdated Advice About Match Types
Match types have changed a fair bit, and a lot of the advice floating around still describes how they used to work, which is where a lot of confusion online comes from.
Exact Match
Used to mean exactly that: the literal phrase, nothing else. Now Google will trigger it for search terms with roughly the same meaning, even reordered.
Phrase Match
Has loosened into something closer to what broad match used to be.
Broad Match
Is like casting a net into the ocean. It'll catch what you're after, but also competitor names and searches that have nothing to do with you.
The more these loosen up, the more your results depend on a negative keyword list that's actually maintained, not something set once and left alone for two years.
Mistake 6: Accepting Every Recommendation Google Gives You
A lot of the recommendations sitting inside your Google Ads account are worth ignoring. Google wants advertisers testing new features so it can gather data on how they perform; that's more or less the incentive at play. Some recommendations are genuinely useful, adding more images to an asset group being one example, but others mostly benefit Google.
Someone running their own online store gets a recommendation to bump their daily budget from $50 to $120, with the promise of extra conversions. They take it. The budget goes up, and so does the spend, but the return doesn't follow. The money just goes down the drain.
Mistake 7: Getting the AI Question Wrong
Trust Google's automated bidding. It's using data (device, time of day, browsing history) that no person could realistically track by hand, so there's not much of a case for doing it manually anymore.
Don't trust it (or a chatbot) with your landing page, your ad copy, or your budget decisions. Those still need someone who actually understands the business and who's willing to say no when a recommended spend increase doesn't add up.
This matters more when it comes to using ChatGPT or Claude to plan a campaign from scratch. A fair amount of what's published online about Google Ads is itself written by AI at this point, or just out of date, and match types alone have shifted enough in the last couple of years that old advice can genuinely hurt you rather than just being unhelpful.
If you're setting things up yourself, go straight to Google's own documentation instead of leaning on a chatbot's summary of whatever's out there.
When to Do It Yourself, and When to Hire Someone
The answer here isn't "always hire someone". It comes down to time, more than budget.
If you're spending somewhere around $500 to $1,000 a day and you actually want to learn how the account works, that seems like a reasonable range to manage yourself. You're not going to be pouring dozens of hours a month into it at that scale. The tipping point comes when things get more complex, spend goes up, or your time is just worth more somewhere else in the business. It's less about whether you're capable of doing it and more about where that time is best spent.
| Factor | Manage It Yourself | Hire a Specialist |
|---|---|---|
| $500–$1,000/day Spend | Yes | Limited |
| Time Available Monthly | Limited | Yes |
| Growing Complexity / Spend | No | Yes |
| Time Better Spent Elsewhere | No | Yes |
What It Comes Down To
Most of these mistakes trace back to the same thing: treating Google Ads like something that runs itself instead of something that needs actual attention. Tracking tells you what's working. Your landing page and offer decide whether people convert once they've arrived. Match types and negative keywords decide whether your budget even reaches the right people to begin with.
"Knowledge is power. You have to be able to see the road to take the turn."
If you'd rather have someone who already knows where the road bends, our Google Ads team can take a look at your account and tell you exactly where the budget's leaking.