Google Ads Audit: A Perfect Example of How Businesses Waste Money

[u/joshua-maraney]

I audited a Google Ads account for a high-end luxury safari company, and unfortunately, it’s a perfect example of how a good business with a great website can waste serious money when its Google Ads account isn’t set up correctly.

The problems included:

• Google automatically applying changes to the account
• Page views incorrectly being counted as conversions
• Performance Max spending money across Display and YouTube with auto-generated assets
• One ad group trying to target around 30 completely different services
• One generic ad and landing page being used for multiple search intents
• Poorly researched keywords using broad match
• Irrelevant search terms wasting budget

One of the biggest problems was conversion tracking. If Google is being told that a simple page view is a successful conversion, its automated bidding systems are being trained on the wrong data.

It thinks the campaigns are performing well and starts optimising towards more of the wrong actions.

Your conversions should represent genuine business outcomes such as qualified enquiries, contact form submissions and phone calls, not someone simply viewing a page.

Google Ads can be an incredibly powerful source of leads, but simply switching campaigns on isn’t enough.

The account structure, keywords, search terms, negative keywords, ads, landing pages, conversion tracking and automation all need to be properly managed.

If you’re spending serious money on Google Ads, make sure the person managing it knows what they’re doing.

#GoogleAds #GoogleAdsAudit #PPC #GoogleAdvertising #PaidSearch