Mistakes in the ad accounts of small and mid-sized companies repeat so reliably that they can be written down as a list — and most of them cost money every single day until somebody fixes them.
Structural mistakes: one campaign for everything
The first and most common mistake is a single campaign with a single ad group holding forty keywords ranging from 'cheap tyres' to 'air conditioning service Žilina'. Google then has no way to allocate budget by performance, because everything competes inside one bucket, and you have no way to tell which part earns money.
The second mistake from the same family is mixing branded and generic queries. People searching for your company name would have come anyway. When they sit in the same campaign as generic queries, they inflate its results so much that the numbers become useless for decisions.
Keyword mistakes: broad match with no negatives
The third mistake: broad match switched on without a single negative keyword. Google will then show your 'kitchen fitting' ad to somebody searching 'kitchen fitting free tutorial' or 'kitchen fitter jobs'. You pay for both clicks and neither will ever bring you anything.
The fourth mistake is the opposite extreme — exact match on a handful of queries and nothing else. The account then has nothing to grow from and drops to zero during seasonal swings. A healthy account has both: a narrow exact-match core and a controlled layer of broader queries with a properly maintained negative list.
Measurement mistakes: what to check in fifteen minutes
The fifth and sixth mistakes are in measurement and they are the most treacherous, because the account looks successful even when it is not. Go through these five points directly in your account — if you find even one, you have your first thing to fix:
- In the Conversions section, check whether two actions with the same meaning are both marked as primary. If so, every order is counted twice.
- Look for anything marked as a conversion that is not one — a click on a phone number nobody answered, or a view of the contact page.
- In the search terms report, sort the last ninety days by cost and read the first fifty rows. You will usually find at least five queries that have no business being there.
- Check that invalid traffic exclusion is on and that campaigns are not targeting countries you do not deliver to.
- Compare the conversion count in Google Ads with the number of orders in your accounting for the same month. A difference above ten percent needs an explanation.
The seventh mistake: a landing page you would not click yourself
The last mistake is not in the ad account but behind it. A campaign for a specific service leads to the home page, where visitors have to hunt for what the ad was about. Or it leads to a page that takes five seconds to load on a phone. On average half the people leave before they even learn what you offer.
The fix is usually cheaper than expected: a dedicated page for every major campaign, the same wording in the headline as in the ad, one clear next step and a form you can fill in with a thumb. This is also the single place where audits most often find the biggest immediate gain — without adding a euro to the budget.
You can walk through your account against this list yourself. If you would like a second pair of eyes and a calculation of what each mistake costs you, take a look at how we run a marketing audit.
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