The 5 Google Ads mistakes we find in almost every account we audit

Usually yes, at least until you have measured it separately. Search Partners places your ads on non-Google sites and it is enabled by default on new search campaigns, but its performance is reported inside your overall campaign numbers rather than split out, so most advertisers have never seen what it costs them on its own. To check, go to your campaign, open the Segment menu and choose Network. If Search Partners is spending a meaningful share of budget at a materially worse cost per conversion than Google Search, switch it off and reallocate. Some accounts genuinely do well there, which is why the honest instruction is measure before you cut rather than simply disable it, but you cannot make that call without segmenting first.

Broad match is not inherently harmful, but broad match without a negative keyword list and weekly review reliably wastes money. Broad match lets Google show your ad for searches it judges related to your keyword, which can mean a plumber bidding on "boiler repair" paying for "boiler repair training course" or "how to repair a boiler yourself". Neither searcher will ever hire you. The fix is not necessarily to abandon broad match, with strong conversion data it can find valuable searches you would never have thought to add, but to pair it with an actively maintained negative keyword list and a weekly look at what it actually matched. If nobody has added a negative keyword in three months, broad match is running unsupervised and it is almost certainly leaking budget.

Almost never. Sending paid traffic to your homepage forces someone who searched for one specific thing to navigate to find it, and every additional click between the ad and the answer loses a meaningful share of visitors. If your ad promises emergency boiler repair, the landing page should be about emergency boiler repair, with the phone number visible without scrolling and a form short enough to complete on a phone in under a minute. This single change frequently moves conversion rate more than any bidding adjustment, because it is fixing the moment of highest intent rather than optimising how you bought the click. The test is simple: click your own ad on your phone and count how many seconds pass before the thing you promised is visible.

Check what your conversion action is set to count. The most common failure is an account recording page views, button clicks, or arrivals at a contact page as conversions, none of which are enquiries. If Google Ads reports 40 conversions last month and your inbox and phone log show 11 enquiries, your bidding algorithm has been optimising toward the wrong outcome for as long as that mismatch has existed, and every performance decision made from those numbers was made on fiction. Fix it by tracking submitted forms and calls over a genuine duration threshold, then reconcile the Google Ads number against your actual enquiry count every month. If the two do not roughly agree, stop trusting the dashboard until they do.

The search terms report shows the actual queries people typed before clicking your ad, as distinct from the keywords you chose to bid on. It is the single most useful screen in Google Ads and the one most business owners have never opened. Find it under the Insights and Reports menu, or from within a campaign under Search terms. Read the last 30 days, sort by cost, and add anything irrelevant as a negative keyword. In most accounts this exercise finds obvious waste within the first two minutes: job seekers, students, DIY researchers, and people looking for a competitor by name. Doing this once a month is the highest-return recurring half hour available in the platform, and it requires no technical skill at all.