Google Ads defaults are not set up in your favour. They’re set up to spend your budget. Three settings do most of the damage, and all three take minutes to check.
1. Broad match is spending on questions you don’t want
Broad match lets Google decide what’s “related” to your keyword. Sometimes that’s useful. Often it means a plumber pays for “how to fix a tap yourself” — someone who has explicitly decided not to hire a plumber.
Check it: Campaigns → Insights and reports → Search terms. Sort by cost. Read the top twenty. You will recognize the wasted ones instantly, because they’ll be questions rather than intentions.
2. You almost certainly have no negative keywords
Negatives are the list of words that stop your ad showing. Most accounts I open have none at all, which means nothing is being stopped.
The universal starter list, worth adding to nearly every account:
free, cheap, diy, how to, jobs, salary, career, course,
training, template, wikipedia, reddit, youtube
Add the ones that apply to you and re-read the search terms report in two weeks. That single list often cuts a fifth of the spend without touching a single lead.
3. Conversion tracking that counts the wrong thing
This is the expensive one. If Google is optimizing toward the wrong event, it will get very good at producing something worthless.
Common versions of this mistake:
- Counting page views of a contact page as a conversion, so it optimizes for people who look and leave.
- Counting every form submit, including spam, so it learns to find bots.
- Counting nothing at all, which means it’s optimizing for clicks — the one metric that costs you money without ever making any.
Check it: Goals → Conversions → Summary. Look at what’s marked “Primary action”. If you can’t explain in one sentence why that event is worth money, that’s the problem.
The thing worth doing
Just the search terms report. Ten minutes, sorted by cost, top twenty. That one report tells you more about your account than any dashboard.
If a third of the money is going to questions rather than customers — which is common — you’ve found next month’s budget without spending anything.
One thing worth saying plainly
Nobody can guarantee you a position or a return in Google Ads. Anyone who does is guessing, and it’s your money they’re guessing with. What can be promised is that the money goes toward people who are actually trying to buy.
Next month: why AI assistants are starting to answer instead of linking, and what that does to your traffic.