10 Signs Your Google Ads Are Wasting Money

Quality Score is Google's rating of the relevance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages. It is scored from 1 to 10, and it directly affects how much you pay per click. Keywords with a Quality Score below 5 are costing you significantly more than they should.

A low Quality Score means Google considers your ad experience poor for the searcher. The result? You pay more for worse ad positions. If the majority of your keywords sit below 5, your account is haemorrhaging money on every single click.

How to fix it: Ensure tight alignment between your keywords, ad copy, and landing page content. Break broad ad groups into smaller, more focused groups where every keyword closely matches the ad text and landing page.

Negative keywords prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant searches. Without them, you are paying for clicks from people who have no intention of buying from you. This is one of the most common — and most expensive — mistakes in Google Ads.

For example, if you sell premium accounting software and you are not excluding terms like "free," "template," or "course," a significant portion of your budget is going to clicks that will never convert.

How to fix it: Review your search term report weekly. Add irrelevant terms as negative keywords at both the campaign and ad group level. Build a shared negative keyword list for terms that apply across all campaigns (competitors, job-related terms, free/cheap modifiers).

Broad match keywords give Google maximum flexibility to show your ads for searches it considers related. The problem is that Google's interpretation of "related" is often far too loose, resulting in your ads appearing for searches that have little to do with your business.

Broad match can work well when combined with Smart Bidding and robust conversion data. But if you are using broad match with manual bidding or limited conversion history, you are likely paying for a large volume of irrelevant traffic.

How to fix it: Shift high-value keywords to phrase match or exact match. If you keep broad match, ensure you have comprehensive negative keyword lists and are using Smart Bidding strategies with sufficient conversion data (at least 30 conversions per month).

Without conversion tracking, you are flying blind. You have no way of knowing which keywords, ads, or campaigns are actually driving results — and which are just burning budget. This is arguably the single biggest waste of money in Google Ads.

Surprisingly common, broken or misconfigured conversion tracking is something we see in the majority of accounts we audit. Tags fire on the wrong pages, duplicate conversions inflate numbers, or key actions like phone calls are not tracked at all.

How to fix it: Audit your conversion tracking setup thoroughly. Ensure you are tracking all valuable actions (form submissions, phone calls, purchases) and that tags fire correctly. Use Google Tag Assistant to verify implementation.

Your search term report shows the actual queries people typed before clicking your ad. If more than 20% of your search terms are irrelevant to your business, you have a serious waste problem.

This is closely related to negative keywords and match types, but it deserves its own attention. Even well-structured accounts can develop search term drift over time as Google expands matching to new queries.

How to fix it: Check your search term report at least weekly. Look for patterns of irrelevant queries and add them as negatives. Pay attention to the "search terms not shown" percentage — if Google is hiding a large proportion of your search terms, that is a red flag.

Sending paid traffic to your homepage or a generic page is one of the quickest ways to waste money. If your landing page does not match the promise made in your ad, visitors bounce — and you have paid for a click that had zero chance of converting.

A poor landing page also tanks your Quality Score, which means you pay more per click in the first place. It is a double penalty: higher costs and lower conversion rates.

How to fix it: Create dedicated landing pages for your highest-spend campaigns. Ensure the headline matches the ad, the page loads quickly (under 3 seconds), and there is a clear, singular call to action. Test different page layouts and copy variations.

Mobile traffic now accounts for over 60% of Google searches, yet many advertisers treat mobile as an afterthought. If your mobile conversion rate is significantly lower than desktop but you are spending the same (or more) on mobile clicks, you are wasting money.

Common mobile issues include slow page load times, forms that are difficult to complete on a small screen, and landing pages that are not optimised for touch navigation.

How to fix it: Segment your campaign performance by device. If mobile is underperforming, apply a negative bid adjustment for mobile or create mobile-specific campaigns with tailored landing pages. Ensure your site loads in under 3 seconds on mobile connections.

Unless you are running an e-commerce store with 24/7 checkout, running ads around the clock is almost certainly wasteful. B2B businesses, for instance, are paying for clicks at 2am on a Saturday when nobody is going to fill in a contact form.

Even e-commerce businesses see significant variation in conversion rates throughout the day. Spending equally across all hours means over-investing in low-converting periods and potentially running out of budget during peak times.

How to fix it: Analyse your conversion data by hour of day and day of week. Apply bid adjustments to reduce spend during consistently poor-performing periods and increase bids during your peak conversion windows.

If you have been running the same ads for months without testing variations, you are leaving performance (and money) on the table. Ad copy testing is one of the simplest ways to improve click-through rates and Quality Scores, yet many advertisers set ads once and forget them.

Even small changes to headlines, descriptions, or calls to action can make a meaningful difference. A 10% improvement in click-through rate can reduce your cost-per-click and improve ad rank simultaneously.

How to fix it: Run at least 2-3 responsive search ad variations per ad group. Test different headline approaches (benefit-led vs. feature-led, with and without pricing, different calls to action). Review performance monthly and replace underperformers with new variations.

If you are paying to drive traffic to your site but not remarketing to visitors who did not convert, you are missing the easiest wins in Google Ads. Only 2-4% of website visitors convert on their first visit. Without remarketing, you are abandoning the other 96%.

Remarketing audiences typically convert at 2-3x the rate of cold traffic and at a significantly lower cost-per-click. Not having a remarketing strategy means you are repeatedly paying full price to reach new visitors while ignoring the warm audience you have already paid to attract.

How to fix it: Set up remarketing audiences for all website visitors, specific page visitors (pricing page, product pages), and cart abandoners. Create dedicated remarketing campaigns with tailored messaging. Use frequency caps to avoid annoying potential customers.