Google Ads can be a highly effective marketing channel when used correctly, but it's also easy to spend large sums without getting enough return on your investment. Many businesses find that their results stagnate or that they lack a clear overview of what their ad spend is actually achieving. Here are seven common signs that your Google Ads account has untapped potential for improvement.
You Don't Know Which Ads Are Driving Results
The first and most fundamental mistake is to focus only on traffic. If your reporting mainly shows figures for clicks, impressions, and costs, you're only seeing a small part of the picture. For most businesses, it's crucial to be able to track valuable actions, such as contact form submissions, phone calls, orders, e-commerce purchases, or demo bookings. Without solid conversion tracking, optimisation becomes pure guesswork, and you risk spending money on keywords and ads that never lead to new customers.
Your Budget Is Being Spent on Irrelevant Searches
A key part of working with Google Ads is regularly reviewing the search term report to see exactly which searches are triggering your ads. It's not uncommon to discover that a significant portion of the budget is being spent on irrelevant searches. For example, a law firm specialising in business law might find they are paying for clicks from people searching for "free legal aid" or "job as a trainee solicitor". By actively using negative keywords and adjusting your keyword match types, you can weed out these costly searches and focus your budget on genuinely relevant customers.
All Visitors Are Sent to the Homepage
A common mistake is to send all ad traffic to your website's homepage. Imagine searching for "wedding catering in London" and clicking on an ad, only to land on a general homepage that presents everything from corporate lunches to overtime meals. You then have to find the right information yourself, which increases the chance that you'll leave the site. There should be a clear, consistent path from the user's search, through the ad's message, to the content on the landing page. The more relevant and specific the landing page is, the easier it will be for the customer to understand your offer and take the next step.
Lots of Clicks, but Few Enquiries
A high number of clicks isn't necessarily a sign of success, especially if they don't convert into enquiries or sales. If you find that traffic is flooding in without delivering bottom-line results, it's time to investigate the cause. The problem could lie in the ad setup itself, such as targeting the wrong audience or using keywords that are too broad. The cause could also be on the landing page, in the form of a weak offer, an unclear call-to-action (CTA), technical errors, or simply a slow page that makes users lose patience.
Your Campaigns Are Left to Run on Autopilot
Automation and machine learning have become a central part of Google Ads, but that doesn't mean campaigns can be left entirely to their own devices. Google's algorithms are good at optimising towards the goals you set, but they can't replace strategic and creative work. It's still up to you to define the goals, work on the messaging, develop new ad copy, improve landing pages, and make strategic decisions about budgets and target audiences. Letting campaigns run on autopilot is like handing over the wheel to a system that doesn't fully understand your business context.
You Don't Know What a Customer Costs
To assess whether Google Ads is profitable, you need to know what you're paying for a result. If you spend kr 30,000 in a month and get 20 relevant enquiries, your cost per enquiry is kr 1,500. Whether this is expensive or cheap depends entirely on what a new customer is worth to your business. For a plumber, this could be highly profitable, whereas for someone selling low-cost products, it could be a disaster. Without knowing your cost per customer or enquiry, you have no way of making informed decisions about how much you should invest in the channel.
You're Not Testing Any New Ideas
Successful Google Ads campaigns are never static; they evolve over time. If your account looks exactly the same month after month, you're likely missing out on significant opportunities for improvement. Continuous testing, often called A/B testing, is crucial for achieving ever-better results. For example, you can test new messaging in your ads, try out new keywords, create alternative landing pages, or experiment with different offers and geographical targeting. Stagnation is often a sign that your full potential is not being realised.
Unsure if your Google Ads account is performing optimally? Get in touch with us at Vekstloop, and we’ll help you with a no-obligation review to uncover opportunities for improvement.
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