The 4 Most Common Google Ads Mistakes We See

There are many common mistakes in Google Ads that we see from clients and businesses. We have covered the main 4 here.

1. Weak or misaligned landing pages

The most you can do with a Google Ad on its own is to make a claim or a promise. You need a landing page to convince someone that clicks to continue with their enquiry. If there is an obvious mismatch between your Ad and your landing page, you are essentially paying Google to help you annoy your prospective customers.

Here are the main issues to avoid:

Mismatch in overall messaging

This occurs when the keyword you use, the messaging of your ad, and the messaging on your landing page are not aligned properly. A fractured approach like this encourages users to bounce out of your landing page because they don’t see the information or solution that they wanted. This leads them to think that the page is unhelpful or bogus and encourages them to react by clicking away quickly.

It’s not just customers that find this disconnect annoying either. Google will actively charge you more to maintain your position when your messaging doesn't match your ad copy. It does this by assigning a quality score to your keywords which is lower for mismatched keyword intent. The lower your score is, the more your ads will end up costing.

Too many options

A landing page should be created with a single objective: to convert the people that land on it. Whether you want a customer to place an enquiry, or to buy a product. That should be the sole focus of your page.

This is because humans don't like making decisions. We see it as extra effort that we’d rather avoid. If you include too many calls to action (CTAs) or too many options for people to pick from, it can often lead to choice paralysis within a customer. This results in them choosing to make no decision and leave your landing page instead. Providing just one thing for a customer to do on your landing page is the best way to get them to convert.

Adding too many options also provides customers with the opportunity to do something other than what your landing page is built to convert for. Do you really want to pay for a click that hits your landing page and then clicks away to one of your social media pages instead of converting through your form? If your focus is to generate a lead, are you happy for the cost of a click to result in a newsletter sign up instead?

If there are any actions that you don’t want a landing page visitor to take, simply don’t include them.

Too much focus on design

A trap that many businesses fall into is the need for everything to look ‘nice’. Unfortunately, just because a landing page looks nice, doesn't mean that it will convert well. In fact, the most beautiful landing page could also quite easily have the worst conversion rate. It can also convey an expensiveness that can be off-putting.

Landing pages should be clear, simple, and persuasive. A customer is more likely to convert if their journey to converting is straightforward and easy. Focus on showing them where to go, making the conversion form easy to find and complete, and including persuasive copy, and you’ll be on the way to creating a landing page that converts.

2. Poor Tracking and Attribution

The silent killer of Google Ads campaigns, poor tracking and attribution removes your ability to assess your campaigns effectively. There are some things you should look out for, in order to avoid it:

Missing or unreliable conversion data

If your conversion tags are not capturing every conversion event properly then you are essentially flying blind. Whether you have broken tags, they are firing twice, or an offline event is not being captured, it stops you from seeing the full picture.

Without reliable data you aren’t able to distinguish between keywords that actually convert and keywords that result in window shopping. This can lead to wasted spend as you continue to fund campaigns that aren’t working or choose to scale campaigns based on false positives. Either way, it’s a recipe for throwing your money away.

Gaps in attribution can lead to how effective your Google Ads channel appears to be. If someone clicks on your ad, doesn’t convert immediately, but does convert following a direct search later on, without the correct tracking there is no way to attribute the inbound lead to Google Ads.

Optimising to the wrong events

When setting up Google Ads tracking, choosing which events to focus on is very important. It’s often better to focus on the tracking of purchases or qualified leads and optimise towards these. This is because, if you optimise for something more surface level like button clicks, and optimise for that. You can very quickly waste your budget on clickers that have no intention of buying.

Inability to tie spend to revenue

If you can’t prove that an amount of money spent has resulted in a specific amount of profit, there is no way to prove whether your Google Ads account is working. All you can be sure of is the cost.

If your Google Ads account is not connected to a CRM that can attribute revenue generated to your ads, you won’t have a full picture of what your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) truly is. Without this you can’t prove your worth. This means that you can’t push for an increased budget, and can’t prove that what you are doing is actually working.

Without effective revenue attribution, there is also no way to see the lifetime value of each customer that your ads have brought on board. This prevents you from being able to show the long term value of your Google Ads account. Without the proper tracking, a return customer that is worth thousands in revenue could only be seen as a one time buyer that has generated £100. Completely underselling how well your ads account has performed.

3. No clear ICP or qualification layer

Having a clearly defined ideal customer profile (ICP) is extremely important when setting up your Google Ads account. Without a clear ICP you are essentially widening the net to catch everyone and anyone. It results in a lot more clicks and a lot fewer conversions. By having a qualification layer built in to your strategy, you can avoid the following issues:

Attracting the wrong type of searcher

If your targeting is too broad, your ads will be shown to people who are interested in your topic but would never be interested in your product or service. For example, you could target potential customers that are not within the region that you operate. It’s no use selling your service to customers in Aberdeen if you can only provide your services across London.

There is a risk of click spend being wasted on incompatible customers due to a lack of excluded terms too. Without using a clear ICP, terms such as ‘free’, ‘cheap’, and ‘jobs’ could be included. This results in clicks from people such as students and job seekers who are definitely not going to be buyers.

Lack of commercial intent filtering

One of the biggest things that signals what a clicker is looking for is their search intent. No one is looking to buy something every time they conduct a Google search. A lot of the time people are searching for educational content such as ‘how tos’. If you don’t filter for commercial intent, you will be paying for clicks from these types of search too.

It may result in a higher click through rate (CTR), but it won’t lead to much in the way of conversions or revenue.

Forms that invite low-quality enquiries

When building a landing page for Google Ads there is a tightrope that you need to walk. You don’t want your form to put potential customers off by being too long and convoluted, but you don’t want it to be too short either.

Long forms encourage clickers to give up and leave, but overly short forms can be a big problem too. If a form is too short, it results in a complete lack of lead quality. Without using some qualification questions, there is no way to know how serious a prospect is about proceeding with their enquiry. You just end up with a large amount of junk leads that someone has to sift through to find the leads that are of actual value.

Adding qualification questions is a great way to sort the wheat from the chaff. If someone does not meet your criteria they are likely to drop off if they are unable to answer a question or if they realise that your offering is not suited to them. This helps to improve the quality of your leads, as it’s only the customers that take the time to complete your form that become leads. This reduces the amount of wasted sales time and increases sales efficiency.

4. Treating Google Ads as a set-and-forget channel

Once you have set up an effective Google Ads funnel that performs well, you may be tempted to leave it and let it run on the assumption that nothing will change. This can be a fatal error that undoes all of your hard work, and should be avoided.

A profitable campaign today doesn’t mean a profitable campaign tomorrow. Google’s algorithm is constantly working to maximise the revenue that Google itself receives. It has no interest in whether your ad campaign is making a profit. Here are some common pitfalls to avoid:

Over-reliance on automation

While Google Adwords has some useful ‘smart features’, they can become problematic without a human babysitter. An automation does not know what is wrong or right. It just aims to hit a conversion goal and does a number of different things to achieve this. If an automation goes unchecked by a human, it can lead to harmful actions such as bids being made on your brand name, and ads being displayed on junky mobile apps.

Automated bidding strategies need to be updated with data constantly. Otherwise they will not remain accurate. Without input from a human, the algorithm can make drastic changes due to changes that it doesn’t understand. This could be in the form of greatly reducing bids which also tanks your traffic, or even in pushing bids which could use your budget up too quickly.

While automation is helpful it also lacks creativity. Leaving your ad account unattended will inevitably lead to ad fatigue that reduces your CTR over time, and reduces the efficiency of your ads. Human intervention is required, in order for an ad account to have lasting success.

No testing framework

If there is no testing framework in place when running your Google Ad campaigns, there is no way to find out how to improve them. Your campaigns will stay the same.

Unfortunately, when it comes to digital marketing, not moving forwards is the same as moving backwards. Just because you do nothing doesn’t mean that your competitors will too.

Testing allows you to improve your campaigns incrementally, based on data. All it takes is a simple A/B test of a headline, CTA, or form field to find out what works best and implement it across the board. If you take the ‘set and forget’ approach, this kind of testing will never happen and your campaigns won’t improve.

Without testing there is also no way to see how much of an improvement you could make overall. You may take an approach that is fine, and be happy with the results, but you’ll never know how much more potential revenue and profit you could have been making.

No learning loops between channels

Google Ads is not just a channel that can provide leads and revenue, it is also capable of providing valuable knowledge. It doesn’t work best when used alone either.

If you run a test on Google Ads that provides a very effective CTA or uncovers a headline that increases conversions, this can be shared with SEO and social media teams to help everyone improve their channels. You can take insights from other teams to improve your channel too.

Communication between teams can lead to more efficient use of your ad spend too. The knowledge of a page that your SEO team has managed to rank #1 for a high cost keyword in Google allows you to manually lower the ad bid for that keyword to save money. This is something that automation does not take into account.

Automation does not take information from your sales team into account either. They may be able to provide information on a keyword that actually leads to very low sales despite a high number of enquiries. This is something that can be manually addressed and fed into google ads, but is not something that a ‘set and forget’ approach allows for.

What a real lead generation system looks like

A "real" lead generation system is no longer a linear funnel; it’s an ecosystem.

Traffic capture, not just traffic buying

Traffic is no longer a disposable commodity that you can just buy. It has become an ecosystem where you can create demand, and capture it.

Paid search as demand capture

Google Ads is the ultimate Demand Capture tool. It is designed to intercept people who are already actively looking for a solution. Paid search allows you to help users across the finish line to make a purchase. Due to their high-intent you have to pay a premium to be the first option they see. There is only a limited amount of demand too. If you don’t create more demand, you will eventually run out of people to capture.

SEO and content as demand creation

To avoid running out of demand, you can create it through SEO and content marketing. They focus on the majority of your market that is not actively looking for a solution today, but will be in the future at some point.

To do this you need to build problem-awareness through tailored content. This also helps increase your authority on a subject. The more helpful content that you produce, the more authoritative you become. This is very important as AI search prioritises authoritative sources. You aren't just ranking for keywords; you are training AI models to recognise your brand as a leader. Plus, high ranking content can continue to generate ‘free traffic’ for years.

Conversion-centred landing experiences

Landing pages can no longer get away with creating any friction for the buyer. Everything needs to be tailored to help a buyer make a single decision with as little fiction as possible.

One page, one job

Don’t treat your landing page like a mini website. It should have one specific link for one specific goal. Remove ‘exit ramps’ like a header menu. They allow the user to click away from the page and your goal. Only mention the product or service that you mentioned in your ad. This is all that the user is currently interested in. Test your landing page to see if it’s clear what it’s for. Ask someone that hasn’t seen it to tell you what they are supposed to do on the page.

Clear hierarchy of action

Design your page to lead the user’s eyes to your main call to action. The CTA should be the most visually dominant element on the page. Before the user scrolls they should be able to see a benefit-driven headline (what do they get?), a supporting sub-headline (How do they get it?), and a clear button or short form.

Proof, trust, and reassurance

Due to the current state of the world with deepfakes, scams, fake news and all other forms of untrustworthy content. Being able to signal that you can be trusted with a user’s data or money is imperative. This can be done by using verified social proof (Trustpilot reviews etc.) that state clear benefits a reviewer experienced due to your service or product e.g. ‘We saved £X on our energy bills after moving to this service’. Including authority signals such as certifications and awards helps to further build authority, while including a privacy lock icon near the form can help to reduce friction.

Accurate tracking and commercial reporting

Reporting on campaigns and tracking data is no longer just about clicks. You need to be able to see how much revenue each specific click has generated.

Clean conversion events

For an event to be considered ‘clean’ it must have no duplicate data or bot interference. When tracking, integrity is now more important than volume. To achieve these clean conversion events, you should prioritise native Google Ads tags as your primary bidding signal. They are more responsive and work well with Google’s smart bidding algorithm due to their high data quality.

Revenue-aligned KPIs

Focusing on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are aligned with your revenue is the only way to measure the profitability of your campaigns. It’s no use tracking metrics that just reflect activity. It is better to report on profit on ad spend (POAS) instead of return on ad spend (ROAS) as this takes all of your costs into account. You should also aim for a customer’s lifetime value to be at least 3 times more than the cost to acquire them.

Decisions driven by data, not instinct

Making decisions based on data and testing is the only way to improve your campaigns in 2026. Doing something based on ‘gut-feeling’ is not a viable strategy. The best way to make improvements to your campaigns is through hypothesis-led testing. Only change things that can provide measurable results. Don’t give Google’s bidding algorithm free reign, as it only focuses on volume. You need to make sure that your targeted keywords are value-focused.

Qualification built into the funnel

Your marketing funnel should not focus on getting as many conversions as possible. Instead the focus should be to get the right high-quality conversions by qualifying them effectively.

Smart forms

Using static forms with static fields to gather information is an outdated approach that can feel quite clunky. Smart multi-step forms are much more effective at qualifying leads via interaction.

You can start with 1-2 easy questions to build momentum with a user before asking for dry information such as contact details. This encourages a user to provide more information as they already sunk some of their time into the first few questions. Some smart forms can even recognise returning users and ask them more in-depth qualification questions instead of repeating questions that were answered previously.

Smart forms can also make the whole process easy for a user. It allows you to use clickable images as options rather than relying on text boxes that feel like more work. The less work a user feels they are having to do, the more likely they are to convert.

Messaging that filters

The best landing pages don’t just convince the right people to convert, they actively discourage the wrong people too. This goes for ad copy as well.

By using phrasing that makes it clear who your target audience is, you can discourage anyone that doesn't fit your criteria from clicking on your ads. This saves you money on wasted clicks and saves users from wasting their time.

Your headlines should be specific rather than generic, and your CTAs should be driven by intent. Don’t simply use ‘submit’ at the end of a form. State what it is that the user will be getting e.g. ‘Get a free site survey’.

Intent-based routing

Instead of sending every user along a single generic customer journey, intent-based routing allows you to customise the journey based on answers that the user has provided. It is not a good idea to treat all leads equally. If a lead has signified that they have an extensive budget, you are likely to get more value from them.

At its simplest level, intent-based routing can split leads into 2 channels based on how ready they are to take action. This would be a case of having a ‘ready now’ journey that removes wait times of call backs by immediately triggering a live calendar to book an appointment or demo directly. The second route would be for all customers who did not select ‘ready now’. This would push them to a callback as their need is less urgent.

There is no limit to how many routes you can create based on a user’s intent. As long as you ask the right questions, you can split your audience in whichever way you see fit.

Get Google Ads right (with our help)

If you’d rather create a real lead generation system instead of wasting your money by approaching Google Ads in the wrong way, we can help you to avoid making costly mistakes.

If you want help with Google Ads, let's talk.

Google Ads optimisation FAQs

Why is my Google Ads Quality Score so low?

A low Quality Score is usually caused by a messaging mismatch. Google evaluates how well your keywords, ad copy, and landing page align. If a user searches for a specific solution that matches your ad copy, but the landing page is not focused on the same thing, Google will give you a lower Quality Score than ads with aligned information on the landing page.

Should I send my ad traffic to my website's homepage?

No, ad traffic should not be sent to your homepage. A homepage will not have a focus on the specific solution that your ad is advertising which will harm your Quality Score. There are also multiple navigation options on a homepage that will give the user too many opportunities to click away. For the best conversion rates, you should use a dedicated landing page with one specific goal and no "exit ramps" like header menus or social media links.

What is the difference between ROAS and POAS?

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): Measures gross revenue generated for every pound/dollar spent on ads.

POAS (Profit on Ad Spend): A more accurate metric that takes into account your actual profit margins and business costs. Tracking POAS is the best way to ensure your campaigns are actually profitable.

Is Google Ads automation better than manual management?

No, automation is a powerful tool, but it requires a "human babysitter." Without manual oversight, Google’s algorithms may bid on your own brand name or display ads on low-quality mobile apps to hit volume targets. A successful strategy combines smart bidding with human creativity and strategic testing.

How can I stop getting "junk" leads from my ads?

To stop getting junk leads from your ads, you should add a qualification layer like a smart, multi-step form, refine your copy to use specific messaging that discourages the wrong audience, and add negative keywords for your ad campaign to avoid. This will help you to avoid clicks from users with no commercial intent.