7 ways businesses waste money on Google Ads
Most Google Ads accounts leak money in the same seven places. Here's what they are, why they happen, and how to check your own account for each one this afternoon.
· 5 min read · The redsite.ai team
Google Ads is brilliantly designed — for Google. Every default setting, every “recommendation” in the interface, every automated suggestion leans towards one outcome: you spending more.
Run well, Google Ads is the most controllable lead source a business can have. Run on defaults, it's a subscription to disappointment. These are the seven leaks we find most often when auditing accounts — check your own against each one.
1. Broken conversion tracking
The big one, and the most common: in the majority of accounts we audit, conversion tracking is either missing, double-counting, or counting the wrong things (page views as “conversions”, button clicks that don't mean anything, forms that fire on load).
Why it matters more than everything else on this list: every automated decision Google makes is based on your conversion data. Feed the machine garbage and it optimises for garbage — confidently, at scale, with your money.
Check: open your conversion actions and ask, for each one, “would I pay for this to happen?” If the answer isn't an immediate yes, your optimisation signal is polluted.
2. Broad match without negative keywords
Broad match keywords let Google show your ad for anything it deems related — and Google's idea of “related” is generous. A plumber bidding broadly on “boiler repair” can end up paying for “boiler repair course”, “boiler repair jobs” and “how to repair a boiler myself”.
Broad match isn't inherently bad; broad match unsupervised is. It needs a disciplined, growing negative keyword list to fence it in.
Check: when did someone last add negative keywords to your account? If the negative list is short, old or empty, you're buying clicks from people who will never be customers.
3. Sending paid clicks to your homepage
You paid a premium for a click from someone searching “emergency boiler repair” — and landed them on a homepage about your company's proud history, full range of services and recent charity walk. They came for one thing; you answered with everything.
Message match is half of PPC performance. The page must continue the exact promise of the ad, with one obvious action.
Check: click your own ads (once — or view the final URLs). If more than one campaign lands on the homepage, there's conversion rate — which means cost per lead — on the table.
4. Set-and-forget management
Auctions shift, competitors change bids, search behaviour drifts, Google rolls out new defaults you didn't ask for. An account left alone doesn't hold steady — it decays, usually while spending exactly the same amount.
Check: look at the change history. If nothing meaningful has been changed in 30+ days on an active account, you're paying maintenance-level fees (or attention) for a channel that needs gardening.
5. Bidding on the wrong intent
“What is conveyancing” and “conveyancing solicitor quote” are both search terms about conveyancing. One is homework; the other is a buyer. Accounts bleed money bidding indiscriminately on informational searches that were never going to become enquiries — especially in expensive niches where every click is real money.
Check: review your keywords and ask which ones a person types when they're ready to pay. Informational terms belong to your SEO and content strategy, where the click is free — a division of labour we lean on constantly across SEO and paid.
6. Ignoring the search terms report
The search terms report shows the actual phrases that triggered your ads — not the keywords you bid on, the reality behind them. It is simultaneously the best source of negative keywords, the best source of new keyword ideas, and the clearest picture of what Google thinks your business is. Most account owners have never opened it.
Check: open it now. If you find surprises in the first screen — irrelevant searches you've been paying for — imagine what the full history looks like.
7. Fees that reward spending, not results
The quiet one: many agencies charge a percentage of ad spend. Think about the incentive that creates. The agency earns more when your budget goes up — regardless of whether your results do. “You should increase the budget” becomes advice that pays the adviser.
Check: if your management fee is a percentage of spend, re-read your agency's last three budget recommendations with that incentive in mind. (Our view: flat fees, agreed up front — the agency should profit when you do, not when you spend.)
The pattern behind all seven
| Leak | Root cause |
|---|---|
| Broken tracking | Nobody verified measurement end-to-end |
| Unfenced broad match | Automation trusted without supervision |
| Homepage landing pages | Ads treated as traffic, not as promises |
| Set-and-forget | Management priced as a product, delivered as neglect |
| Wrong intent | No distinction between researchers and buyers |
| Unread search terms | Reporting to the client, not learning from the data |
| Percentage fees | Misaligned incentives doing what they always do |
None of these require genius to fix. They require attention, honest measurement and incentives pointed the right way.
If you'd like to know which of the seven are happening in your account, our free audit includes a wasted-spend review — we'll show you the leaks in pounds and pence, and you keep the findings either way.